Odin Sphere(PS2)
2007 VanillaWare

The Short Version: I think odin’s a pretty cool guy. eh fights midgets and doesn’t afraid of anyone. If you liked River City Ransom, but wished it was prettier and with MMORPG-like item farming, this is the game for you!

The Long Version: It occurs to me a pretty big chunk of my Playstation 1&2 library seems to basically go against that apocryphal set of policies that Sony set in place to make 2-D game developers as unwelcome as possible (unless it’s a quickie port of old arcade titles turned around to make a buck as fast as possible, of course.) Either by purpose or design, anyway, I got Odin Sphere when it came out, and promptly have delayed the hell out of playing it extensively. Now that critical acclaim and relevance have pretty much entirely faded away, it’s my turn to sluice my opinion onto the pile.

I hate to admit I was one of those who bought the game at least in part buying into the fandom’s panicked cries of how if nobody supported this game, then 2-D GAMING WOULD BE OVER FOREVER. There’s also my leaning toward the NDS for game releases lately than any of the consoles. Games like Mega Man ZX that feel like they might have been able to squeak by on SNES hardware are my favorites- simple enough to pick up and play, but just meaty enough to stay interesting for a while- without a commitment of time equal to a work week plus overtime if I just wanna push through to the end. So, I bought OS, at full price, at launch, and if nothing else I’ve indirectly funded the samurai flavored successor coming to the Wii the-day-after-whenever-the-fuck.

Let’s get this bit out of the way since it’s worth stating- OS is really a gorgeous game. It’s hard to believe that the same technology that made those goofy looking ‘tentacle ball’ bosses in the SNES era could be tweaked to make such smoothly-animated and ornate characters and enemies. Each character is made up of multiple small sprites, allowing for movements a lot more subtle than most sprite-based games bother with, while still looking like what they’re supposed to, rather than marionettes or South Park cutouts. (That isn’t to say there aren’t moments the jointed-sprite nature isn’t given away, but we’re not talking Contra 3 boss bad.) The colors are rich, soft, and dreamy- just like the storybook the plot(s) are being told from. It’s a pretty, pretty, pretty game, to the point I feel a wee bit girly playing something that involves a princess in a flowing dress buying snacks from a talking rabbit with sparkly eyes. Even if she reverts back into a spear wielding, ass kicking Valkyrie warrior in action levels.

I don’t get to use the phrase “Rashomon-like retelling” often enough in describing games, which is kind of a shame since it’s the perfect excuse to have multiple paths through a game without designing new levels or characters. It just seems like a wonderful way to be lazy and artsy at the same time, and you can already tell by looking at it that they at least wanted to shoot for ‘artsy.’ You play as five different heroes at different times in the game, and though their paths cross, much like the average plot intensive fighting game (Does Soul Calibur try any more or is every ending a Vader reacharound in IV?) they don’t mesh perfectly and some fights that happen in one story won’t happen in another, so on. Basically, you have these five kingdoms, fighting over a big magical steampunk device. The various nations, through one means or another end up sending a member of the royal family to run around in circles in the woods and perform boring item creation. And then everything will be ok. And you thought democracy was fucked up.

(Well, it still kind of is, but it’s getting better! We elected a black guy!)

The plot’s a good deal deeper than that, but that’s true of any game these days. The meat is how it plays, which, since it’s an artsy game with an intricate plotline, is surprisingly not a turn based snoozefest. It’s a side scrolling platformer-ish beat-em-up, something like a high speed Double Dragon. The layout of each stage is a Flintstones-esque endless loop with one or more exit points to the next stage in the region, and you have a map to navigate your way through the regions to the bosses/minibosses/shops/brothels. It can get a little annoying and confusing, but once you get the hang of it, navigating the levels isn’t so bad. There’s really no other way they could have worked the stage layouts in with the hit and run fighting style without doing the looping thing.

Fighting is fun, mostly anyway. Many moves seem a bit overly-showy and as a result, come out way too slow to deal with the droves of enemies dogpiling you at a given moment, which is made worse by the stupid attack gauge. You have a bar that depletes as you use normal moves, and restores when you don’t attack. If you go all out and (god forbid) use up the whole gauge on a group of foes, you’ll be dizzied and immobile for a few seconds. It’s like Gwendolyn (et al.) are trying to do sit-ups without getting the breathing down. In addition you also have a few room-clearer spells, and you can create offensive items like Napalm. The boss encounters in particular are freaking amazing full screen monstrosities even as they get harsher and more ridiculous, including a dragon that devours your soldiers then spits what’s left of their armor at you as a weapon, and a Viking dickhole who forces you to drink his booze. Bad. Ass.

Now, the griping. As mentioned before, there’s an item creation system in this, and boy howdy aren’t they proud of it. You can plant seeds, which mature into various food items as they absorb Phozons from the air (pink energy dots released by dead enemies and your alchemy). You can use the creatively named “Materials” item in conjunction with other items to create potions that do various things, like explode or nullify the effects of stages that suck your health out. You can only do your ‘farming’ in action levels, which means you must either do it while the area teems with enemies (good luck with that!) or wait til you’ve cleared the foes, and do your planting, synthesizing, and so on as the ‘level cleared’ music plays. The clear level music, incidentally, is snooze inducing “Ooh, Ahhh” fantasy music that would have been at home in Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders. That’s the main thing keeping me from going back and finishing the game. I’m afraid that I might end up in a late Ernest Borgnine flick.  There’s also EPIC slowdown. Not normal slowdown as seen in many NES shooting games, we’re talking PC level slowdown. Like when your anti-virus program spontanteously decides to rape the processor in the middle of a session. I’ve always thought slowdown in some games was a blessing in disguise when things are getting too intense, or in like, Bangai-O, it actually serves to heighten the drama when you cut loose with a huge counterattack. Here… No. It just slows to a crawl during the more intense fights when you need all the help you can get, and it can really screw up your timing.

So, I never really reviewed the game in a timely fashion when it came out, but look at it this way: How has it held up since its release two years ago? I can’t say I like it much better after having been away from it for so long. I can only really play it in short sessions before the ooh-ahhh mystical magical stuff starts to get to me. The story’s interesting and that’s the main thing that keeps pulling me back into it now and then to see it unravel a little more at a time. The biggest problem Odin Sphere’s got is that it doesn’t seem to understand what it does best. It’s at its most fun when you’re a whirling dervish cutting down enemies by the squadron, then sucking their souls up into your weapon to level it up. When you have to spend ten minutes on a time-out to refine potions so the next area being too hot/cold/full of poison doesn’t erode your life meter away, it kills all of the excitement and momentum you had the moment before, and all to overcome some arbitrary, unavoidable environmental factor they could have just not added in to begin with. That’s the thing that pisses me off the most, really. You have to take time out of the fun part of the game to create an item that prevents something that shouldn’t be in the game to begin with. I might even let it slide a little if it were just the scorching hot underworld that pulled this, but no! There’s a freezing cold mountain, too. And you’ll be visiting both more than once thanks to there being five paths through the game! And then there’s the fact that the enemies themselves aren’t really hard- just cheap. Waiting for the vulnerable moments in your overly flashy combo chains to zip in, bosses that are simply overpowered to punish you for slipping up, and most annoyingly, when you beat the knife wielding goblins, their daggers flip through the air from their hands, and damage you if you’re too close before they hit the ground. And not a nick, its the same as if they stabbed you.

Summing up: Odin Sphere isn’t a horrible game, just an awkward one with a pretty paint job. It’s kind of a Double Dragon for the power-leveling, item-synthing set, though it’d probably take some getting used to since most fans of that kind of thing are used to battling the forces of evil with deadly menus and stat charts.