The Hidden Ones (Hitori No Shita: The Outcasts) Preview: Not Just a Pretty Face

The comeback wasn’t going to happen. I was blowing it. I lost my first character in my first match of The Hidden Ones because I didn’t cash out with my Ultimate Skill, but I made a comeback with my mid before losing her to my opponent’s anchor. I didn’t have a great answer for what he was doing, and I was convinced I was going to waste what had started off as a great comeback. Then my anchor came out. It was my first game; I’d never used her before. And at first, it was going about the same, and then I realized what I was doing. I canceled my default combo into another combo then another, and cashed out with my Ultimate. And on the last hit, I got the kill. God, I love fighting games, and if my time with it is any indication, The Hidden Ones is living up to what makes the genre so great.

If you’re not up on The Lore ™, The Hidden Ones is based on the anime Hitori No Shita: The Outcasts, which in turn is based on Under One Person, a Chinese webcomic. Whew. Okay, so the history is a little complicated, but you don’t really need to know what’s going on with the other parts of the series to vibe with The Hidden Ones. I have no experience with the anime, but I was able to follow what I saw pretty easily. I started with the story mode, which dropped me into the shoes of Wang Ye. Ye is one of the Outcasts, blessed with one of the Eight Secret Arts, which were generally believed to have been lost to time. Once people figure out what Wang Ye has, though, they go after him to get it.

Wang Ye tries to nip this in the bud by speaking with Li Gaofeng, the head of the Li Troupe, and trying to convince him to leave Wang and his family alone. Impressed by Wang’s gumption and fighting prowess, Li agrees to let him go and leave his family alone. Of course, things don’t go as planned and Wang finds himself framed for Li’s murder and battling the Li Troupe as he tries to escape.

The Devil’s in the Details

Whew, okay, set up. What’s cool, though, is the game Morefun games has made out of this. The Hidden Ones would probably be best described as an arena fighter, but you don’t just go from fight to fight. Between the fights themselves, you’ve got the ability to run around and check out The Hidden Ones’s world, whether that means enjoying the environmental detail on display or checking out a ledger or diary you find in the world. This attention to detail is important: during an interview that happened between my two play sessions, Lead Game Designer Fox Lin and Senior Game Designer Stan Fan told me that the team at Morefun spent a long time capturing the detail of these environments, many of which are based on actual, individual Chinese streets. They wanted the world of The Hidden Ones to feel real, and that comes across even in the relatively small area I was playing in.

The same is true of The Hidden Ones’s visual style. This game is stunning, and that attention to detail is clear in everything from the characters to the way they fight. This is intentional, too. The story and world of The Hidden Ones are based heavily (though not exclusively) in Chinese martial arts and myth, and that meant getting the little details right, right down to the motion capture done by real martial artists.

Morefun is also quick to note that while the Outcasts are incredibly powerful, they’re also folks going about their day. Maybe they’re going out to buy groceries or just using their abilities to accomplish their goals in subtle ways. The point is these are regular people, and that’s a major part of the story here, even if they are throwing punches and casting magic.

Like a Flowing Stream

Speaking of the fighting, The Hidden Ones feels great when you’re throwing punches. This is an arena fighter, so movement is crucial, but the rock-paper-scissors interactions of what makes a fighting game a game fighting work are here, too. You’ve got your basic attacks, which lose to special attacks; those losey to your defensive stance; and your defensive stance loses to attacks, which become throws if they’re in that stance. There’s also a dodge, which costs a limited amount of stamina, and you can time perfectly for a Witch Time-style slowdown that will allow you to retaliate when you otherwise wouldn’t, and a parry that you can perform out of your defensive stance during special attacks, so you can swap from defense to offense with a well-timed button press.

Stamina also comes into play on offense. You can spend it to cancel actions — whether they’re physical or special attacks — allowing you to build custom combos and combos into your Ultimate Skills, which is how I won that match I told you about at the start. If you’re the one getting your face rearranged, you can also spend stamina to break out of combos and reset to neutral. Put together, all of this means that, despite The Hidden Ones’s fairly simple control scheme and combo structure, you’re constantly making interesting choices where you’re alternating between playing neutral, reacting, and pre-empting your opponent, all while managing your character’s unique skills (Wang Ye, for instance, has a special attack that can go into three different variations). The right play at the right time, like say, throwing out a special attack when you think they’re going to swing at you, can swing a match.

Nah, He Just Looks Big

The real meat and potatoes, and my favorite part of my time with The Hidden Ones, is going to be the mano a mano fights between your three-person teams against other players, but I also really enjoyed the three boss fights I got to play. The first, which I ran into during the story mode, started off as a one-on-one brawl before the boss in question brought out her skyscraper-sized snake, forcing me to play around its massive fangs before its master would come down and I could get back to the fine art of knocking her out.

If that’s not enough for you, though, there’s also Trial mode, where you can face off against a boss with any of the characters you’ve got. There were two available in the demo I played, and both were challenging, especially on the highest of the available difficulties. Both eventually went down, but they forced me to use characters I knew, pick my spots, and learn their patterns. It’s a fun change of pace for a game like this, and I’m eager to see what other fights look like in the future.

When my time with The Hidden Ones ended, I left excited, and wishing I could have played more, especially more multiplayer. But I left with a good idea of what Morefun is trying to accomplish, and I liked how much cool stuff there was and how unique and interesting the characters they’ve created here are. Arena fighters are a tricky business, but so far Morefun has nailed the balance of simplicity, depth, and game feel that any good fighter needs while providing more to do if you’re not looking to throw down online. I’m excited to see where The Hidden Ones goes, and in the meantime, I’ll be thinking about landing that Ultimate Skill at the right moment, and how cool it was that The Hidden Ones gave me the options to play how I wanted in that moment. Like its characters, The Hidden Ones knows even when the chips are down and the outcome is uncertain, there’s always a play to be made, hidden in plain sight.