The Video Game Revue

Odin Sphere

With plenty of competition for my attention circling around, Odin Sphere still manages to steal time out of my busy schedule, and so far has gotten nearly eight hours of it. It's an excellent piece of work, but a very challenging RPG (then again, I did select "Normal" difficulty rather than "Easy") that requires a lot of careful attention to progress through.

Odin Sphere is extremely item-heavy, with item farming and crafting taking the spotlight as the single most important element of strategy required to both level your character and survive difficult levels. Experience points are rewarded for eating food, which also regenerates HP; some foods are actually low in HP restoration while being high in XP or vice-versa, which requires making trade-offs when deciding which items to pursue.

To give you an idea of the kind of flow involved in this game, imagine clearing enemies and collecting seeds. These seeds may be planted in the ground to grow fruit which yields some HP and XP, or they may be fed to a chick to mature it into a hen which can be slaughtered for meat that yields more HP and XP, or the egg that hatches the chick may actually be cooked along with vegetables in order to yield still more XP back at the town. Now imagine that all three of these strategies must be employed all at once to ensure that you level efficiently while still having access to HP regeneration during combat situations when you most need it, and you have a pretty accurate picture of what the strategies in Odin Sphere are like. There's also an alchemy system in the game which I won't bother to go into here, but suffice to say that it makes things yet more item-centric.

One of the serious flaws of this game is that I found the menu controls to be very disorienting at first. It's not often that I play a game where I actually need to stop and think about the controls in order to avoid making mistakes, so I've found Odin Sphere jarring in that respect. One major example is that the circle button is used to call up the item selection menu, yet selecting an item and pressing circle again actually dismisses the menu; the X button is what is used as "accept" in all menus while circle cancels (during combat, X jumps.) This has lead me to accidentally dismiss the item menu when I'm trying to use something, and worse yet, to accidentally use items that I wanted to save. Another example is that one typically wants to plant seeds in the ground (press the X button to use the seed), but in some situations, such as when feeding a chick, one wants to drop the seed instead (press down and X.) I recently made a blunder where I planted three seeds in the ground when I intended to drop them, which was a complete waste since such actions cannot be undone (also I didn't have enough phozon generation stuff with me to make use of the seeds anyway, and even if I had, those seeds were useless to me--which is why I was trying to feed them to the chick.)

I've also been disappointed with the gameplay, but it's worthwhile in its own way. What I was hoping for is a very responsive system such as the control scheme that one finds in Castlevania games, but Odin Sphere has a much more technical feel with the timing being much slower and methodical. This slow pace of this system is emphasized not only by the main character's sluggish movement, but by the stamina meter that cuts otherwise long chains of rapid attacks fairly short. Button-mashing in Odin Sphere is a surefire way to lose, so if you're not up for some challenging gameplay, I would steer clear (this ain't no Kingdom Hearts.)

The scope of the game seems quite large, since almost eight hours of playtime hasn't brought me anywhere near the half-way point from what I can tell. Unfortunately, this raises concerns that I won't have the endurance to actually finish Odin Sphere, but there is some hope in that the game ends up presenting the same storyline from the viewpoint of several different playable characters, which could make for some good plot twists and refreshing gameplay variations. I'm still far too early into the game to make a lasting judgment call, but while Odin Sphere isn't going to appeal to every RPG fan, it is definitely worthwhile.

posted by Parappa @ 12:40 AM