I just recently started playing a little game called Odin Sphere. Sad to say, I’ve become addicted. At the time that I started writing this post, I had already beaten the first two characters in the game playing a total of 15-16 hours. The funny thing is, I’ve only been playing it since late Saturday night (EST.) That, and I have work until 4 pm. I whole lot of my free time this week has been put into this game; that’s just how much I love it.

The way the game is set up, it’s almost like a play with each individual character starring their own little stories. Even the game refers to its scenes as ‘acts.’ Therefore, I decided to treat each character plot as its own play and give them separate impression posts. Below, you will find the links to each post with the title of their stories. There are some general impressions after the jump.

Story Impressions:
“Valkyrie”
“The Pooka Prince”
“Fairy Land”
“The Black Sword”
“Fate”

Regrettably, good art in videogames can sometimes get gamers to buy games whose art does not quite make up for their below average gameplay. I fall victim to this a lot: see Ar Tonelico. Odin Sphere is not one of its games. Yes, its art is very beautiful, but it doesn’t need to make up for anything. The whole game is stellar. There’s hardly any fault to be found in it.

There is one big fault, however, that may even force some people to hate is the boss battles. No, not the fact that they seem impossibly hard at times, but more because of the fact that there are like 8 or 9 of them. That may not seem so bad, until you think about how many characters there are. If you do the math, you’ll find that something just doesn’t make sense. There aren’t enough bosses to go around, unless the characters decide to share.

And that is what the developers decided to do. There is no problem with it in my opinion, though. Some people may think that it was because they were lazy, but I refuse to believe it. It seems to me that it was a design choice, since there is an over-arching story to the game dealing with the cauldron. Therefore, all of the characters would have to be tied together somehow.

You can really expect no less from a game like Odin Sphere. It truly is a labor of love. The people at Vanillaware have been practically working on it for 10 years, ever since the release of Princess Crown. It is easy to tell that each character was very well thought it. Each little dittle was woven into the storytelling. You know how lights focus on a character giving a monologue in a play, that happens in Odin Sphere as well. Everything is there besides the wild amount of irony that floats in Shakespearean plays.

As mentioned above, the art is friggin beautiful. The animation for it is perfect as well. The characters move a bit differently than in most games. Instead of the artists drawing new frames each time a character moves, they only draw individual movement of the limbs and other body parts. This may sound ugly, but it works very well in practice. The movements seem so natural.

As a side note, my favorite character design is Velvet so far. I’m sure you guys can tell why

One last note: this game is hard, very hard. Don’t expect to breeze through this like other non Megami Tensei JRPs.