Odin Sphere, or: Delicious Graphics, I Must Eat Them

[Endesu]

Once again, culled from the ever bountiful fields of the GHZ Forum!

The sequel to Princess Crown on the Sega Saturn...

Is this funky little title by the name of Odin Sphere! Safe to say, I had never heard of it prior to reading this topic, but now that I've seen it, I feel I definitely need to play it. Enough so, in fact, to put off buying into next gen for a bit longer.

Official website is here.

Features of the game include

Gorgeous hand-drawn artwork and animations!

Intense side-scrolling action with astonishing attacks and magic effects!

Fully-voiced dialogue that heightens the drama!

Fantastic bosses that tower over the protagonists!

Five playable characters in all; each one’s fate is intertwined with the others’!

A robust cooking and alchemy system that can be used to create powerful attack and recovery items!

Here is a video link...

The official trailer...

Oh, and let us not forget the screenshots, plucked up from the official site...










It's slated for US release on May 21st.

[glu-glu]

Delicious Graphics indeed.

[BrainWalker]

Princess Velvet needs to put some clothes on.

Other than that, though, this game definitely has an impressive visual style. It's a shame we don't get to see what next/current-gen hardware can do with 2D gaming more often.

[PriamNevhausten]

A robust cooking and alchemy system that can be used to create powerful attack and recovery items!

Does anyone else think, when hearing these words, of a complicated goddamned encyclopedia's worth of worthless shit results sprinkled with a child's handful of decent combinations invokable only by rare drops that would probably be better not parted with in the first place? Or is it just me?

[glu-glu]

i dunno, if done well it can save your life, it did on Paper Mario: TTYD.

[BrainWalker]

I hear that. It all depends on wether they take the MMO philosophy of making shit, or the "games should be fun" philosophy of making shit.

[Spleen]

Who said games should be fun? You're supposed to end the day spiritually beaten and despairing over your wasted life.

[Justice Augustus]

Sounds like somebody else plays Battlefield 2!

[Jak Snide]

Oh god, the gunship's coming for me and my squad again. :[

As for crafting systems, the ideal one would tell you exactly what you need to make item X and then not require you to have Not Fun getting said materials. Experimentation is nice, but often too much of a gigantic timesink.

[Endesu]

Odin Sphere is being released... today!

I'll be picking it up, and once I give it a shot, I'll post my thoughts.

[PriamNevhausten]

You know what had an awesome 'cooking' system? The entire Megami Tensei series. For fuck's sake, I can't even force myself to do any cooking in Super Paper Mario. I will still probably pick up this game, though. Maybe very soon.

[Endesu]

You know what had an awesome 'cooking' system? The entire Megami Tensei series.

Chalk it up to my ignorance of the MegTen series, but I didn't know a 'cooking' system was involved.

[PriamNevhausten]

Well, they called it 'fusion.' But the point is, you could see what you would get, PRECISELY, before burning up the components. And the components were things you wanted to have anyway, not things you had to quest for.

[Capntastic]

What is the gameplay like!

[WillBaseton]

What is the gameplay like!

Hard. If you're going for high stage ranks and bonus items, the game is freaking hard. It plays kinda like Ragnarok Battle Offline, but with a more robust-ish item fusion system. The initially small inventory size of your starting character is also a crippling setback, but when you can buy items that expand it, it starts to get less painful.

It's a decent game thus far, just very, very difficult and slightly frustrating at times.

[Ark]

It plays kinda like Ragnarok Battle Offline

SOLD!
I'll order the game tommorow!
Though honestly I probably was going to anyway.

Other PS2 game I'm thinking of getting:
Grim Grimoire
Its looks pretty as well but is more on the tactical side.
So Yay.

Also an RPG I've got coming my way as I type:
Ethrian Odyssey
I couldn't resist. Chibi characters meets Eye of the Beholder, with a cool map making system!? Oh freaking HELL YEAH! Nintendo DS as well. Apprently freaking hard. Cool stuff!

[Capntastic]

Etrian Oddysey is awesome but I'm instinctually afraid of it because I dislike grinding. But once you get over the hump for the area you're on, it's swell.

[PriamNevhausten]

I am not particularly impressed by Odin Sphere thus far. Though it be in character (at least for the first character, as I assume more than one is playable throughout the game), blocking happens much more slowly than I would like, and the combat system is pretty imbalanced in the wrong ways. The story seems pretty standard-melodramatic-anime fare, and there's no option to skip text to the next line after you've read the current line--you either wait for the voice actors to, like, run a lap around the building or whatever it is they do during that gap between lines, or exit out of the conversation entirely. If you've ever tried to play FFX with subtitles turned off, you know the kind of painful waits between lines that I'm talking about.

I kind of like the planting system, and I really like that there's a plant that is pretty much specifically designed to be food for other plants. Alchemy I haven't really messed with yet. POW I could do without, but I see its function--I'm just not used to having to moderate my attack pace, having just played Castlevania: Curse of Darkness, and God of War 1 and 2.

In sum, I don't have quite enough material to make a main judgment on this game. But it's not looking good.

edit: I knew I forgot to mention something. The cooking system, such as I have seen it so far, is not bad! You find recipes on parchments all over the wherever, and the extent of your ability to make things is ENTIRELY dependent on those recipes--you simply canNOT make things by alchemy for which you do not have a recipe. But, on the other hand, when you have the recipe, you know precisely what you need, precisely what you will get, and precisely how to arrange the parts to get the product. I can dig it.

[BrainWalker]

I dig it. The plot is kind of irritating for the reasons Priam mentioned, but at least the characters act their parts pretty well. I like beating the crap out of things, but I kind of wish the combat system was more robust. Aside from your basic combo and air combo, you've got a grand total of two moves outside of magic and alchemy. Blocking is also a bit less effective than it could be.

Don't get me wrong, it's fun and all, and really neat looking, but.... I guess when I heard "It's kind of like RBO", I was expecting it to be... well, kind of like RBO.

Also, alchemy and agriculture are both much less irritating and much more awesome than I was expecting them to be. Hurrah!

Edit: I actually don't find the game to be incredibly challenging, but that's probably because I don't try to S-rank everything. A and B are good enough for me. I mean, it's not a cakewalk, but it hasn't really got me frustrated yet.

[PriamNevhausten]

What's got me is, does it think it's a story game? If so, it needs to have better script. Does it think it's a combat game? Then it needs to have more combat options and variations. Is it supposed to showcase how non-3d-rendered things are still good? Well, I guess they get props for staying away from Flash-like systems, just for the sake of doing their own thing, but I mean, really, is rotating objects that horrible? If you're going to showcase how sprites can do great things, then you have to have them DO great things, and not just be large. And if their big thing is to look pretty, then why in fuck's name does every valkyrie look the same, and why does every woman have that not-wearing-much thin-and-buxome appearance? I take it back, there's also the female characters who do wear stuff, but it's all very tight fitting, and they still have that 'I am weak female' look. What the shit, really.

One thing I can say is that it doesn't feel like I'm playing the same game that I've played before; this is a bit different, thanks to the inventory/planting/alchemy system--the tactical planning of battles gets to be different by virtue of that stuff. But another thing I can say is that after about an hour of playing the game, I feel like I'm doing the same things over and over again. Because I am.

It's like Katamari Damacy. A neat idea, with good implementation, but for Dog's sake, mix it up a little so it doesn't get too boring due to repetition. Cripes.

[Endesu]

I had a somewhat lengthy post to make here, originally, but I've caught a dire case of sickness and thus don't really have the gumption to push it through here. Needless to say several of the complaints lodged above are more or less correct, though I've heard that the characters unlocked after Gwendolyn apparently control much better than she does, which comes as something of a relief to me.

And, really, were people not expecting a standard Animu/JRPG-type storyline here?

I'd also like to note that the English voice acting is decent; nothing terribly bad, and the VAs emoted reasonably well (at least for the duration of Gwen's chapter).

[PriamNevhausten]

To be serious, I'd been so spoiled by MegaTen games, that I thought that since Odin Sphere was also from Atlus that it'd also have an interesting and provocative story.

[WillBaseton]

What I hear for the most part is that Gwen's story, being the "tutorial" chapter of the game, is the least enthralling of all of the five protagonists. It also doesn't help that she's not very easy to control either. It's just too bad they MAKE you start with her instead of giving you the choice of who to pick first.

But I'm willing to actually play through the game and see the other storylines, since common consensus seems to be that the story gets better as you play through the other five books.

[PriamNevhausten]

This hope is the main reason why I am continuing at all.

Also, item bags! Holy shit, the last time I had items that could hold items was in the Dark Sun PC games.

[Endesu]

I'm nearing the end of Gwen's story, and I'm starting to warm up to the game. There's definite fun to be had here; it's just hidden behind something of a veneer of difficulty. For the most part, the 'star' rankings are right-on in how difficult victory will be to obtain; two-stars or three will equate to a minor challenge at most; four and above are much harder. The bosses are generally pretty difficult, though there are some exceptions.

Spoiler:

Levanthan is almost too easy, and Mercedes, while she can hit hard, can be easily defeated as long as you mind to attack her on the side she's not aiming her Psypher crossbow of doom.

I'd like to note that Odin Sphere is, as stated before, a 'spiritual sequel' of sorts to the earlier Saturn title/present PSP port Princess Crown and thus utilizes a similar type of graphical style. Also, Priam, I've noticed that the women are all particularly thin; I've also noticed that the 'regularly' sized men are also very thin. I'm pretty sure that's just the artist's particularly weird choice of style. (

Spoiler:

Note, also, that the ridiculously big guys, such as Brigan and Lord Odin, ended up becoming bosses.

)

[PriamNevhausten]

Okay, so as I expected I would, I am going to revise my opinion, having played through a large portion of the game by now. It is surprisingly fun, even just to run around leveling, and actually I had a great amount of fun abusing the hell out of certain mechanics lately. The story has improved greatly since I moved away from Gwendolyn, and really hers isn't even all that bad once she has a change of setting.

There are a couple battle things that still really irk me, but I have the feeling they are supposed to--among the examples are anything that happens in Titania Capital, largely--and they can be dealt with without *too* much hassle by planning. Just for anyone else's benefit, though, don't go into Titania Capital without a large bag (or more) FULL of Napalms. Jesus.

So yeah. Definitely worth the money I spent on it to get it on the street release date.

[Alexander]

It's a good game, worth buying. My only complaints are that the gameplay lags from time to time and it can get a bit repetitive. The repetitiveness isn't really a problem since it's a side-scroller, but when you see something so beautiful once, and you see it again and again.... yeah it kind of looses it a bit.