Brad "DMV" Rice

Rev. Anthony

Everything you need to know about Odin Sphere can be summarized in two bullet points.

1. It is the most beautiful and immersive 2D video game ever made.
2. The "block" and "attack" commands are both controlled by the same button.

Odin Sphere exhibits an astounding depth of thought and attention to detail in every aspect of its aesthetic design   -- which makes it all the more astonishing that the game also possesses so many obvious gameplay and control flaws that almost cripple the entire experience.

First, the good: as my colleagues will no doubt confirm, this game is absolutely gorgeous. The 2D graphics may not seem to be anything new at first – an anime-style character is an anime-style character is an anime-style character – but the fluidity of the animation, the detail of the backgrounds, and the overall storybook feel of the game are enough to reduce any hard-bitten gamer into a state of childlike glee. The graphics are so good, in fact, that they manage to make the trite, derivative story compulsively watchable; thanks to decent voice acting and beautiful graphics, the narrative is far more interesting than it really has any right to be. I'm also a sucker for games with fractured timelines and multiple protagonists, and I'm pleased to say that Odin Sphere delivers on both of those fronts.

And for a while, things seem great: the combat is harder than usual and the controls are a little unresponsive, but it's no big deal – the game directly tells you not to rely only on your beat-'em-up skills, and to fiddle around with creating potions and using special moves to defeat your foes. For a couple of hours, Odin Sphere feels perfect. For the first time in my gaming life, I felt like I was honestly pressured to use everything at my disposal to defeat my enemies, instead of just falling into the typical RPG routine of stocking up on items and mindlessly hacking away.

But then the game gets cheap. And when it gets cheap, you begin to realize just how truly flawed the combat system is, and how horrendously it screws up the flow of the game.

As Dick points out, the player's inability to break an enemy's combo, the stamina bar that prohibits constant attack, and (most irritatingly) the fact that the block and attack commands are mapped to the same button put the player at a horrendous disadvantage. Coming across multiple enemies means that you have to try every combat tactic in the book -- which is cool, in theory -- but nearly every strategy one can use is either totally ineffective (blocking), or punishes the player in an unavoidable way. For example, attacking an enemy from the front with a powerful combo is a useless tactic, because though getting attacked by a baddie will stop your combo, attacking a baddie will have no effect in stopping his. He'll simply stand there for a few seconds and by the time your character is just about to deal the finishing blow of your combo, the enemy will abruptly hit you with an uber-poweful charged attack that there was no way to block or avoid. We take things like this for granted in modern brawler gameplay: if I manage to execute a successful combo on a bad guy, he shouldn't be able to immediately and unavoidably hit me with a powerful charged attack without at least pausing for a few seconds.

Again, these flaws are all but negligible when the game plays fair. But once you get attacked by a dozen enemies at once, all of whom have attacks that reduce you to 50% health with one hit, and when flying, difficult-to-hit elemental sprites freeze you for a good ten seconds (leaving you completely open to attack), you'll find yourself dying over and over and over again (subsequently forcing you to repeatedly sit through lengthy loading screens) thanks to the lackluster combat system.

And yet, sometimes, the game is simply magic. Every once in a while the clouds dissipate, the game starts playing fair, and the player begins to play the game the way it was meant to be played -- by using all different kinds of potions, weapons, and attacks in a beautifully drawn 2D landscape. Given the game's propensity to divide up everything into individually playable chapters sandwiched between story cutscenes, Odin is the perfect game to play in short bursts: play it for a little while, enjoy its beauty, then save and turn it off before the irritating combat mechanics make you want to put it down and never play it again. I'm not exaggerating when I say that, at moments, Odin is pure gaming bliss: it's just a shame that it's so goddamn infuriating the rest of the time.

Verdict: Rent it!
Score: 6.0

Aaron Linde

Lemme tell you, gang: it's really, really difficult to hold Odin Sphere responsible for its faults. It succeeds so well at some of its ambitions -- ambitions that, for the most part, have been altogether abandoned by the industry at large -- that you're almost willing to overlook its shortcomings as a form of reward for its efforts. For creating what is undoubtedly the most beautiful 2D game ever crafted, I want to shower Vanillaware in cash and virgins. If any game is set to revitalize the imaginitive visual style that Koji Igarashi, current producer of the Castlevania series, claims is much too costly to pursue on a console, Odin Sphere is it. In the face of such success, it's a shame that the rest of the game doesn't stack up quite as high as the awe-inspiring visuals.

My colleagues have already talked up many of my pros and cons, so let me dig a little bit deeper into Odin Sphere's most debated feature: the combat. 

Odin Sphere's complications are chiefly rooted in the combination of the various elements of gameplay that it seeks to incorporate. This isn't to say that these elements are implemented altogether poorly -- they just come up a little short. As Brad and Anthony have already mentioned, combat in Odin Sphere has a variety of faults which, originally, I had accepted as the sort of "flavor" of this particular brand of action RPG -- like the percentage charge in Secret of Mana or the ball-breaking difficulty of God Hand. I was getting creamed on a fairly regular basis, so I had to ask myself: is this a failing of design, or do I just suck? It's a little bit of both. 

Odin Sphere implicitly asks the player to abandon some of their expectations of the beat-'em-up genre by incorporating a few choice elements into the works -- namely, the heavy emphasis on item creation and use in combat and the POW bar, which Brad had mentioned earlier. As veterans of the brawler genre, our instincts would lead us into battle with both barrels blazing, slamming that attack button for all we're worth, hurling ourselves into the fray with reckless abandon. This strategy, while useful in brawlers like God Hand and The Red Star, won't get you far in Odin Sphere -- and the game doesn't give you any indication that your approach isn't just off, it's damn useless. It's a hard lesson, and one you'll have to learn on your own, if you're as intimate with the brawler genre as we are.

The revelation goes something like this: near the end of the game's first main storyline, Gwendolyn's saga, it finally occured to me that this isn't so much a brawler wrapped in an RPG; it's an RPG wrapped in a brawler. I slowed my onslaught tried to pay attention to the movements and tells of the enemy sprites -- anything to help me anticipate their attacks. I planned my assaults, worked in a divide-and-conquer strategy, and suddenly the combat became much less frustrating. Sure, the enemy could still bust up my combos with a well-timed strike, but with a bit of effort, I found that I could prevent them from ever getting an opportunity. 

Once you get the swing of things, Odin Sphere proves to be a spectacular game. But a game that expects you to conform so rigidly to a particular style of play just to succeed -- hell, just to avoid mind-numbing frustration -- is bound to lose points in anybody's book, especially mine. I like games that offer myriad paths to victory, multiple ways to play. There are several ways to play Odin Sphere, but only a few of them will keep you from breaking the game in half.  

At its heart, Odin Sphere is an action RPG that suffers from a crippling identity crisis. It aspires to be a complex, inventory-driven RPG while also shooting for the halcyon realm of quality beat-'em-up. In theory the combination of these elements sound quite tantalizing, and in practice -- well, it is. It just takes a little more time and effort to get engaged than you might originally suspect. Vanillaware had a particular brand of gamer in mind when they made this game -- should you submit to their expectations, Odin Sphere should prove an enjoyable and worthwhile experience.

Verdict: Rent it!
Score: 7.0

Destructoid Review Final Verdict

Final Score: 6.2