Oreshika: Tainted Bloodlines—Thicker Than Water

There were reasons that I wasn’t happy with Oreshika beyond my own failure and impatience, which makes the fact that I didn’t hate it even more surprising. For one, the game fails to fully explain many things about itself. It gestures towards them, particularly in the beginning, but leaves the details unsaid. Even Kochin’s information section tends to deal in broad strokes with plenty of room left for enigma. The stat bars of your clan members’ divine hook-ups, which govern everything from a character’s combat skills to their emotional disposition, pulse and bounce on the screen. No numbers, nothing solid, just a vague suggestion that their Water mind is higher than their Earth heart. Maybe it’s supposed to be comforting, as if the game is saying “It’s not really that important, you’ll figure it out, don’t stress!” But I stressed. I stressed a lot. This approach is the opposite of reassuring, because the nature of these kinds of RPGs makes you feel like every single detail can make or break you. I desperately wanted to have a wiki open on my phone, especially in the first few hours. Even if it didn’t give me much more than the game itself, the illusion of stability and understanding would have been enough. (For what it’s worth, the game is right. It’s not really that important. You’ll figure it out.)

That’s not all I struggled with. Oreshika: Tainted Bloodlines is actually the second game in the series, though it’s the first to be localized in English. When it was initially released in Japan last year, fans of the original were fairly unhappy with a key change that had been made. The story now revolved around a “main character” named Nueko, with your clan essentially caught in the crossfire between her and the game’s antagonist. Even though I have never played the first Oreshika I can absolutely understand where these fans were coming from, because the very best parts of the game for me were often the ones when Nueko simply wasn’t around—when it felt like the game was actually about “us”.

The brief, flickering lives of your clan members leave so many little impressions on you over the course of playing. They might remind you of the ancestor that had the same features or wielded the same weapon. If they are stricken with the plague you worry for their wellbeing, because their lives are so fragile and precious. When they die their final words may even make you tear up. But Nueko remains fundamentally the same person, half-dressed and rarely inspired to express anything but physical pain. You see her story play out in flashes of exposition, and seldom will you care. If Nueko wasn’t a strong fighter, her near constant presence in your party (which is mandatory for story progressing events) wouldn’t feel worthwhile. She’s just not terribly interesting, and her role undermines much of what Oreshika does to make the existence and evolution of your family feel meaningful.

But Nueko is not the biggest problem I have with Oreshika. That honor falls to one of the first gods I was able to pair up with: Kujakuin Akemi, an unflattering caricature of a transgender woman who is included among a list of male gods. Kujakuin’s appearance and mannerisms will be particularly familiar to you if you’ve had a fair amount of exposure to Japanese media. This is not an uncommon trope in anime and the like, but that does not make it acceptable. The same goes for the “prissy” run assigned to dancer-class captains as they dart about the game’s dungeons. I rolled my eyes watching my female dancer perform this animation, but watching her son doing the same made me pause. If you’re ever unsure how to feel about when you come across something like this, ask yourself if whoever designed that moment expected you to laugh. It was the same feeling I had when I first saw Kujakuin—I knew that someone intended for players to laugh, both at the expense of the character and more significantly at the expense of the real people those tropes were created to mock.

The Ties That Bind

Even at my most frustrated, confused, irritated and even offended, there was always something to love about this game. There was the arresting visual design, with every environment, character and effect composed of soft watercolors and bold outlines. There was the music, a spirited mix of traditional and contemporary that never wore out its welcome. There was the ever expanding list of skills, each more impressively animated than the last. There was Kochin, wriggling around in time with the music during the Frenzy periods when all the monsters in a dungeon are celebrating.

I don’t think I really understood how I felt about Oreshika until after my fourth try at the end boss. My last try, when I finally won. The curses placed on the clan had been lifted (don’t pretend that’s a spoiler, because of course the curses get lifted) and the game was easing itself towards the credits. Nueko turned to the head of the clan, a martial artist with the same trade and the same smug expression that one of the clan founder’s once bore, and told her, “No need to rush anymore. Take your time. Chew before you swallow.”

I hadn’t been chewing for a long time. I’d been tearing off great big chunks and gulping them down whole, and it hadn’t been an enjoyable experience. But after the credits rolled, and the post-game revealed itself, my relief to be done immediately changed into an eagerness to keep playing. Now that I’d finished the game there was no story to rush through, no progress points to beat my head against because of deadlines. Nueko’s specialized job class was unlocked for my clan, meaning that I would no longer need to call her down to benefit from her skills. I also now had the option to summon any god from the pantheon to join the clan on the battlefield as she had.

Better still, it felt like I could finally start to dig in to the subtler mechanics present in Oreshika. The heirlooms, the curses, the deification (or demonization) of my own family members, the passing down of powerful Secret Arts, the expansion of the town, the… Uh… Benefits and drawbacks of celestial inbreeding. I’m not sure I completed even one of the game’s random dungeons. If you’re playing on the game’s suggested difficulty setting it feels like you’ll barely scratch the surface of what it has to offer.

Maybe that’s why it was such a strange relief when the game faded back in from the credits. I wanted to see how the twins would turn out after their training. I wanted to break the curse placed on the fan that the founder had commissioned for her son. I wanted to bring the deified gunner back to fight alongside his great-grandchildren. I wanted to find the heaven promised at the end of the Heptacolor Hot Springs. The very first thing I did was expand my clan’s house. I was finished, but I wanted to play more than ever.

Oreshika: Tainted Bloodlines was developed by Alfa System and published by Sony. It is available for the Playstation Vita.

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Janine Hawkins is a games writer based in sunny Canada. You can find her written and video work on HealerArcherMage.com or follow her on Twitter @bleatingheart.