Odin Sphere is like a storybook come to life, but unfortunately has the same framrate as a book's illustration at times.
Odin Sphere contains not one main character but five. Each "book" tells a tale for each character over seven chapters, with characters occasionally meeting and interacting, either as friend or foe. Each of the five characters have their own motivations: a warrior princess fighting to win her father's love, a human prince cursed to an animal-like body, a young fairy girl unexpectedly promoted to Queen during a turbulent time, a shadow knight who would no longer be used, and a princess of a doomed kingdom fighting to prevent the coming Armageddon. With scenes before and after each chapter, there's a lot of story and character development despite playing each character for about six hours each to complete their books. There's even a great timeline showing where each cutscene happens chronologically in relation to other characters, and allowing you to replay each scene you've already encountered. While many will enjoy this unique way of telling a story, others will be put off by the fact that you're repeating the same thing from different perspectives quite a bit.
While based on a general RPG structure, Odin Sphere is actually a lot more like a 2D brawler. Each section of the chapter's map is a 2D side-scrolling area that loops around in a circle, allowing you to run around and attack enemies from behind if necessary. Each of these areas make up a node on a map, with each node containing either a series of enemies, mini-bosses, shops, or the chapter end boss. There's just one attack button so combos are simply just hitting the same button repeatedly, but there's deceptively a lot more than just button mashing in Odin Sphere. The enemies can cause a lot of damage if you just run up and hack away, so being nimble and avoiding their attacks is necessary. This is especially true with the game's difficulty in general; even the easy mode is harder than most of the games you'll likely play this year. Each character has different weapons and combos and a special trick or two, but largely they play rather similarly. The one exception is Mercedes the fairy, who can fly and uses a ranged crossbow weapon, but can lose health fast if you get her get hit and she has to land to reload her bow.
Leveling is remarkably simple in Odin Sphere. When an enemy dies, phozons emerge from its corpse, which are basically floating pieces of its soul. The main characters have weapons crafted out of special stones called psyphers, which can absorb these souls to gain in power. Holding down a button will draw all the phozons towards you and absorb them, which increases the weapon's level. Obviously the higher the level the more damage it does. This also increases your phozon meter, which allows you to cast magic. Each spell consumes so much of this meter, which you will have to replenish by absorbing more phozons if you want to cast more. There is also a level for your health too, and these two levels are the only stats your characters need. You can plant seeds on the battlefield, and these plants will absorb a set number of phozons before they ripen. Not only do their fruit replenish your HP, but they also have a set experience value that goes towards your health level. Some seeds make multiple fruit, some make one, some fruit lasts for multiple bites, some even leave behind seeds for you to plant again. Both fruit and other collected ingredients can be used in a restaurant or cafe to create food from recipes you collected, which not only provides a large amount of experience but also provides raw bonuses to your maximum hit points. There is also an alchemy system that will enable you to make potions with effects that range from healing, absorbing attacks, or causing a lot of damage.
Despite its simple yet enjoyable battle system and wonderful story and characters, there are a few things that hold the game back. For one, there are only eight locations in the game, with each character visiting one in each of their seven chapters. After the first character's book, you essentially saw almost all the settings you'll see all game, and the enemies from each location remain constant between books. Bosses repeat themselves frequently too. You'll find a new boss here and there from the second book onwards, but the majority of chapter bosses are simply exact repeats of ones that you defeated in the first book. As mentioned before, even the easiest difficulty setting can be brutal at times. To compound this effect, the game is prone to absolutely massive slowdown at certain points, typically with the illumination from the underworld and a number of boss fights. The slowdown on the boss fights comes at the worst time in the game, as many of the bosses can be a bit challenging as it is. There is one encounter late in the game where you fight not one but two full-powered bosses at once, which is both exceedingly difficult and causes absolutely frustrating amounts of slowdown. The excessive inventory management will also test the patience of some, but the well organized will not have much trouble with it.
As previously mentioned, the game is visually one of the best looking of the generation. While its technical specifications are nothing special, its artistic is simply wonderful. The 2D side-scrolling areas have beautiful and detailed backgrounds in constant motion, like a storybook illustration come to life. The lava flows in the background of the Fire Kingdom are particularly impressive. Characters are large and hand drawn, featuring a wide range of animations that effectively convey their emotions. Their battle animations are also very fluid and consistent. The only downfall, of course, is the slowdown that affects a few specific locations, particularly boss battles. Enemy bosses are gigantic, often taking up more than the screen, but the developers were a little too ambitious in just how much their attacks can throw at you. The audio is of equal quality overall. Most of the voice acting from the key characters is great. Oswald the Shadow Knight does seem to be the weakest of the bunch, but it is still passable. Some of the voices from the random unnamed NPCs can be a bit flat, particularly a couple of specific merchants. However, a dwarf that sounds exactly like Sean Connery offsets this. The game does come with the Japanese voice acting as well if you prefer the original. Hitoshi Sakimoto composes the music, and his trademark orchestral soundtracks once again do a great job of matching the mood of their environments.
With each character's book taking about six hours, the game will last roughly thirty hours or so. This could be extended if you do not prepare well to take on another boss after beating each book's final boss. Those that do need to stock up for more major fights will have to replay that character's book to restock on items. However, you restart from the beginning, so you'll have to just steamroll your way through a good portion of the book in order to unlock the restaurants and areas where you can find the high-level ingredients. This could add a couple of hours to each character, and it's unfortunate that you cannot just enter the book in later chapters instantly. There are a few recipes that take a bit of effort to unlock and a way to unlock a bonus scene if you beat the final bosses multiple ways, but other than that there is little additional content. However, with such a unique game, you may very well be compelled to play again if you were not forced to fight through books again to restock. With three difficulty levels and a fourth one that you can unlock later, the game certainly has no shortage of challenges.
Odin Sphere is one of the most unique games you'll play this year. It has a wonderful feeling of a side-scrolling brawler from an era that has long since passed, with simple gameplay but enough difficulty to prevent you from just running up to an enemy and hitting attack repeatedly. The characters are great, the story and its structure is compelling, and the setting is just a sight to behold. It's too bad that there were a few issues with Odin Sphere, ranging from slight annoyances to nearly game-breaking slowdown on certain fights. Overall there, Odin Sphere is certainly a quality game and it stands out from its contemporaries. Though it has RPG elements, it is certainly more of an action hack-n-slash game with a bit of inventory management. If you can put up with the slowdown, then this game is probably worth checking out.