#Ao oni meaning plus#
#Ao oni meaning series#

Shun is unfortunately being bullied mercilessly in secret by the sadistic Takuro, who maintains a public image as the school’s most popular student. The story follows Shun, a transfer student who creates a video game (…it’s Ao Oni… it’s meta) based on the town’s urban legend of a monster that lives in a creepy isolated European-style mansion.

#Ao oni meaning plus#

This volume is largely devoted to setting things up for the four characters from the game (Hiroshi, Takuro, Mika, and Takeshi), plus two new characters (Shun and Anna).

#Ao oni meaning series#

Whether you have played the game or not (really, it doesn’t matter either way), if you’re a fan of horror at all then this is a series that’s well-worth checking out. Which I’m happy to say are not bad! In fact, I’d have to say I was pleasantly surprised by this opening volume. And, of course, it got some light novels too.

“How do you do, fellow gamers?”Īo Oni would eventually get a couple (bad) live-action films, some (bad) anime gag shorts and (bad) anime film, and a couple sequel games (which I have not checked out yet). I mean, I guess I’d run away too if I saw that in real life, but an Anpanman showing up in real life would probably freak me out just as much. To be honest I never felt too impressed with the game–it feels awkward and clumsy, the presentation lacks polish, the puzzles are pretty ridiculous… And, well, I’m not sure I’d even call the ao oni that scary. Many creepypastas also involved tales of old-school games glitching out in horrific ways, so I think Ao Oni could be considered a game that released at just the right time to catch a lot of people’s attention. This was right when “ creepypasta” was a big thing on the internet (the most famous story probably being “Slender Man”). The first rendition of the game released in 2008, but improved versions would follow over the next several years. You don’t have any means of defending yourself, so if the “ao oni” (“blue demonic ogre”) gets you, it’s game over. In the game, the goal is to solve puzzles to find a way to escape the building you’re trapped in–but at random times the monster will suddenly appear and try to catch you (accompanied by music reminiscent of the shower scene from Psycho). The Ao Oni novels are loosely based on a simple freeware video game of the same name, in which a giant blue monster chases some high school kids around in an old abandoned mansion. So far there are three volumes available in English, and from what I can tell there are six volumes total for this series in Japan (Note: one of the listings in the link there is for a comic anthology).

This book was released by J-Novel Club in January 2018. It is based on the Japanese indie game by noprops.

This review is for the first volume of Ao Oni by Kenji Kuroda (with art by Karin Suzuragi). For general information on this series: Ao Oni entry