Odin Sphere

June 8,2007 - Just when you think the PS2 has seen its last great game, another one comes out of the woodworks to surprise everyone. This time, Atlus and Vanillaware are here to show you that 2D is far from dead as we move into the next generation. Odin Sphere combines RPG elements and brawler gameplay into a new experience that aims to keep Sony’s little console flying high for just a little longer. Does Odin Sphere prove that 2D will never die or does is it another nail in the 2D coffin?

Odin Sphere’s story is presented in a manner similar to The NeverEnding Story, as a little girl is reading each of the five main character’s stories, which interweave between each other to show multiple sides of one conflict or new things that aren’t shown in the other tales. Gwendolyn, the daughter of King Odin, is the first story, which begins with her being sent off by her father to help the others defend their kingdom and defeat the invading one. The story progresses through multiple lands—eight in all—from the Fire Kingdom and Forest of the Fairies in the south to the Kingdom of Ragnanival and the Netherworld in the north. Each world offers new environments, enemies, items, and emerging stories that differentiate each region from the next. Each story can take between 10-15 hours depending on how you navigate the regions from beginning to end.

While it may be an RPG, Odin Sphere doesn’t play much like one. It definitely has the heart of the brawler in its gameplay, which involves primarily just attacks, items, and spells performed while fighting the enemies. Attacks are almost a little too simple, with just one combo, downward and upward attacks, and an attack while in the air. They really feel a little too simple, repetitive, and even at times unresponsive at times when there are a bunch of enemies on screen at once. To break up the monotony of the standard attacks, Odin Sphere has its own magic system along with the ability to use items in your inventory to cause damage on your foes. Luckily, each character plays slightly differently, though still within the same basic structure.

What’s neat about the stages you visit in each land is that while they’re side-scrolling, they’re circular. So instead of just having an end and a beginning to a stage, they loop endlessly. After completing each stage, you’re graded on how long it took you to beat and how much damage you took and your rewarded prize will depend on how well you did. Struggle and you’ll get decent prizes, but fight efficiently and you’ll get some much-needed coins, seeds, and other good items. The map shows each level as a circle connecting to other circles, so you just reach one of the exits to another stage and press up and X to move on to the next stage. There are a few different kinds of stages in each of these regions, the normal stages, shop stages, sub-boss stages and the main boss stages that will be the end of each chapter. Alongside each circle, you can see the difficulty of the stage and the bonus treasure it will reward you with upon completion. Unfortunately, unless you get the region map as treasure within the first few stages, you’ll have to wander aimlessly hoping the next stage isn’t a boss battle that you can’t handle. This emphasizes the game’s motto: “save early and save often.”

Odin Sphere features a simple level-up system revolving around the experience that food and Phozons contain. Experience points from food can level up your HP while experience points from Phozons level up your MP and attack, as both come from your Psypher weapon. Alchemy is an important part of the game, allowing you to combine a base material and an item to create a new item or a higher numbered base material. Seeds also come into play quite often, as there are various kinds that grow many type of food for consumption. Seeds generally require a certain number of Phozons to grow fruit, which is useful to plant before you fight so that your enemies’ Phozons feed the plants. There are also special rings or similar items that can be warn to offer special bonus to your attack power, HP, or give you other bonus effects. There are a few difficulties that you can change to at any point, which means that the enemies are made weaker or stronger, but that you level up more quickly, so some of the tougher parts of the game can be dialed down a bit if you run into any frustrating stages.

With all these items that you can use, it’s no wonder that you constantly have to open up your backpack to make room for the excessive amount of items you’ll collect. You start off with two backpacks that can hold eight items each—which can fill up quicker than you’ll realize—but you’re required to find the right shops to buy another backpack that may not even be big enough for your needs. That leads to another annoyance: the extreme lack of money being dropped by your enemies. You’ll rarely have enough money to get what you need, so you’re forced to either hope you will find the items you need in the stages or sell what you have for incredibly low prices to get those all-important items. As if the money wasn’t rare enough, there are five different coins of different values that you could get, so you could hit the jackpot and get the bigger coins or get stuck with singles.

The 2D sprites in Odin Sphere are very well done, one of the best-looking 2D games ever. Unfortunately, because of the large, detailed sprites and backgrounds, the game has a problem with slowdown. Whenever there are a lot of enemies on screen or a lot of action’s going on at once, things slowdown and it feels like you’re back in the Matrix. Don’t even ask about the Netherworld. It seems that in this place, despite looking amazingly good, the action can grind to a halt at times because so much can be going on at once that it’s just insane. Though it seems like a huge problem, the majority of the fighting is slowdown-free, so just be cautious of those occasional areas and try to use the slowdown to your advantage, if possible. Load times are another annoyance in Odin Sphere, as there is a lot of loading between each stage with the initial load of the first few stages being the largest, as it’s the template for the majority of the rest of the stages. All of these 10+ second loading times begin to add up rather quickly as you stare at the flipping pages of a book called the loading screen.

Odin Sphere has a rather nice soundtrack that fits the world you’re in while also setting the tone of each battle rather nicely. However, the music sounds generally the same for every stage within a region, which just blends together for the entire chapter. The dialog is fully-voiced, even offering both English and Japanese soundtracks. The dubbing doesn’t even attempt to match the mouthing of each character, so the Godzilla movies come to mind as you see the mouths flapping long after the dialog’s been spoken. Unless you’re the typical anal fan of Japanese dubbing, the English works just fine. Sound effects are used nicely for an early warning for approaching enemies, but for the most part you hear a lot of clanking metal and the sounds of attacks while you’re fighting.

Odin Sphere does a lot to show you that with the proper attention to detail, 2D can still provide for great-looking games that can stand out amongst the myriad of 3D games that occupy the shelves today. This isn’t a perfect game by any means, but the annoyances are definitely outweighed by the positives enough to be a game that you can recommend to the RPG crowd. While Odin Sphere may not be the best game for everyone, it certainly gives the PS2 another big game to keep this last-gen console alive for a couple more months until the fall season arrives.

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