ONINAKI

ONINAKI is Tokyo RPG Factory's third game after I Am Setsuna and Lost Sphear, and the first to build its entire premise around a genuinely uncommon idea for the genre: you play Kagachi, a Watcher whose job is to guide the recently dead — Lost Souls who refuse to let go of their former lives — toward reincarnation, using a blade that can see into the Beyond. Death here isn't a story event that happens to other characters off-screen; it's the actual subject matter, treated with more weight and stranger rules than most action RPGs bother to build a world around. That's a genuinely interesting pitch, and it's also the exact thing the game's own Steam audience keeps saying the finished product doesn't fully deliver on.

A striking premise, told through Daemons

Combat centres on Daemons — spectral weapon-spirits Kagachi can summon and swap between mid-fight, each carrying its own skill tree and a distinct combat identity (a straightforward melee Daemon alongside ranged and support options, according to the review corpus's own descriptions). Layered on top are Shadestones, equippable modifiers that let you tune a Daemon's build further. On paper, that's a reasonable amount of build depth for a mid-budget action RPG, and reviewers who enjoyed the combat consistently point to Daemon-swapping as the system doing the most work to keep fights from feeling flat.

The visual and audio direction earns some of the most consistent praise in the entire review corpus, independent of how a given reviewer felt about the story or combat: a distinctive, painterly art style and a score that multiple reviewers single out by name as the strongest individual element of the package, even in reviews that are otherwise lukewarm or negative overall.

Where the review corpus agrees the game runs out of ideas

Read enough of ONINAKI's Steam reviews — negative and positive alike — and the same handful of complaints recur with unusual consistency for a corpus this small. The most common one: the game front-loads its strongest material. Several reviewers say outright that the free demo Square Enix shipped alongside launch represents the best hour of the experience, and that the full game's second half recycles the same enemy roster with palette swaps rather than introducing new threats to match a story that's supposed to be raising its stakes. One of the most-upvoted negative reviews puts it bluntly: "about half way through, you've basically seen everything there is to see."

The story itself draws a similarly split verdict. Reviewers who liked it credit it with asking real moral questions about death, duty and what the living owe the dead without resolving them into an easy light-or-dark binary — genuinely rare framing for the genre. But an equally large share of the corpus, including several long-playtime reviews well past the halfway point, describe the character writing as thin, the protagonist specifically as underdeveloped, and the back half of the plot as failing to build on a stronger opening. Both readings show up from reviewers with comparable playtime, which suggests this isn't a case of impatient players quitting early — it's a genuine split over how well the back half of the story lands.

A PC port with its own specific problems

Layered on top of the design complaints is a PC-specific one that shows up repeatedly and specifically enough to treat as a real pattern rather than a handful of unlucky setups: broken controller remapping, where button prompts and stick input fail to match what's actually configured, with more than one reviewer calling the game close to unplayable with a controller until manually working around Steam Input settings. For a Japanese-developed action RPG where controller play is the expected default, that's a more serious issue than a cosmetic annoyance, and it's specific enough — named settings menus, named workarounds — that it reads as a real, reproducible complaint rather than a one-off configuration problem.

A studio pattern, not a one-off

ONINAKI isn't Tokyo RPG Factory's first game to draw this exact shape of response. I Am Setsuna (2016) and Lost Sphear (2017) were both received as visually and musically strong, deliberately old-school JRPGs whose mechanical depth and pacing drew the same kind of qualified praise ONINAKI gets here — competent rather than exceptional, with the atmosphere doing more work than the systems underneath it. Read against that pattern, ONINAKI reads less like a one-off misstep and more like a studio whose strongest skill — mood, art direction, a distinctive musical identity — keeps outrunning its ability to build a combat and pacing structure sturdy enough to carry a 20-30 hour game. The Daemon-swapping system is a genuine attempt to address that gap with real build variety, but the review corpus's own difficulty-setting complaints — Maniac mode reported to raise enemy health and damage without changing enemy behaviour — suggest the underlying combat wasn't tuned with much room for that variety to actually matter under pressure.

The demo strategy is worth noting on its own terms, too. Shipping a substantial free demo alongside a full-priced launch is a confident move when it works, and several reviewers explicitly credit the demo with converting them into buyers. That the same demo now gets cited, just as consistently, as evidence the full game peaks early is an unusual outcome for that kind of marketing bet — it succeeded at generating goodwill and purchases, and simultaneously became the yardstick the finished product keeps getting measured against and found wanting.

Verdict

ONINAKI has a real idea at its centre and commits to it visually and musically further than most mid-budget action RPGs bother to. What its own, genuinely small Steam audience keeps saying — with unusual consistency for a corpus this size — is that the execution doesn't sustain the premise much past its own free demo: a back half that recycles enemies, a story that loses its grip on the stakes it opened with, and PC-specific control issues on top. Try the demo, and if Kagachi's world hooks you, wait for a deep sale rather than paying the launch asking price for it.