Oreshika: Tainted Bloodlines is actually the sequel to the PlayStation 1999 game Ore no Shikabane wo Koete Yuke. Now, this sequel was released in 2014 in Japan and localized in 2015 as effectively the last first-party game for the Vita. Oreshika has a few neat concepts, the most obvious of which is the art style. Its take on the Japanese artwork aesthetic is stunning and looks great, with beautiful environments and monster designs. Unfortunately, while everything is rendered in 3D, the camera is fixed and there are some generic locations within the dungeons from time to time. This is because each dungeon is split between multiple areas, separated by a small loading screen and you'll have a short generic cave route for example as a bridge between the inside of a cave and the waterfall outside.
The other interesting concept of Oreshika is the premise. You are a clan who is cursed, your whole family and further generations can only live for a maximum of two years. This is actually as short as it sounds because the time within the game goes by in blocks of "months". Your characters will die by their 24th month, but usually much earlier. You start out with three characters and then have to replenish your clan by performing the Rite of Union with gods. You'll then have offsprings to carry on the legacy. Throughout the duration of the game, you'll go through many generations in this manner. There is a huge selection of gods to perform the Rite with, you see, the draw here is to keep building and improving upon your genetics as time goes on.
When performing the Rite, you want to select the gods who will either eliminate the weaknesses you have within your genes or with gods who will improve your strengths. This gets very complicated because there are a lot of factors and stats to consider, however, you can get by through the game by just selecting the gods who seem to have the longer stat bars. There are a lot of hidden factors in play that determines how strong your characters are going to be, which can get a bit annoying when "recessive" genes occur and you get weak characters for a while. There's really no way to control this. You can boost up your clan numbers through other means too, such as betrothal with outside clans, adoption and even hiring mercenaries to perform your fights for you. Oreshika allows a lot of freedom in this aspect.
Each character you create can be taken out onto the battlefield with you, where you will fight against demons to gain experience, level up and get stronger so that you can defeat the bosses. As your characters age, they will also weaken, bosses also only turn up in a specific month each year so you have to time your characters' strengths perfectly or postpone the progression to the next year. Once a character dies, you'll have to level up a new one again and this is where Oreshika brings home the fact that you can't just overlevel your characters to brute force the bosses, you need to be a bit more cleverer than that and plan ahead.
Your clan owns a town and it is your mission to improve its prosperity and invest upon it with the money you earn. You can expand item shops for more products, forge your own weapons and open up entertainment districts such as hot springs to improve stats. As your characters keep dying, the story focuses upon Nueko, who was the one who had sacrificed herself to get your descendants at least two years of life. You have to retrieve back the five instruments to bring back festivals to the world. The aim of getting these instruments is to eventually get the chance to fight against the demon/god who had brought this curse upon your clan in the first place. The story is told via 2D animation cutscenes as well as in-game rendered cutscenes.
The story isn't too bad but it can be bland and uninspired at times, causing you to lose focus and become in attentive. Various dungeons will contain an instrument guarded by a boss. Once you defeat the boss, more lands and new dungeons open up for you to explore, the promise of new lands and rewards keeps you going. The dungeons are huge, and the lack of an overall map means that it is designed to get you lost, because in order to defeat a boss you will need to find them within the dungeon at the right time. Oh, you also have a time limit on how long you can spend within the dungeon, once the timer runs out, you can either spend another month within the dungeon or leave.
The length of the time limit that dictates how long you can stay in a dungeon is dependent upon the "difficulty" setting you chose. You can opt for a longer time limit but this means that experience earned from enemies are lower, and that enemies will be stronger. Opting for a shorter time limit means you can level up faster but at the detriment of not being able to fully explore the dungeons in time. You can swap between the settings though, thankfully. Prowling within the dungeons are demons, running into them will transition you to the battle screen in a classic turn-based combat system. You'll face up to ten demons at once with a maximum party of four characters. You can attack with your characters, or use special abilities.
One neat feature in the battle system is the fact that you can chain together the same ability from multiple characters to increase your damage output (i.e. two characters using the same ability will cause four times the damage, while with a full party of four characters will cause eight times the damage). Characters are also designated into one of eight classes, each with their strengths and weaknesses. As offsprings are created, you pick the class they are in, Fencers have strong attack and defense but can only attack one enemy at a time, wile Halberdiers can attack a whole row at once but are weaker. You get the idea. Oreshika lulls you into a false sense of security with its difficulty in its first two bosses, before completely destroying you starting with the third boss. From then on, it becomes a harder challenge and you need good preparation before each boss.
It is actually very frustrating and annoying at how unfair the later boss battles are, such as a particular boss gaining rapid stat boosts, while you can't even reverse the effects with your abilities. Then another boss will overwhelm you with sheer numbers. This ruins the game immensely and makes you not want to play as to overcome the boss, you need to create your party again and train them from scratch. Just a big waste of time. The difficulty spike of the final boss is too much to handle, which makes it extremely unfair and not fun. The fact that you have to grind and grind and grind in order to build up your clan's strength (beating the previous bosses doesn't even indicate that you're half ready for the final boss), coupled with the annoying and frustrating ability of the final boss to change phases makes the game a joke and ruin whatever goodwill it had.
Overall, Oreshika: Tainted Bloodlines is a solid game. It doesn't have a strong tutorial system for its many game mechanics, rather it expects you to read a heap of text tutorials in your spare time. The battle system is a classic and works well, the game mechanics are interesting and while it does get a bit difficult towards the second half of the game, it is fun and addictive. However, the massive difficulty spike in the final boss massively ruins the game, and makes it hard to recommend this frustrating and unfair piece of software, which is a shame because it had a lot of potential and was amazingly fun and addictive during its best bits.
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