Onigiri is a Japanese MMORPG created by Cyberstep. It was launched in the summer of 2014 and has a decent sized player base. Around 2015 the game got a PS4 and Xbox One release as well, having their own servers.
In late 2021, a mobile phone version running on Android and IOS has been released under the name Onigiri Heroes. It's basically the same game, with few but significant modifications to the gameplay.
Long ago in Japan, malicious creatures known as the Kamikui appeared, causing all sorts of destruction all over. After a century of problems that beset both man and god, Amaterasu managed to place three great seals that locked these vicious monsters away.
Years later, the seals have somehow broken and the Kamikui have been appearing all over Japan. It falls to a young oni and their friends to save Japan from breaking out into all-out chaos, or something even worse.
Not to be mistaken for the Japanese rice ball or Vtuber Oni Giri.
Onigiri provides examples of these tropes:
- Adaptational Weapon Swap: Ibaraki-Douji, one of the party members, wields a sword in-game that looks like a cat-paw on a stick. In the anime adaptation, she instead wields an axe. Yet, one piece of in-game artwork depicts her wielding dual swords.
- Armor Is Useless: An often criticized point of this game is that defensive stats do very little to actually decrease damage. That is because, as some have found out, for whatever bizarre reason the Attack stat doubles as Armor Penetration. This ends up making later sections of the game devolve into Rocket-Tag Gameplay, as you'll be lucky to survive a good hit outside of Vanguard Swap.
- An Adventurer Is You: There are no actual character classes. Your character build is dependent on which of the five main stats you focus on, with a decision on the character creation screen influencing your starting stats. Each stat raises affinity towards each of the weapon classes. (Ex. Strength works for swords, two-handed swords and axes, whereas Dexterity makes your twin swords and bow affinity higher.)
- The Anime of the Game: Has several anime shorts that began airing in April 2016. Also there's a manga-adaptation on the official site.
- Asian Fox Spirit: Aside from clothing options to give your character an appearance like this, there's Izuna in Kyoto, a young fox whom wants to make friends. Helping her out earns her as a partner character. Much later into the story you help piece Tamamo-no-Mae back together.
- The Beast Master: Upon clearing a certain quest, you can summon your own little Youkai to assist in battle.
- BFS: The Oodachi weapons easily fall under this category, many of them the size of the player or even bigger. The Sky Rending Sword in particular stands out.
- Blocking Stops All Damage: Subverted with regular blocking. However, it can be played straight with Just Defends, which also restores some SP and allows the next attack to be executed much faster.
- Booze-Based Buff: Once you get Ibaraki-Douji on your team, she will provide a bevy of alcoholic beverages that provide a wide array of buffs, increased damage and health restoration being two examples. On the enemy's side, the Nue enemy appears to get this once its health drops below a certain point.
- Boss in Mook Clothing: The Field Bosses found in the fields preceding the town of Kaga (Kikaigahara to Nether Sekigahara) take this to a literal degree: they're mooks from later areas of the game, given a large level and stat increase. They're more than capable of curb-stomping unprepared players, but managing to kill them will grant your player a lot of experience, money, and numerous items ranging from money boxes and friendship items to random magatama. Just managing to land a few hits on them can give you the money and item rewards, assuming a stronger player is assisting.
- Bow and Sword in Accord: This is a viable option, due to both weapons being powered by the same stat, but becomes much harder to keep up once you start to focus on character optimisation.
- Breakable Weapons: Every weapon (outside of Vanguard Swap partners) has a certain item grade, which determines durability. Aside from great repairs, which can increase durability, there are also bad repairs that decrease it. Recent updates have given out tickets that permanently increase a weapon's durability, and both smelting and using Weapon Grade Plus powder can give you increased grade, which gives better damage and durability. Finally, when repairing, you can use a Repair Fairy to ensure a good repair if a bad one would happen.
- Averted in the mobile version, which removes durability.
- Cap: Aside from stats capping at 100-120, damage caps at 9 million.
- Cast from Hit Points: The Sacrifice skill requires 50% of your HP, alongside its SP cost, to use. On another axis, the Collapse skill on most weapons chews through a lot of its durability to use.
- Cat Girl: Ibaraki-Douji shows traits of this, despite being an Oni like the main character. She's also got some Hidden Depths to her, despite her often laid-back attitude towards matters.
- Cool Sword: Most of the higher level blades are this, and come in one and two-handed varieties.
- Crossover/The Cameo: One of the limited time events had a character from one of Cyber Step's other games, Cosmic League, looking for certain items. Helping her not only got you a free unique weapon (potentially two if you play your cards right), but you can even summon her as a party member. A later event brought another character from Cosmic League, allowing you to build one of her weapons and even recruit her.
- Damage-Sponge Boss: Another criticized point, as later bosses will have millions of hit points, and even with hitting elemental weaknesses you'll be lucky to reach six-digit damage figures outside of certain situations, such as Vanguard Swap and limited-edition weapons.
- Defeat Means Friendship: Although friendship may not be the right word, this is how you get Momotarou to join your party.
- Difficult, but Awesome: The game has a really steep learning curve.
- Dual Wielding: The Twin Swords weapon tree. Momotarou is a proficient user.
- Dude Looks Like a Lady: Part way through Izumo, you meet Veronica, a boy who gets mistaken for being a girl. What doesn't help is his attire and manner of speaking.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Kamikui, which exist opposite to the Gods.
- Elemental Powers: Most skills have an element attached to them (ex. Water Dragon Spear, Phoenix's Slash, Tornado Drop). Certain "Warding Dungeons" will require you to use a specific element to kill the enemies quickly.
- Equipment Upgrade: Yoshitsune can upgrade your weapons in two ways. Firstly, by using spare identified weaponry, one weapon can be leveled up. Second, once the weapon hits a level multiple of 10, she can Smelt it by using a copy of the weapon to increase its level cap. You can get options to increase its grade (higher damage and durability), more success in smelting, and, as mentioned below, upgrading a skill.
- Evolving Attack: Skills in the game work on a rank system of 1 through 10, each rank allowing the skill to be leveled up to ten times per rank. Once you recruit Momotarou, he will upgrade the skills of identified weaponry. However, it's random as to which skills on a weapon can be upgraded a rank. You can also upgrade the lowest ranked or a random skill on a weapon via Yoshitune's Smelting option once its level has been upgraded to a multiple of 10. (10, 20, 30, and so on—- it's signified by a lock.) What fulfills the "Evolving" part of this is that as the rank increases and the damage goes up, the animation of the skill changes up as well.
- Evolving Weapon: Aside from being able to upgrade weapons via Yoshitsune, some weapons grant increasing amounts of Attack depending on level / stat milestones, allowing them to keep relevant in higher-level areas.
- Fanservice: In spades. Equal opportunity fanservice, in fact, with pretty girls and handsome guys—for instance, Ibaraki-douji is a pretty young woman with a Buxom Beauty Standard figure and an extremely revealing outfit, while Susanoo is a cute Bishōnen with a muscular build and an aversion to wearing shirts.
- Forced Level-Grinding: This is due to the fact that the exp gain is reduced to 20% of what a player would normally get. In the Japanese version (Normal EXP gain), there's no problem until the mid 40s, where grinding is needed. In the US version (Reduced to 20%), you are forced to grind even before reaching level 10. And to gain a decent amount of exp, you have to enter dungeons that are 15-20+ levels higher than yours, where enemies can one-shot you.
- A few patches to the game have bumped up EXP rates— while nowhere near the original Japanese game, it's a lot closer compared to before. There are also consumable items that temporarily increase EXP gained.
- New dungeons were added to address the EXP grind. The enemies will drop EXP tickets that grant increasing amounts when used, depending on the dungeon difficulty.
- The Gadfly: Benkei proves to be this, not only showing a very lackadaisical attitude, but even ribbing Yoshitsune on her relations with the player character, much to her own consternation.
- Gender Bender: A number of historical figures met in the game, such as Yoshitsune, Miyamoto Musashi and Hiraga Gennai, are female.
- Herd-Hitting Attack: Spear weapons often come with multi-target skills, perfect for taking on plenty of enemies. The merchant Miroku will make use of this.
- Hyperactive Metabolism: Sushi and other fishy foods are the primary means of restoring health. For SP restoration, several flower-oil based products serve that role.
- Improbable Accessory Effect: Your armor in this game is Magatama beads, and they can come with a variety of effects ranging from defense increases to stat-increases to making your skills stronger. Thanks to Kaguya, you can craft some with additional effects, as well as outright add new effects onto old ones.
- Item Crafting: Early on in your adventure, Yoshitsune will give you a quest to unlock Weapon Smithing, and from there on you can find recipes that can let you craft other kinds of weapons. Later on, Kaguya will unlock Magatama Crafting, and you can find recipes for making different ones.
- Level-Locked Loot: Aside from weapons, magatama beads have both a minimum level requirement and chakra requirement. You do gain chakra through leveling up, though the amount tends to be randomized.
- A different kind of the above trope comes in the form of Lucky Boxes. They only drop from slain foes that are within 10 levels below the player, with no upper limit set as to enemy level drops.
- MetaGirl: Kaguya often speaks as if she's aware she's in a game, not to mention her Maid outfit and weapon...
- Metal Slime: Recent updates have given chances for Goldarumas (golden darumas) to appear in dungeons. They're incredibly resistant to most elements (but have a poison weakness), and once they notice you they will run away quickly. If you think you have them cornered, they'll perform a stun attack, usually followed up with a laser sweep, and they HURT. Sometimes they won't even stick around long enough to be attacked, and can heal to FULL HEALTH when given the opportunity.
- Monster Compendium: Defeated enemies will sometimes drop a card that has information on the slain foe. The more of these cards you acquire, the more information is gleamed about them, including elemental weaknesses and item drops.
- Oni: The race of your character, as well as some other characters like Ibaraki-Douji. However, the leader of Onigashima (the starting town) implies there's more to you than meets the eye, and even one of the antagonists notices such when you prove more than capable of killing the Kamikui.
- Powers via Possession: Recent updates to the game have introduced Divine Forms for several of your main party membersThose involved , which is done through the power of Possession. However, it is stated that as the party members' bodies are used to manifest these divine forms, their personalities will show up from time to time.
- Random Drop: Get used to this, as a LOT of your items will come from slain foes and the occasional treasure chest.
- Rare Random Drop: Some items have a less than 1% chance to appear (and often times, you'll need these for certain quests). However, repeated daily log-ins can increase the drop chance, alongside a Random Drop Booster that can be obtained in-game.
- Relationship Values: All of your party members have a meter, usually with a small anecdote displaying how they feel towards you. You can increase these via Friendship Items either dropped by foes around your character's level, obtained in Lucky Boxes, or bought in Miroku's Bargain Bin (if you didn't already use the cash shop or get some via quests). Increasing the values to certain levels rewards the player with increased functionality, allowing the party member to do much better at their job. (Example: Shizuka identifies dropped weapons and stores items for you. Increasing her friendship level makes the identified weapons much better, and gives you more storage space.)
- This goes double for the Vanguard Swap partners, except their meters are increased through gifting them weapons and armor. Gifting them weaponry that matches what they use (ex. Izuna uses wands whereas Gennai uses axes) nets the largest increase, and increased levels makes them stronger overall, and expands their skills.
- The Rival: Momotarou has a one sided rivalry with the player character.
- Schizo Tech: The game is said to be set in an alternate univers Japan, yet one where modern architecture, automatons, trains, and plenty of other modern items are commonplace. An anime short displays this blatantly—- anti-Kamikui laser defenses!
- Shout-Out: Tons of them in the game, both with characters and weapons.
- In Kyoto, a group of five Sticky monsters have formed A team dedicated to keeping their town safe.
- A lone Sticky calls himself the Child of the Sun!
- One weapon is the Predator Spear.
- You can also acquire The Master Sword.
- An axe-class weapon is basically called the Dragonslave, or Drachtslave in some versions. Its description points out that there's a super-destructive spell with the same name.
- A bow is called Goldeneye and refers to a secret mission.
- There's even lightsabers as acquirable weapons!
- The Star Staff was used to great effect by a magical girl a long time ago, and makes you feel like collecting Youkai Cards. It even looks almost exactly like the Sealing Wand, or at least as close as it safely can.note
- There's also a staff known as the Nekogami Staff, which belonged to a hermit who raised a cat that could talk and lives longer than humans. It looks suspiciously like the staff of a certain hermit who IS a long-lived cat that can talk.
- Outside of weapons, there's also a quest to defeat an assortment of insects bothering an NPC. It's name? "You need some Repel".
- Status Effects: Poison, Freeze, Paralysis, Stun, and Burn.
- Stripperific: Ibaraki-Douji wears very little. And that's not even getting into the various clothing options the player character has. On the enemy's side, the butterfly-themed Uzume fits the bill.
- Switch-Out Move: Recent updates have introduced the Vanguard Swap system—- with certain partners summoned onto the field, as you damage and kill foes, a gauge fills up. Once the gauge fills, pressing the assigned key will let you swap into controlling the partner character. After a certain amount of time passes (or your swapped character's HP hits zero during the timeframe), you will switch back to your character. You will get fully healed upon switching.
- The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: He even tells Susanoo that he alone has dibs on dealing with the Player Character, and that even a god such as him is a target.
- Tomboy and Girly Girl: Yoshitsune and Shizuka, respectively.
- Wrench Wench: Hiraga Gennai, full stop. She basically drops into a full-on fit of Squee when given the chance to study Benkei and help repair him, but also makes her own line of robots based on his designs.
- Youkai: Makes up the general bulk of the enemies you'll fight in the game. They're all faithfully represented in looks, mannerisms and attacks.
