Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers Review (Wii)

This game is the sequel to the Xbox 360’s “Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad”, and is basically the same game. You control a few beautiful, scantily clad women and guide them through their battle against hordes of undead in a 3D brawler similar to Devil May Cry, Dynasty Warriors, or Samurai Western. These sort of games normally draw a love-or-hate reaction from people, making it hard to give a universal recommendation on whether to buy them or not; one gamer will brush the genre off as shallow trash, another will love it for precisely that reason.

But in the case of Bikini Zombie Slayers on the Wii, it’s easy to call: stay away. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the game’s premise, as fighting your way through packs of undead and the boss figures controlling them sounds fun. Likewise, the fanservice angle of unlocking several pretty outfits for the girls to wear could be fun to some people. Unfortunately, some bugs, annoying design choices, and the controls will kill your interest.

The major problem is that this game requires you to use the Nunchuk and Wiimote. Nevermind that the Classic Controller has enough buttons to mostly duplicate the Xbox 360 prequel’s controls; you’re forced to flail your arms around in several complex motions to deal with hundreds of enemies per stage. And if you clear a room, only to go into another one with a save point... the room you just cleared refills with more zombies the second you return. While there is a certain flow to the controls and they can be mastered, they’re still bad. This was a ’button masher’ on the 360, why do I have to wave my arms around non-stop this time around? It gets tiring after a while and that’s on top of some of the controls being unintuitive to boot