Sporting Playstation 1 graphics and Super Nintendo performance, Onigiri is the most pathetic thing that will release on the Nintendo Switch in 2018.
Onigiri is such an offensively incompetent mess that I find it hard to believe that the game wasn’t made this bad on purpose, either as a method of intentionally driving a business into the ground to fulfill a personal vendetta, or it’s just the front for an international money laundering operation like a pizzeria run by the mob that gets its real money selling heroin on the side. Am I saying that developer Cyberstep Inc has underlying motivations for releasing this game on the Switch apart from releasing a game? Yes. Yes, I am.
And I do so because the alternative is to admit that Cyberstep is one of the worst developers to put out an Asian MMO, which is like giving the worst score of a pool of test takers that already sit in the .001 percentile in a classroom full of baboons. With this show of competence, I wouldn’t allow any of Cyberstep’s developers to boil me water for tea out of fear of somehow managing to be poisoned in the effort while my house burns down. It astounds the mind that people come into work on a daily basis, call this game a job well done, and actually get a paycheck to put this stuff out. The folks at Cyberstep do get a paycheck, right? This isn’t an involuntary internship program that specifically hires poetry students with no programming knowledge?
I’m going to state the obvious and point out that Onigiri is a port and isn’t new. It is, however, a port from a 2013 game. Yes, this game came out in 2013. It was ported incompetently not too long ago to the Playstation and Xbox where it exhibits most of the same problems that it does on the Nintendo Switch.
And where to begin with the Switch problems? Onigiri runs at a wonderful five frames per second, generally getting down into the slideshow territory the moment you try to do, well, anything. It doesn’t help that the game has a draw distance of roughly twenty feet resulting in the Amiga-tier engine barely capable of loading the double-digit polygonal structures without nearly dying of an aneurysm every two seconds. Movement is a frustrating tango of slightly touching the stick only to have your character always take four or five more steps than you meant which means navigating small spaces will have you contemplating death. Combat would be just barely passable if the creatures didn’t have the habit of disappearing and then reappearing about ten feet away. Throw in a UI that is a mess to navigate and you have a game that takes longer to download than it does to recognize that it’s an unfixable disaster that needs to be deleted.
I considered whether or not posting this article would ultimately be pointless. It’s fairly obvious from the state of the game and its continued quality over the past five years that the developers don’t care. I would be incredibly surprised if the developers go home from work every day with an attitude with pride in their work and less of a “well at least I’m getting paid from this dumpster fire of a company” line of thought. There’s no information in particular to give out since the game is free and very obvious from the start that it is of the lowest quality trash. So I formulated it as a rant.
I suppose my ultimate ending here is that I am disappointed with Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo because this proves that their quality assurance is a myth. Every so often we hear about games being denied release or patches being delayed because the developer didn’t pass the stringent certification from one of the three console manufacturers. If Onigiri is the kind of product that passes, I can’t imagine what a horrible state of existence those games were in for Nintendo to give its stamp of disapproval. It also marks a point where game consoles are no longer the curated stores that they once were, but are now willing to accept every mouth-breathing developer who shoddily compiles some code and calls it a game.
Those of you who read MMO Fallout will know that I don’t attack gamers as part of my coverage, but I think we all know who is playing this on Switch and saying “it’s really good quality.” Cyberstep’s main customer base are the depressingly lonely, the kind of people so sad that they look at these horribly drawn and posed anime girls and ultimately decide that the game is of decent quality because they’re kinda cute and they imagine a different reality where they can hold hands and kiss these anime ladies and the ladies like them and don’t bully them with their bad words like “you’re in your 20’s, shouldn’t you get a real job and move out?”
And for the record, I have nothing against people who like anime or even those who have waifus and like sexy anime girls (or sexy anime boys). If you’re going to like a game because it has cute anime girls, there are so many titles with better graphics, better girls, that are also free or pretty damn near close. There is also an internet full of drawn and animated media available for free if you need to get your rocks off. Have some standards, don’t be such a Thirsty Joe that you start deluding yourself into thinking games like this are good because of some of the NPC models.
