Sometimes there are rpgs that get release that the buying public knows about right away due to word of mouth or the right marketing campaign. And sometimes there are rpgs that get release but totally ignored by the buying public due to lack of awareness from little to no marketing campaign by the publishers. In the case of the latter, some rpgs end up totally being ignored by the rpg community and good rpgs can end up being missed out on. But there are times where an rpg getting minimum marketing from the publisher for good reasons even after being release onto the market. Back in summer of 2007, Odin Sphere was one such rpg that was release with little fanfare and not a strong marketing support from Atlus. After completing this game, you understand why this original 2D action rpg game was totally ignore by the fans and didn't have a strong marketing campaign backing it. A Persona game is what Odin Sphere will never be. It's not surprising that Odin Sphere was release and than pretty much abandon and forgotten when word of mouth start to spread out on the actual quality of this game. This was one of those rare cases where Atlus may have rushed releasing Odin Sphere without fully checking the overall gameplay problems. Maybe in the end, Atlus probably knew this game was a lost cause and decided to release it anyways and moved onto their next rpg game immediately after. Who is to say except that this game seem like a game that was rushed out onto the public. Well for you lucky gamers out there, I'm here to fully review what's wrong with this game. I took the pain of playing this game to spare future gamers of having to deal with the pain I had to suffer when playing this game.
STORY
"Your destiny and fate has only
begun."
"Is this it? My time has
come at last."
In the world of Erion, a war has broken out between the Fairy Kingdom of Ringford and the warrior nation of Ragnanival over ownership of an ancient relic known as the Cauldron that is said to possess great power. In the midst of this war, three wizards calling themselves, the Wisemen, decides to plan events that would bring about an ancient prophecy that would bring Armageddon to the world. The ancient prophecy foretold that the survivors of this Armageddon would become kings. However for the prophecy to take place, the last of the dragons, Leventhan, must be born, the Cauldron powers must be unleashed, and the coming of five warriors. Odin Sphere tells the tales of these five warriors and the roles they play in the prophecy and the coming of Armageddon.
The story presentation is very similar to what was feature in the Saga Frontier rpg series. You have a main story that is being told through the different view points of the 5 main characters in their own mini stories that intertwine together to form one main story. This isn't a new thing in rpg games where you have mini stories base around a main story. If done right or if told right, it can be pretty effective giving a clear picture of the main story in the end. But doing it right can be hard to get off as is the case here. As you play through each of the 5 character mini stories, you don't really get a sense of what the main story is about. The mini stories of these main characters are a bit confusing to follow because the mini stories themselves are too short, poorly written, and fragmented. Playing through the mini stories is like trying to piece together fragmented parts of a jigsaw story because each of the character mini stories have gaps in them purposely that can only be filled in by playing the other character's mini stories. It's sort of like reading through a mini book with someone highlighting out certain key events that will only be revealed later when you are playing a different character. And when key events get highlighted out, the flow of the mini stories don't gel together very well when you are actually playing through the mini stories. You tend to lose interest because things aren't revealed properly and told properly for you to understand. The mini stories themselves tend to lack any sort of emotion that gamers can connect to. All of the mini stories are base on a love story but it's been presented and played out so poorly that you can't even care about the love story between these main characters. The world maybe coming to an end in Odin Sphere but you don't really care enough about it to be interested in saving it. This is where the story fails the most. You feel nothing for the story when you finish the game, just no emotion toward it at all outside of being bored with it.
Score 6/10
CHARACTERS
"Are you a lead character too?"
Odin Sphere focuses on the adventures of 5 heroes in their own mini story within the main overall storyline. The 5 main characters are Gwendolyn, Cornelius, Mercedes, Oswald, and Velvet. Since each of the character stories are about them and their roles in the Prophecy of Erion , the character development for these characters are excellent. Despite having good character development, the cast of Odin Sphere is lacking overall. The problems with the cast of characters are on a couple of fronts. The first problem is that the individual character stories and the character themselves are boring and bland. This is actually the main problem. No matter how much a character has been development, they just come off very bland to gamers and we have a problem connecting with them and caring for them. We just can't seem to form an emotional bond toward these characters. The primary result for this is that the overall Odin Sphere story isn't really interesting at all. And since the overall Odin Sphere story is base on these mini character stories, this resulted in characters being very sub standard in terms of keeping us interested in them. The second problem with the cast of characters is that outside of these 5 main characters, there's really no supporting cast of characters for these main characters to interact with. You have the basic servants as supporting casts but no real major supporting characters that play a major role in the stories unless you count the villains as supporting characters. So for the entire story of Odin Sphere, it's pretty much just the 5 main heroes as characters for the entire story. This wouldn't be a problem if the main characters had charisma, are likable, and interesting. And without those key ingredients, the characters just fall flat even with good character development to them.
Score: 7/10
GRAPHICS
A beautiful 2D artwork world.
Visually speaking the game is nice to look at. And that's all you can really say about it. The graphics aren't ground breaking or anything and there are PS2 games out there with much better graphics that pushes the PS2 engine more. What you have here is a nice simple looking rpg game that utilizes a 2D graphic engine through artistic designs. The 2D artwork environment is drawn nicely with rich colors bringing this game to life. The character designs are drawn in a cutesy look but with rich detail to them. There's also a unique look to the character designs and monsters in the game that you don't see else where. The artistic designs are sort of like an anime designs with western influence in them. What stops the graphics being higher in terms of quality is that there's not much of variety to them. There's only a few background environments introduce in this game and they are being reused over and over in all of the 5 main character story adventure. By the time you are playing the third character, the game visual no longer impress you and they become sub standard because it's the same stage and the same visual background that you've seen over and over in the last 2 character adventure. And you have to play through the same artistic environment for all 5 character storyline. Nicely draw visual but not enough varieties to impress you overall.
Score: 7/10
MUSIC
"Hear that? It's the sound of our love."
The music is probably the only decent thing in this entire game. The game soundtrack contains over 40 different musical scores. Each musical score is composed very nicely from story scenes to battle scores to stage areas. The music blends in nicely during your gameplay and help keep the pace of the game going as best as it can. The only drawback is that the stories are short and forgettable that the music ends up being a waste because the stories don't help complement the music at all. You can tell base on the quality of the musical scores that the game developers spent a lot of time ensuring the importance of each musical score in each story scene and settings. Looking at the soundtrack long term, you won't remember much about the game's music thanks to the average story and less than stellar gameplay.
For voice acting, the game is 100% voice acting. There's not one dialogue where there's no voice acting at all. The great news is that the voice acting is top quality in both English and Japanese. This is one of those few games that you're actually happy to hear everyone talk. And having the option to listen to the original Japanese voices or the English voices is a great plus too.
Score: 7/10
GAMEPLAY
"Die, die, die, please."
Eating meals for some good exp.
Game Information
Genre: Action RPG
Publisher: ATLUS
Disc: 1 DVD Disc
Memory: 191 KB
Players: 1 Player Mode
Analog Control: Yes
Vibration Function: Yes
Rating: Teen
Release: May 2007
On the surface, Odin Sphere gameplay is pretty much a very basic action rpg game done in a side to side 2D environment. It's pretty much an average hack & slash game using an attack button and a jump button only. Of course there are unique features placed into the gameplay to make things interesting. Since this is a simple action rpg game, there's not much of a learning curve to the game outside of trying to control all the different fighters. That's where the real challenge of the gameplay comes from, trying to overcome the bad controls and the bad mechanics of the game. We'll talk about those at the latter part of this gameplay review. The game starts off with the Book of Gwendolyn. This represent Gwendolyn mini story that you are playing through. Once you complete Gwendolyn Book, another book will be unlocked and you can start on the next character. Each character book is base on 7 chapters with stages in each chapter. You'll have a story scene at the beginning of the chapter and at the end of a chapter. A chapter is base on a map with many stages on the map. You need to clear out certain stages in order to make it to the boss stage to clear out the map and end the chapter. If you have a map of the chapter stages, you can just skip as many of the stages as possible and make your way straight to the boss stage to end the chapter. However by doing so, you'll be skipping out on getting some rewards for clearing out all the stages. So it's more practical to clear out all the stages before you try for the boss stage. There are 3 types of stages. Boss stages are mark in purple, Sub Boss stages are mark in blue, and regular enemy stages have no colors to them. To clear out a stage you just need to defeat all the enemies on the stage until there aren't any enemies left standing. A treasure chest will drop that will offer you rewards such as items and money base on your rank for clearing out the stage. Your ranking for clearing out a stage will be base on your time completion and the amount of damage you take during the stage. Now the stage environment is a 2D side to side movement. At the lower corner you'll have a mini stage map that consists of a round circle and a dot on the circle. The dot or dots on the circle marks the exits of the stage toward the next stage. The exit of course will be lock or close off until you clear that stage by defeating all the enemies. Even though the environment is a 2D side to side movement from moving right or left only, you are actually moving in a circular loop as indicated on the circle map. For example from a starting point on the stage map, if you keep moving left and keep going left, eventually you come right back to where you started at. Hence the environment is a round circle but in a 2D side to side movement. Attack and jumping is just the very basic of pressing the corresponding button. However each fighter has their own unique style of attacking and jumping even though the button coordination is basic. Their own unique style of attacking and jumping is base on their attack combos, their unique attack skills, and the way they jump. Executing attack combos and jumping is the same with all the characters by pressing the attack buttons a few times consecutively or pressing the jump button a few times back to back. It's just the way their animation motion is done when executing those attacks and jumps that are different. And it takes a lot of getting used to as some characters are very hard to control. Gaining experience points, using magic, and leveling up is a bit different in this game. Killing enemies don't really gain you any experience at all. You gain experience to level up base on the food and fruits you eat. As you play the game and clear stages, a treasure chest will drop. Some treasure chest will contain seeds. By using the seeds and planting them, the seeds will grow into fruits that you can eat to gain experience points. You can also use seeds and fruit as ingredients at the Pooka Village Café to make meals that your characters can eat to gain experience points. As for using Pyspher Magic, you'll need Phozons. Phozons will be scattered as you kill enemies. By gathering them into your weapon, you are filling your Phozon gauge up so you can use Pyspher Magic. Gathering them also raises the level of your Pyspher Magic. You'll unlock new Pyspher Magic as your magic levels up. So leveling up magic and your character is done through different ways. Outside of this, the game is very simple and straight forward. You basically just go through each chapter and clear out the stages by eliminating all the enemies including bosses. Once done move onto the next chapter until you complete the Character Book. When you finish a character story book, you move onto the next character and redo the whole process again. Completing all 5 character story books and the final story book will result in over 40 hours of gameplay time. A simple action rpg game like Odin Sphere can still have some key features that are unique. So let's review those features.
Special Skills: Each fighter have there own 2 special skills or moves that are unique only to them. It can be a defending move, a jumping move, or an attacking move. Overall the special skills aren't too useful in this game and you don't really use them that much. Some skills can be super useful but they do consume a lot out of your Power Gauge that it's not worth using the special skills. Psypher Magic: Your fighters have at least 5 Psypher Magic with 1 Psypher Magic that is unique only to them. The requirement to use Psypher Magic is filling up your Psypher Gauge. Some Psypher Magic requires your Psypher Gauge to be at a certain level. You can fill up your Psypher Gauge by absorbing Phozons in the air. Power Gauge: Each character has a Power Gauge that track the usage of their actions by attacking or using a Special Skill. As long as a character has enough power in the Power Gauge, he or she can continue attacking. Once the Power Gauge reaches zero, the character will temporary be stun for a few seconds. The Power Gauge will automatically refill up after a few seconds of being stun or by absorbing some Phozons. You actually have to be careful when doing attacks because you don't want to run out of Power and be temporary stun in this fast pace action rpg game. This is probably one of the annoying features in this game that actually hurt the flow of the gameplay because you really can't get into a rhythm going on an offensive because each time you're in a flow of taking the offensive, you have to back off right away or else you'll be stun and get kill while being stunned. Phozons: Phozons are magical energy that exist in the world of Erion. They power your Psypher Magic and increase the strength of your weapon. Plants also need to absorb Phozons in order to grow fruits. Phozons are released from defeated enemies, from alchemy mix, and from plants. Chains: Landing continuous hits will result in creating chain attacks. The purpose of creating a long chain of attacks is that your critical hit rate increases thus you end up doing bigger damage to enemies and the chance of an enemy dropping an item also increases with higher chains. Status Ailments: Normally status ailments wouldn't be a key feature but for Odin Sphere, status ailments play a major role in effecting the flow of the gameplay and the enjoyment of the gameplay in a very negative way. There are 6 types of status ailments and they are Dizzy, Freeze, Frog, Poison, Flame, and Stun (Out of Power). Stun, Dizzy, and Freeze are the 3 status ailments that will annoy you the most in this game to the point of total frustration. When you get hit with one of those 3 status ailments, you will temporary be out of commission for a few seconds. In a fast pace action rpg game where swarm of enemies are coming at you from every direction, a few seconds can last a life time. Add into the fact that all status ailments can gain higher in level from a level 1 to a level 3 status ailment. The higher the level the longer the status will last. Status ailment gain in level base on the fact that if you are already inflicted with that status ailment and get hit again with the same status ailment it doubles up and go up in level to the maximum of tripling up to level 3. An example of this is when you get hit with being in frozen status by being Freeze and while you are Freeze you get Freeze again and again. This can be so annoying because each time you get hit with Freeze, the state of frozen last longer and longer. And during all this time, all you can do is helplessly watch your fighter get beaten down and killed off while you can't do anything about it. Or as soon as you finally get out of being Dizzy, you get hit with being Dizzy immediately again even without having a chance to move because while you are out of commission for a few seconds the enemies have closed around you to the point where there's no chance of you moving without being hit with another status ailments. It's just super annoying that it makes the game not fun at all. Planting/Harvesting: The game relies on eating food and fruits to gain
experience points. You can grow food and fruits through the usage of plantings
seeds on each stage. You can buy seeds or gain them from treasure chest after
clearing a stage. In order for a seed to grow into a full adult plant so it can
be harvested, they will need a certain amount of Phozons. Phozons will automatically
be drawn into a planted seed in the area if there are Phozons in the air. Alchemy: Various different types of potions can be made through the Alchemy system. This Alchemy system is pretty simple and easy to do. All you really need is two ingredients, a Material and a Mandragora. There are 5 different types of Mandragoras. By combining a type of Mandragora with a set number of Materials, you will produce a potion. Before you can create a potion, you will first need to have the alchemy recipe for it. You can gain these from treasure chest after clearing a stage.
Recipes: Meal recipes can be gain from treasure chest after
clearing a stage. Once you have a recipe, the meal will become available for purchase
back at the Pooka Village Café. Eating a full meal at the Café will give you a
much higher experience point boost than just from eating food and fruits. Of course
in order for the meal to be made, you still need to have the ingredients and money
to purchase the meal.
It's hard to look for a bright spot in the gameplay as every time there's a chance that you might get into a flow and start to have fun with the game, the game's bad mechanics just comes back and slap you down with frustrations after frustrations. You'll find yourself cursing a lot at the tv screen due to the bad gameplay. The concept of the gameplay isn't bad, it's the horrible execution and game mechanics that kills the enjoyment of the gameplay. There are just too many horrible elements that take away any fun you have with the game, whether it's the horrible lag, bad controls of your fighters, annoying status effects, the lack of money, or the lack of inventory space, and lack of magic usage. Anyone who played this game will face all of the problems that I have listed above. The game is extremely difficult because of the problems I listed. Let's start at the beginning. This is a simple basic 2D action rpg game done in a side to side environment. It's actually quite a fast pace action rpg game that will have you hacking and slashing at a large number of enemies coming from you at all directions. Each of the 5 main characters has their own separate style of fighting and jumping technique done in the same basic control of just hitting the jump and attack buttons. The problems is that since each of these fighters fight & jump in their own unique style, doing a simple attack and jump for each character can be very frustrating because of their own unique style. It makes controlling some of these characters very frustrating because they respond to the attack & jump button differently from other characters. You'll find that on some characters you have no problem controlling while on other characters doing a simply jump and attack becomes extremely difficult. And in a fast pace gameplay, you want to be able to control a fighter smoothly with ease. You won't get that kind of ease in this gameplay here. It's not the enemies that will get you kill in this game, it's the bad controls and the bad response of your fighters that will kill you. You be screaming at the tv shouting why is he/she jumping like that and why is he/she attacking like that. The bad controls are just totally annoying and frustrating. And if the bad controls doesn't get you killed, than the major game lag will get you killed. It's hard to imagine that you can get game lag in a none online rpg game but you do here. On the simple 1 star to 3 star stage areas, the game lag isn't really bad. But when you are on a 3 to 5 star areas where you are facing down tons of enemies coming at you, the game lag hits you like a major brick. Even boss fights have major game lag in them. It's like fighting in slow motion or quicksand where your fighters are so slow to reacting to your controls that you always end up getting killed because of the slow down from the lag. The game lag is pretty much the death killer on some of the harder stages and boss fights. If the bad controls don't get you killed so many times, it's the bad lag that will get you killed because your fighter is stuck in a slow motion time capsule while everything around him/her is moving at normal space that he/she is like a sitting target due to the slow down of the game lag. Nearly 60% of my deaths came from the stupid game lag. Fights that should have been easy became extremely difficult because of the game lag. Another 30% of my death comes from the annoying status effects of the gameplay. If the bad controls and game lag doesn't stop any momentum you have going for you during your fights, the status effect will. Nothing is more frustrating than finally getting into a groove and having fun with fights and than bam, your fighter get hit with being stun for a few seconds because he/she is out of POW, or get hit with being Dizzy, Frozen, and Frog for a limited amount of time by an enemy. What's really frustrating is that on the stages with 3 or more stars, being out of commissions for a few seconds will be costly as the enemies can just gang up and double up on the status effect level to point where you can only sit and watch your fighter getting killed off being stuck in a status effect for a long minute or more. That is frustratingly annoying as hell.
The game offers 3 different mode settings. Easy, Normal, and Difficult but that's kind of misleading because due to the poor controls & game lag. I would probably say that Easy mode is considered Normal and Normal is considered Difficult. You'll also quickly notice early on in this game that money is extremely hard to come by. In order for you to expand the number of bags you can hold for inventory space or upgrading your accessory or even buying healing items and food, you need money and lots of money. Unfortunately for you, money is something you need to scrape by in this game. You'll constantly be broke in this game for most of the time. Either everything is too expensive or there just isn't an easy way to gain money in this game. And with lack of money comes the lack of inventory space, lack of healing items, and lack of proper accessories that make the game more difficult and frustrating than it should be. If the lack of money doesn't frustrate the hell out of you, the lack of being able to equip more than 1 accessory does. The game offers quite a lot of different accessories that your fighters can equip and use but limiting your fighters to being able to equip only 1 accessory destroys the fun of using & trying out different accessories. Heck it pretty much made having so many different accessories pointless in the game. It's not like you have the money to buy different accessories anyways and it's not like you have the inventory space to carry a bunch of different accessories at once too, which leads us to the inventory space problem. You'll quickly notice right away as you play the game that inventory space becomes a major problem that slow down the progress of your game. The game mechanics require you to grow your own food and alchemize your own items. The problem here is that in order for you to do that properly, you need to have enough inventory space to carry those ingredients and seeds around. And inventory space for doing all those things gets dried up pretty quickly. You can expand your inventory space to a maximum of 6 large bags with 8 free space in each bags but even then 48 spaces isn't enough for you. And it's not like you can upgrade your inventory space to 48 spaces easily due to money problem. It seems like the entire gameplay is to limit your gameplay as much as possible to take out any possible enjoyment you may have. Limit your money, limit your inventory, limit your accessories, and limit your magic usage. This brings us to the magic problem. Magic is always a strong key element in an rpg game. But for Odin Sphere, it seem like they don't really want us to use magic much but just threw magic into the game for the sake of having magic in the game. Each character has about 5 different types of Psypher Magic to use. And out of the 5 Psypher Magic, I say only about 2 of them are really useful that you really don't end up relying a lot on Pyspher Magic in the game. The gameplay can also get repetitive quickly. Even though you have 5 mini adventures to play through from each of the 5 main characters. It's pretty much the same stages and same bosses for each character adventure. The only difference is the order that you play the stages and boss fights.
By the end of it all, you just glad you finished with the gameplay and don't ever want to go back to playing the game ever again. Since we talk a lot of the negatives of the gameplay, I like to leave things off with a bit of a positive note. I do like the usage of growing seeds and eating food to gain exp. That is a very unique way of leveling up. I also like the alchemy feature in the game which can be fun. I hear that they fix the lag problem in the European PAL version of the game, although it really doesn't help North American gamers. The game can be fun to play if you are able to get into the flow of things but too bad most of the game mechanics tend to interrupt that flow. In the end this is just a very annoying and frustrating gameplay experience. One I like to forget about for a long time.
Score: 5/10
EXTRAS/REPLAY
Wheel of Fate Book unlocked?
In terms of in-game extras such as side quests or extra boss fights or dungeons, Odin Sphere offers nothing. Truly sad because in this day and age, an rpg must offer at least some good decent extra gameplay value. The only thing that Odin Sphere offers in terms of extra is an extra book chapter called the Wheel of Fate. The Wheel of Fate Book doesn't offer any extra stage to explore. It's just the story scene of the good ending to the game and a minor credit roll scene called Curtain Call, nothing big or worth a bother since getting the good game ending is almost a basic requirement to finishing the game properly.
As for the replay ability to the game, there are 2 multiple endings, a good and bad ending as well as a new difficulty mode setting called Heroic. You don't really need to replay the entire game again to unlock and view both the good and bad ending, just redo the book chapter called Armageddon. If you manage to collect all of the game recipes, texts, and alchemy scrolls, Heroic difficulty mode gets unlock. The game is already frustratingly difficult in normal mode, I don't know who would want to try this game in a difficulty setting that is even more difficult than Difficult mode. Heck to be honest I don't even know who would want to replay this game again. There's just no extras & replay value in this game at all.
Score: 3/10
For final thoughts, I have to say that it's been a very long time since I played a game where I didn't have fun. Odin Sphere truly tests a gamer's patience and frustration level to the max. Truth be told I think most none core rpg gamers would probably have given up on the game after a few hours of playing it. I can only realistically see true die hard core rpg players continuing to play this game to the end. I'm not sure what happen here when it comes to the final product on Odin Sphere. Where were all the game testers? Did not one single game tester mention how incredibly laggy the game was that it interfere with the gameplay and controls? Did no one mention how hard it was to control some of these heroes and their movements in this side to side environment? No game tester bothered to mention how difficult the game is even in normal mode? You really don't understand what happened here. Either the game testers were all incompetent or Atlus decided to ignore all the problems and just release the game anyways with all its flaws. I'm leaning toward the latter. The end result is that Odin Sphere could have been something good but instead it became an rpg game that isn't worth your time and money. You have more fun going to the dentist than playing Odin Sphere.
