No doubt you've heard plenty about Odin Sphere in the last week, with the gamut of reviews ranging anywhere from ungodly terrible to 100% perfection. As Gamasutra points out, Odin Sphere has proved to be something of an anomaly in gaming review circles. It's a smattering of gameplay from several traditions of the industry's history and, most notably, one of the few sprite-based 2D side-scrollers we're bound to see for a long, long time. So how does this artistic heavyweight stack up for your Destructoid editors? Behold and tremble, dear readers, it's the Destructoid Review!
Before we get started, I got some notes for all y'all. We're changing a few things in our review routine, the most notable of which is our schedule: with any luck, you can look forward to a review a week from Destructoid's dedicated review crew, a crack team of bitter, curmudgeonly gamers hellbent on forcing their tastes and opinions upon you. At present, the squad includes the good Rev. Anthony, DMV, your favorite Linde, Chad Concelmo and Nick Brutal.
Additionally, we've changed up our rating system just a smidge. On top of the standard score to be delivered by each individual editor, we're also offering up our opinions on a buy it/rent it/forget it scale, to give you a better idea as to whether or not a game is worth taking the plunge, or if it merits a little caution -- the kind of notion that might get lost in a simple 1-10 score. We'll also be offering final Destructoid review scores at the end of each write-up, a figure averaged from the editors' individual scores, topped off with some shiny new graphics courtesy of art hero Hushgush.
All that being said, hit the jump and dive into our inaugural trainwreck: Atlus' Odin Sphere!
Brad "DMV" Rice
No one is going to disagree that this game is beautiful -- the way that the characters moved had me spellbound for quite a while, and it still affects me even now when I boot up the game. From that point on, though, it's a series of highs and lows that slowly declines as I went through the game.
Combat was interesting to try out in the tutorial, as the game knew that it was, well, a tutorial. After that, though, it just leaves you on your own to figure out how to beat the enemies. Sometimes it's fairly obvious, like with the first boss -- but it's still challenging and fun. Then, there are times when you just have no freakin' clue how to do it and have to go through about two dozen times of trial and error just to beat the boss.
Now, why is this? It's because the game is a brawler with RPG elements, except it doesn't know how to be a brawler. There are three fundamental areas in which it fails. First, attack and block are the same button. It makes it nearly impossible to go through a battle relatively unscathed unless you use a combination of hit and run and magic, or are just an incredibly lucky bastard. Second, enemies can attack through your combos, and really take a huge chunk off your HP -- which, of course, you can't block. Third, there's a "POW" meter, which will drain as you attack. If you attack too much, then you sit there, stunned, until it fills up again. This will drain way too easily if there's a large horde of enemies attacking (and there usually is), so it makes it really hard to fight them effectively.
The game strings you along in really difficult situations, leaving you to figure out how it wants you to beat a boss. Trial and error usually win out, which is immensely frustrating. The ability to go back to a level once you've beaten it, though, is invaluable, because it's a safe-ground to experiment with making potions and trying out different combat tactics.
The story, once I got past just staring at the characters, was pretty bland. To me, it seems like there was a horrible night of sweaty, drunken, and utterly forgettable sex between Norse mythology and utterly generic (and possibly hentai) anime. To me, it's been disappointing so far. Yet, one thing has set me off on a warpath -- the "true ending." Apparently, to get it, you have to beat every battle with an 'S' ranking on hard, make and eat every food, as well as several other requirements. This is utter bullsh*t. I can't stand the idea of multiple endings where I have to jump through hoops left and right to get it. Silent Hill 2 was fine with its multiple endings, but Odin Sphere has gone into the "I want to stab someone" realm of multiple endings.
While the game is utterly beautiful, it falls short on gameplay functionality with issues on how the combat system works. If you have the patience to figure out how the game wants you to fight a boss, then you'll enjoy it later on once you've got a hang of everything. A mediocre story and ridiculous requirements for multiple endings hurt the game a lot, though. If Vanillaware can patch up the combat system, and lean more heavily in either an RPG or a brawler direction, I won't hesistate to pick up Odin Sphere 2 to try.
Verdict: Rent it!
Score: 5.5
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
Contest:
2:14 PM on 05.26.2007
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Gamers these days are so used to having everything handed to them on a platter that when something remotely difficult comes up, or something that is mildly inconveniencing, they whine and bitch and moan as if they deserve to just get tossed everything.
If you guys can't handle Odin Sphere, maybe you should go back to easy mode. I started the game on Hard and I haven't even died yet. I've come close, but all it takes is a tiny bit of intelligence to actually realize what you're supposed to do.
You do NOT rush in and take on massive groups at a time, you do NOT swing wildly. You watch a little, learn a boss' pattern, and exploit it after you realize what's going on. I have progressed very quickly after realizing the weak points and times to attack for several bosses, and I am quite a good ways into the game myself.
As for the POW issues, it's called stamina, guys. What kind of person can realistically attack non-stop? You want that, go play Dynasty Warriors, it might be mindless enough for you to enjoy it.
But Odin Sphere is a thinking game, a tactical brawler. If you can't understand that, then certainly don't review it and call it out on supposed "faults."
Now, admittedly, the requirements for the best ending are ludicrous, but saying the story is poor? Hardly.
Immediately.
We get it! Are we still talking about it 3 months later?
Bah humbug!
That being said ... good write-up guys. If ever get some free time, I plan on checking Odin Sphere out, despite its faults.
D-Toid: Zelda:TP = Almost shovelware
"Independent" doesn't mean "reactionary."
That you so mightily swung these talking points in our face despite my already voicing most of 'em made me think that you didn't read what I wrote. Just sayin', that's all.
Granted I think Atlus could have cleaned up the controls and other little aspects of the game to give it a wider audience.
It's a niche game, it's not meant for everyone.
If nothing else people should rent this game just to experience it and then decide if you're able to enjoy it.
@ Kia: Disagreeing slightly is one thing, but to say that they must suck at brawlers, and that it only takes a little bit of intelligence to not die seems to be asking for confrontation.
On to other matters: I noticed that all of the reviews referenced those of the other authors, and that in the end everyone had very similar things to say. Are you working on these together, and if so, do you think that may be influencing your opinion at all? Just a thought.
As far as influencing the opinions of eachother, though, I'd like to think not. Hell, I've been trying to make Anthony like me for months -- I've tried chocolates, roses, and clever greeting cards with glitter sprinkled inside. No go. At this point it's probably safe to say that coloring my review of a game to match his perspective probably wouldn't win me any points, either.
But a boy can dream, right? * ~ le sigh ~ *
Clearly, this was me. I feel, while playing it, right down to the sheer challenge of some situations the game presents me with, that some fairy came in the night and plucked my action RPG dreams out of my head, and gave them form.
It's a shame the game isn't for everyone, but that's okay. I'll settle for it just being for me.
Maybe.
And in response to everyone else:
It's important to note that, since Destructoid grades much harder than other game sites, these are good scores. All of us agreed that the game was above average -- none of us outright disliked it.
I'm afraid I'll be hearing about the 4.0 Zelda review until the end of time, but the point is this -- when we review something that is above five, that is a good, above-average game. Below 5 is a subpar game. A 4-rated game is somewhat subaverage. Sooner or later, you guys are gonna have to realize that we simply don't use the number system the way others do: given this new review team and system, we're going to use the ENTIRE 1-10 scale and not just use 6-10 like most sites do.
The review system is a-changin. We're using 1-10 in the way it oughtta be used. Adjust your expectations accordingly.
Everyone needs to STFUAJPG.
This is not how it should be.
People have said that the slowdown is so bad it makes the game next to unplayable.
I can handle crazy difficulty, but if the game starts slowing down then that is what would really piss me off.
I like how destructoid has their editors answer the commentors questions or tripes about the reviews, also how the get burned for giving strict reviews.
But then most people complain that other reviewers give to much slack to their article, and it gives mixed feelings about the game.
No mixed feelings here though, right? If you're into that genre buy it, if not rent it. I'll rent it, but I lol @ Kia's "Wow you guys must suck @ brawlers comment". Good read when you're bored on a Saturday.
Mind, these are all technical terms.
A handful of other battles get pretty sticky in terms of slowdown, but they're in the minority. When it happens, though, you'll definitely notice.
Edit button!
also this is an atlus game, most atlus published games only get a single production run and so once they are gone they are usually gone for good. i buy atlus published games just for the investment of it because most of them even used are eventually worth the full retail price or more. so don't expect to find this in a bargain bin or at a reduced price. it came out at $40 and the game is supposed to take over 40 hours to beat, seems like a good deal right now to me, in fact i just got it today.
It a 2D game, published by Atlus, late in the PS2's life cycle. It will more likely end up costing $120 on ebay five years from now, not $10 in the bargin bin.
But seriously, Zelda doesn't deserve a 4. =P
1 if you ever played it
2 if you didn't
Seriously. I made a weapon that was apparently more effective against a certain type of monster than the one I forged it from, but it did less damage to anything than the weapon that came before it. That's when I gave up.
I guess I should clarify that I don't *really* want to permaban you. I was just using hyperbole to express my discontent. It's not really that my commnents were directed at you - you were just the straw that broke the camel's back.
I do tend to react negatively to the mention of the score because it shifts the focus from actually reading the article.
*huggles*
I totally agree with you about Vagrant Story. It's ambitious as hell, but the game mechanics are just too much.
i have missed out on some of there games because of this kind of thing, and because of the high price of them used i just never spring for them and miss out on the game completely. glad i found a copy of this one, plus its a great game and it looks beautiful, who says 2d is dead.
I love you Kia, I was about to post exactly what you posted each time you posted, i'm glad someone knows what their talking about here.
Oh well, at least Nex is still round.
And here's why.
It doesn't technically have a name, but for all intents and purposes, I'm going to call it the jump smash. It's a combat ability that most all of the bosses and minibosses in the game possess. It is a move where the enemy jumps quickly into the air, disappearing offscreen, and after half a second comes plummeting to the ground, usually on top of the player, taking away at least 1/5 of the player's damage.
Now, this may not seem so bad -- 1/5 isn't much, right? Surely you can block it, or avoid it, or keep on the offensive so the baddie has no chance to use the attack, right?
Well, no. You can't do any of those things. You can't block because if you've just attacked, it takes a good second and a half for the game to realize that you are holding the square button and not just pressing it, by which time the enemy has already completed the attack. You can't keep on the offensive because not only do your attacks not interrupt enemy combos (though, as mentioned before, their attacks interrupt yours), but it only takes about two complete seconds for the baddie to charge the jump smash attack and then execute it. Before you have a chance to attack the enemy, the enemy has already finished the attack. You can't dodge the jump smash because if you were attacking before the baddie began his attack animation, then you have to wait for the attack to finish, and then try to move somewhere -- yet such attempts remain fruitless, because after jumping offscreen, the baddie can land and smash anywhere he pleases within a certain proximity of where he first started the attack.
The absolute ONLY way to not get hit by this attack is to either run up to the enemy, attack him once, and run away. There's no way whatsoever to tell when the enemy will use this attack and there's no way to avoid it after you've hit him more than twice -- as a result, you are forced to play like a complete pansy, running and hitting and running and hitting, or simply rely on luck, dealing out multiple combos whilst fervently praying that the enemy doesn't randomly decide to use the jumpsmash.
Now, is that "tactical?" It's one thing to make a boss difficult, and force you to memorize his patterns. It's quite another to actively punish the player for even attempting to attack an enemy -- the jumpsmash takes away about 1/5 of your health, but it's not too much to ask for an attack that can at least be defended against in some way. Just because you die easily, the enemies attack cheaply, and you have a stamina bar doesn't immediately forgive all of the obvious, horrific flaws that Odin Sphere possesses. The game forces you to play a certain way, but even this method of play is flawed and frequently unsatisfying.
And that said, it's also absurdly inconsistent: while enemies like the Unicorn Knights (who use the jump smash attack) must be carefully watched and attacked at the perfect moment, full-blown bosses like Lord Brigan or Odette, Queen of Death can be easily defeated with a simple psyphr power (2x attack power) and the mindless button-mashing that Kia seems to rail against so heavily.
Like it or not, the combat is flawed. The game wants the player to fight in a specific way, and sometimes that way works, but that doesn't exAcuse the numerous, obvious, undeniable problems in the combat system. All the pretentious BS comments in the world aren't gonna change that.
What difficulty should I start at? I know I will never work hard enough to see the "true ending", but if I play on easy, will I more or less see everything else the game has to offer?
I just want to say this. Unless you've played Princess Crown, you haven't played a game like Odin Sphere before. You can't go into this game with expectations about what this game is. You can't compare it to a game like Star Ocean, Tales of the Abyss, or Streets of Rage. So don't go in thinking it's a pure brawler.
The block being put on the attack button is fairly annoying, but I get around it by using hit and run tactics. Not only does hit-and-run solve that issue, but it also gives you time to recover POW. If you guys did hit-and-run attacks, than your complaints about the combat system are thus fixed. Yeah! Now can we score the game appropriately now?
(I have nothing to add, as this game's probably not going to be released in europe. You bastards.)
The problem is that the game doesn't want you to use hit and run. You are graded (and therefore get better, more necessary items) just as much by how quickly you complete a battle as well as how much damage you take. Even if you aren't trying to get the "true" ending, it's a necessity that you get the best items you can at the end of each fight so you can properly arm yourself for the next one. Hitting and running defeats that purpose, not to mention being an entirely unsatisfying way of playing the game.
And again, jumping away only works if you're content to just hit once or twice, and then back off -- if you use your main attack combo, which the game seems to outright suggest you do, then the counterattack is unforseeable and unavoidable.
I've got absolutely no problem that the game isn't a pure brawler, but it's simultaneously too much of a brawler and too much of an RPG. It's inconsistent and flawed, and even though I like the game a great deal I simply can't look past its inefficiency.
THIS IS NOT THE KIND OF GAME THAT YOU CAN WAIT TO GET AT A LATER DATE!
Each individual store is getting only a couple of copies (if any) each. Of the two local EB's here, one got 3 copies (not enough to fill the preorders for it) and the other only got 1 and neither expects to get more.
If you're at all interested, do whatever you can to get the game NOW. It will NEVER be in bargain bins, and it will likely NEVER go down in price because there won't be any copies in stock anyway. I doubt you'll find it used either as I know of several EB employees from both stores around here that are hoping to get the game from people trading it in. It'll never even hit the used shelves.
$40 may seem like a lot, but when I sell it on Ebay for $100 in a year, I won't be crying about the initial price =-)
And Rev,
I've had practically ZERO problems with the jump smash move.
When it's hits me, I deserve it, and to get away from it, just jump and glide away when they go off screen.
Piece of cake.
Though I'd have to agree that there's NO way you could be very far into the game and not have died on Hard mode. Unless maybe you power level in the magical forest area or some such...