PixlBit

Hello again, everyone.  My Summer semester is finally over, so no more getting home at 10:30 p.m. and waking up at 5:45 a.m.  Yes, for the past four weeks, my work day has been that long.  But it's over now, and I hope I have more time to post some of my reviews/thoughts.  No pictures this time, so it might be a slog.  When I have more time, I'll work on some more complete blog posts.  Thanks for hanging in there!

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I’ve beaten Odin Sphere.  By beaten, I mean I’ve taken it as far as I’m willing to go.  The boredom has gotten the better of me.  Odin Sphere can be a boring game.  It’s a gorgeous game, but the tedium never abated.  And since the tedium began about ten hours in, that’s a lot of tedium to endure to look at beautiful, picturesque visuals.  But a little more on those visuals- a lot has been said of George Kamitani’s artwork, and most of it is true.  Some of the best, most unique character design I’ve seen in a game.  When I first popped in the disk a few weeks ago, I remember being taken aback, wondering based solely on the graphics why I hadn’t forced myself to play this game when it was first released.  It is a testament to how impressed I am with said artwork that I was able to clearly remember Kamitani’s last name, despite not having played the game in over a week, and the easy-to-mistake nature of the alternating vowels and consonants.   

Here’s the thing about Atlus games for me, and I don’t know, maybe everyone else feels the same way and I just haven’t read about it.  They are often pretty good.  Like solid seven out of tens.  I rarely feel like I’ve been ripped off having paid whatever I paid for one of their games.  And here’s the but- but I also never love any of their games.  I’m thinking back….. thinking…..thinking, and the last one I really loved was Radiant Historia.  A lot of people skipped that one, or weren’t too impressed in general, but I really took to it.  Probably because of all the time travel, that’ll usually do it for me.  That was another game that was pretty repetitive- there weren’t too many unique locations, and you ended up leading different versions of your party through the same five or six dungeons.  Maybe I should’ve been up in arms about Radiant Historia, but the hook was enough to keep my mouth shut.

I’m sure if I did even the slightest bit of research, I’d find that all of these Atlus games are made on a budget, and that we are lucky they were able to squeeze as much out of the money they had.  I haven’t done any such research, but most of what I’ve read about them corroborates this line of thinking- that Atlus is not in the business of releasing grade-A blockbuster video games; they are content to work on niche titles that are popular among a very vocal subgroup of gamers who are willing to part with the money to ensure that such titles keep trickling in.  So I, for one, always know what to expect when I play an Atlus title 80% of an awesome game.

Now I know that is sacrilege to some.  I should thank my lucky stars that Atlus sees fit to translate and release dozens of titles that wouldn’t see the light of day behind the shadow of Squenix’s bloated “masterpieces” and western RPGs like Mass Effect and Skyrim.  And I am thankful, really I am.  But I am usually left slightly disappointed.  Take the Persona games, for example.  Nearly every review I read about Personas 3 and 4 touted them as Final Fantasy killers and the best RPGs of their generation.  Why anyone would want to kill Final Fantasy is beyond me, as I liken the series to a septuagenarian wearing sunglasses and a backwards hat in an ill-advised attempt to look cool.  But if you are going to compete with the biggest franchises out there, you are probably going to need the budget to keep things fresh throughout.   I liked Persona 3, and have yet to play 4.  The problem with the former came around thirty to forty hours in, when I finally got tired of doing the exact same thing over and over and over again.  There was nothing to shake up the formula- it was run to the same four or five places to socialize, and then spend the night in a randomly generated, and thus visually indistinct, dungeon.  I wonder if an increased budget would have given the designers lease to create more numerous and varied environments, thus ensuring that I’d remain interested in what surprises might be in store as I moved forward. 

Atlus games are often bursting at the seams with creativity, which is why, I assume, fans are so rabid and brook no argument about their favorite games.  I honestly appreciate a lot of what they do, but I almost always hit a limit in which I can no longer tolerate the repetition for even a second longer.  As I stated, that usually occurs around the forty hour mark, and so maybe that should be their modus operandi- create a forty hour experience that doesn’t wear out its welcome.  Of course these complaints are only an attempt to qualify why I didn’t beat Odin Sphere- I obviously would rather live in a world where such games existed on a shoestring budget rather than not at all.  Atlus games are the scrappy baseball player who hustles and hits in the “clutch”, but can’t seem to sustain success over the course of a full season.

Odin Sphere is precisely that- a game that is awe-inspiring for five hours, enjoyable for another twenty, and then nigh unbearable until the end.  I’ve stated this before, but I’ll state it again- there are seven different dungeons, each containing around a dozen identical rooms, and you will travel through them at least four or five times each.  The enemies in these dungeons never change, and the rooms are interchangeable.  If you’ve gone through the snowy mountain once, you certainly don’t need to do it another four times.  The interludes between chapters (each of the five playable characters must traverse six or seven chapters) are brief and pointless, serving as little more than a rest-stop in which you can purchase items and accessories, and unburden yourself of myriad worthless objects you picked up last chapter.

And that’s the other Odin Sphere irritant- the item management system.  You are (intentionally?) given VERY limited inventory space, perhaps twelve to fifteen slots in which to hold all manner of things you find in those dungeons.  There are seeds and fruits galore, truly a wide assortment of various pulpy red things that you can ingest to raise various health bars and parameters.  There are potions, and empty vials that you must build up to create better potions.  There are other food items- bones and hamhocks and vines and stems that you can either eat or throw at enemies.  Each of the dozen rooms in a given dungeon can yield up to six or seven items that will clutter your inventory to the point of frustration.  You might think that the game intends for you to “eat as soon as you get”, but timing is everything when it comes to consuming these things- you have a food level that increases as the game progresses and grants the character a much-needed health refill that can turn the tide of an otherwise unwinnable battle.  So you are forced to sock the fucking things away for later use, and hope to god that you have enough space to unload a bunch of the more worthless crap to an in-dungeon merchant.  You won’t be pointlessly dropping many of these items, as money in Odin Sphere is scarce.

The story is decent, which by game standards makes it a minor masterpiece.  Something something about Norse mythology that involves Odin and Belial and other names that you’ve seen appear in past Final Fantasy games.  There’s a cauldron that grants gasp ultimate power and a sexy sorceress named Velvet who wears next to nothing except fuck-me stockings.  A lot of dragons, a jealous magician and murderous king who comes back from the dead to extract vengeance on a world that caused him to kill his own daughter.  You might not understand any of it as you play, but you’ll feel the weight of the characters and dialogue and likely get sucked in enough to idly wonder how it will all end.  Overall, it’s a plus.

And I suppose I ought to mention that the game attempts to mix it up slightly at the end.  And I mean slightly.  After you’ve played through as the five main characters, the endgame opens up, wherein you choose which of the heroes you’d like to use in order to tackle five new bosses.  The new bosses are a blessed change of pace after spending thirty hours fighting the same fucking creatures over and over and over again, but by then you might not give enough of a shit to finish.  I didn’t, and a Youtube playthrough filled in the holes in the story. 

The final issue now, and the final reason you might want to pass on Odin Sphere- the slowdown.  There isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said…..  any time the screen fills up, you will be looking at two-frame-per-second slowdown.  Your character will crawl across the screen at an unbearable rate, and you will not be able to accurately time your attacks.  You end up jamming the button in the hope that the animation will catch up with your inputs.  Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, but it won’t really make a difference, as you won’t really feel like you were the one defeating the gigantic bosses.  It’s one of those things that you have to believe could’ve been fixed if the playtesters had spoken up before release.  Can anyone tell me if this has been fixed for the Playstation Network rerelease?  If so, then that is the version that you want to play.

Like many Atlus games, I was happy to dip a toe in the water of Odin Sphere, but loathe to spend the entire day swimming.  It looks great, but suffers from the typical repetitiveness that I feel plagues many of the company’s games.  I absolutely think it is worth a look, but it’s hard to say to a prospective gamer- “why don’t you play about twenty hours of it to get a feel for it, then pass it off to Youtube, where you won’t have to frustrate yourself any longer…..”  Is that Nintendo Seal of Quality that one wants when determining whether or not to purchase a game?  It’s good.  91^st on my list of all-time favorite RPGs.  That’s higher than a lot of games, but it’s also lower than a lot of games.

OVERALL RATING: (30/40) Different but Same