Oni2:Slaves of War/Impressions

Impressions of the Future
Glimpses at scenes, tone-setters, settings, and general neat stuff that could appear in Oni 2 or Oni 3.

Deadly rain

Mai is standing in the rain in the ruins of a city. Everything is quiet. Suddenly she hears a filtered voice calling out, “Oh, oh God! You, get out of the rain! It’s acid, you’ll…” The suited figure realizes that Mai is not being harmed, as she gazes at him. “What… you… ahh!” He runs away, incoherent with fear, calling out on radio to his base, “There’s a monster out here!”

Previous to this, the player has not realized that they are standing in deadly acid rain.

The Daodan within

Mai is struggling with an opponent in the dark. He suddenly realizes that he can see Mai's organs glowing in the dark as she powers up and overpowers him.

Daodan dreams

Mai is sleeping fitfully. Her fears about the Daodan are churning inside. She sees herself walking along the ground on her arms and legs in a forest. She looks up and sees a small marsupial of unknown species eating something. It looks at her with round eyes, at her level, while chewing quickly on some unidentified food. Mai starts awake, breathing quickly as she realizes it was just a dream. (Meaning: She is afraid she is becoming an animal.) With the right music, this could be disturbing.

The Cricket

The Cricket is a small green robot that perches on Mai's shoulder as she performs a mission, used to produce distractions for the sake of stealth. When the player presses a certain button, or when the Cricket is sent out and reaches its destination, it plays a randomly-selected noise. The Cricket does recognize when it’s outside versus inside and can choose sounds appropriately in that regard; when outside, it might produce the sound of a car crash or trash cans falling over in an alley, and when inside, a bottle falling over or someone sneezing. Nearby enemies will run to investigate. This allows Mai to sneak up on them, or to avoid detection in situations with difficult patrol paths.

However, if the Cricket is spotted, the enemy may know what is going on, and the alert level in the vicinity will be raised. If Mai were the one spotted, she might be able to take out the guard before he reports her, but the Cricket has no offensive capabilities, thus use of the Cricket has some risk.

The Cricket can also be a source of mild humor in a generally serious game. It may show some quirky behavior in cutscenes, and its choice of an “appropriate” distraction sound may be rather odd. Another bit of humor can come from the use of more creative alts for bad guys. Instead of “Huh, what was that?”, we can get more specific based on the sound that the Cricket plays: “Was that a car crash?”, or “Hey, this isn’t garbage day!”.

Depending on how much Mai gets to use the Cricket, she may name it. “In Caraguatatuba, Brazil, a black cricket in a room is said to portend illness; a gray one, money; and a green one, hope” -- perhaps she names it Hope, as in “I hope this thing works”. It may be an experimental gadget made by a member of her resistance group.

Phase-shifting

• Enemies with unseen limbs
• Mai cloaking at will, perhaps with lead-in time (for MP’s sake as well as SP balance)

Mai is angry

When something happens that justifies Mai losing her temper and perhaps unleashing her powers, she might start speaking in a lowered voice in a creepy way; as well as this excerpt from a VA's reel which has a completely different tone and context, but actually creates the same ominous feeling that I’m looking for. Alternately, see the scene in the Battle Angel Alita OVA (English dub) where Alita is screaming at Grewcica as she kills him (albeit her dialogue is in her own head, and the screaming was added to the English dub).

Trailer moments

1. A mixed brawl/firefight with some soldiers. Shaky cam follows a soldier as he rushes around a corner and meets Mai, looking serious but unafraid. He’s too close to bring up his weapon, so he attacks her physically. Perhaps we’ve shown already that he’s the commander, and a capable fighter, but she beats him down.

Elsewhere, we catch a glimpse of Mukade dodging enemy fire by teleporting, and throwing his Devil Star.

Finally the fight is over. One remaining soldier has thrown down his gun and surrendered. Mai casually walks by him, and he recognizes her: “You’re Kono--urk!” Mai has grabbed him by the throat, and says in a low voice: “Don’t call me by that name.”

2. Initial teaser, before any trailer comes out: The music playing is just the bass line from Konoko Chase (the 1999 trailer music), at a slower tempo. A woman in armor with hair in a ponytail kneels to look at a lonely flower in a wasteland. It’s a small plant with fragile-looking white petals — a meager spark of life in a land struggling to survive. She slowly reaches out to grasp a petal. The flower suddenly snaps at her hand, stinging her, and the plant folds up into an alien animal which uproots itself and skitters away, its cover blown. Mai holds her hand and stares after it, wondering what this world is becoming.

Navarre's lab

Mai is looking around at various experiments, some of them ghastly, when she hears a friendly, strongly-accented voice: “Mai, it’s been a long time. You've grown!” A middle-aged man walks forward casually with a cane, dressed like a combination of a scientist and a Renaissance noble.

Muro's transformation

Oni 2 could open with the transformation of Muro from the killed-Griffin ending of Oni, either redone with an actual transforming model if the engine can be made to do it, or else an animé version of the scene. Muro says similar dialogue to the original scene. Mai wakes up and we see that it was a dream. We then find a way to show that this didn’t actually happen, and Griffin is still alive.

The purposes of this dream opening are:

• Connecting the two games, for returning fans.
• Redeeming the transformation sequence that was cheated off-screen originally.
• Introducing the theme of Mai worrying about what she will become if she transforms into a being that reflects her more violent acts.
• Showing returning fans that the killed-Griffin ending didn’t happen; it was a bad dream that Mai had, imagining what would have happened if she pulled the trigger. This establishes which ending was canon. We might also need to show, in close proximity to this scene, that Griffin is still alive in order to make the point clear.
• Justifying the unrealistic aspects of Mutant Muro's transformation (where did all that mass suddenly come from?), and the unexplained lack of any transformation in the spared-Griffin scenario.

Muro's escape

(The concept of freezing Muro is a nod to this console.)

Scientist: Sir, it's as we thought. His core temperature is continuing to rise, and at an accelerating rate. Our projections indicate that he will probably begin regaining consciousness in about three days.

<Cut during dialogue to an opaque sarcophagus, and displays showing thermal imaging of the body and a slowly-rising line on a monitor.>

Griffin: You have nothing to report on the phase barrier project?

Scientist: We think we can detect the flow of energy that’s entering the host body, but standard cloaking technology seems to do nothing to impede it.

Griffin: All right, we have no choice then. Put the disposal plan in motion.

Scientist: Sir, we feel that there's a lot we can learn from the host if we can just keep him subdued. There are a couple new IV solutions that have been suggested for keeping him anesthetized—

Griffin: And what do we do when the Chrysalis learns to neutralize them? There's nothing we can do to stop the Daodan, not at this point. It was a risk to even take him alive. I'm not going to make the same mistake twice and listen to scientists who tell me they can control it. You have your orders.

Scientist: Yes, sir.

Cut to a smallish room that is almost freezing cold. The sarcophagus, a prototype “phase barrier”, is shut down and opened. As medics roll out a gurney from the inside, under the watch of armed guards (all in cold-resistant clothing), we see Muro for the first time in Oni 2, lying on a bed with IVs sending coolant into his arms. Although he is completely unconscious, he is chained to the bed, just as a precaution. A capsule is wheeled into the room, and we watch as they transfer the gurney bed with Muro into the capsule. Upon closing its transparent top, the capsule lowers the temperature inside with a burst of nitrogen gas.

Then we cut to a building with an incinerator. Muro’s capsule is inside a truck which parks at the entrance to the facility. Inside, they begin to heat up the incinerator; various whooshing noises of fire and exhaust, and a low klaxon, begin. A forklift picks up the clear coffin-like capsule off its dolly, turns, and slowly begins to make its way toward the incinerator. Cut to close-up through the lid of Muro at rest, his skin blue from the cold.

The scientist watches from the side, alongside armed guards. He frowns as he begins to feel something odd, and looks around at the soldiers, who are standing at attention impassively. His gaze falls on a nearby table with a walkie-talkie. The antenna is quivering.

Scientist, turning to commander: Is this kind of vibration normal?

The Commander’s face shows that he feels something odd as well, but he looks around silently.

Rumbling noises begin to overwhelm the noise of the incinerator, and things begin shaking. Soldiers look around anxiously, clutching their rifles. The forklift is at the door of the incinerator.

The Commander grabs the walkie-talkie: Perimeter, report. Are there vehicles incoming?

Perimeter guards, over radio, sounding panicked: We see nothing, sir!

The door to the incinerator has been opened to admit Muro’s capsule, but the driver is looking around trying to figure out if this is an earthquake. Cut to Muro, still unmoving. Cut to the scientist suddenly looking scared.

Scientist, running towards forklift: Hurry, put him in!

A thick piece of the concrete floor breaks and flies upwards, landing a few feet away. A mushroom, as big around as a man, swells up from the newly-made hole, pushing aside concrete debris, and slowly comes to a rest, upright. Everyone looks at it, confused. The rumbling has stopped and all is quiet.

A popping of metal and various small blasts occur, and everyone looks towards the incinerator to see a heavy vine wrapping around the metal and crumpling it, causing seals to burst and smoke to come out. The vine, with sawtooth thorns, is now shown to be protruding from the concrete floor.

The forklift operator shouts and jumps out of his vehicle as the floor under him gives way and various green and red appendages come up to surround him. A few feet from the forklift, some ensnare his legs and pull him to the ground, and he cries out as the downward pull begins to break his bones, crushing him into the concrete.

Meanwhile, in the background, more mushrooms of varying sizes can be seen popping up, but they are ignored since they are apparently doing nothing. A loud snap is heard, and the forklift is flung into the air, crashing down on the other side of the hangar-sized room with a black spear-shaped object impaling it (this is foreshadowing the harpoon plant from "Muro’s bombardment", below). Now something big rises up around Muro’s capsule: giant petals, encircling the coffin.

Commander, pointing: Shoot it!

The soldiers open fire, but the petals are so thick and tough that the bullets bounce off like marbles. In a top-down shot, we see the maw of the plant engulf Muro’s capsule as the ground opens up beneath it. Cut to his face, still unmoving and cold. The capsule sinks into the ground through what appears to be the giant stem of the plant.

Soldiers with energy rifles are managing to do damage to the plants, and singing the large one that is swallowing Muro, but suddenly they have vines pulling them down into the floor. One soldier kneels and prepares to fire his rocket launcher at the large plant, but unseen to him, the inside of the barrel suddenly blooms with small buds. The commander yells at him to stop, but he pulls the trigger, and the jammed launcher explodes, shards of it slicing through everything in the vicinity.

The giant plant suddenly retracts underground, and so do the vines. Much of the noise seems to have stopped. The scientist and the commander each look around, wondering if this is over. They notice a sound like a swelling balloon, filling the air. They look around and notice just how many mushrooms are growing out of the floor.

Each one is slowly expanding, but also looking more and more “full”. They quiver as they get larger. They are now each about six feet in diameter. Little skirts pop out from the stems, making the mushrooms look a little like mushroom clouds. The scientist’s eyes widen.

Cut to outside of building a moment before it is blown outward by a tremendous force. The bricks are separated from one another and the pieces of the incinerator are thrown upward into the sky as the entire building is fragmented. There is no fire in the explosion, only a white shockwave of high-pressure air.

Later we see a photo of the aftermath showing giant mushrooms occupying the space where the building stood, like freeze-frame nuclear clouds. The mushrooms, following their normal reproductive method of dispersing spores, expanded almost instantly to fill the area, obliterating everything in the enclosed space with a pressure wave.

Muro's bombardment

Muro has learned to summon Wilderness plants, and builds a sort of Akira-like monstrosity. Mai and company are trying to figure out how to fight it, but the air force attacks it with Mai in close proximity, and a fighter’s missile whizzes over her head, fragmenting the plant bodies, but they each begin to regenerate or are replaced.

Muro makes a counter-attack on the jets, maybe using a sort of harpoon plant that works like pilobolus. It seems that Mai and her group are out of their league. The army decides to use its ultimate non-nuclear assault weapon, the rods from God.

Muro's downfall

Suddenly a dark-haired little girl shows up as the rods fall. Muro has erected a plant shield above him, but when the rods fall and the smoke clears, we see that they pierced his shield, but not the phase shield below that, which the girl is apparently maintaining with a wave of her hand. She dismisses his plants casually, and they shrivel away. Muro (who is in an Imago state) is angry with her. She tells him petulantly to come with her, and he says he doesn’t need her anymore. He attempts to grab her, but she paralyzes him with another wave and dismisses his Imago transformation with a snap of her fingers, leaving Muro looking withered and frightened.

Speaking with a scolding tone (“Bad Muro, bad!”), she uses phase shield-enhanced blows to beat him down with quick vicious strikes that break the ground under his body. As he lays still, the girl seems concerned that she went too far. She seems to be talking with someone, and says, “Oh no! I think I killed him! ...Well, he wouldn’t listen to me! You saw! ...All right, here.” Suddenly a phase portal opens, and she has some plants lift Muro’s broken body and convey it into the portal. Mai calls out “Muro!”, and the girl looks at her and seems amused at her concern. As Muro’s body vanishes into another world, she says condescendingly, “Daddy doesn’t listen, he gets a spanking.”