Regardless of the thematic implications of level building, there are more tricks that aid in building your characters and getting items, most of which are less destructive to the cycle of life. You can combine base materials with various items, which will in turn make new potions. Unlike other games with obscure item creation systems, Odin Sphere keeps this all relatively simple, by giving you recipes throughout the game, and showing the result of a combination before you complete it. Although it's not necessary to learn all of the combinations, it can be quite helpful in certain areas. For example, the forest area contains lots of enemies that poison you. However, most stages contain hidden onions lying beneath the ground, which can be used to make antidotes. Similarly, your HP drains constantly in the snow and volcano areas, but both stages contain vegetables that can be easily used to prevent health loss.
Through standard play, you'll probably end up gaining more weapon levels than health levels, even if you harvest a lot of fruit. In order to quickly strengthen your health, you'll need to take advantage of the cooking system. Throughout the game, you'll find recipes for different dishes, all of which require a variety of different items. It can be a pain gathering them all together, since many types of seeds or fruits are unique to certain areas. You also need to gather the proper coins - there are several different types of coins in Odin Sphere, each having their own monetary value. While these don't really matter when buying items in shops - you pick coins out of your purse one by one, but the shopkeeper will accept any type - the cafes where meals are cooked require specific coins for many dishes, again requiring that you pay attention to what you're collecting. This may require a lot of work, but the payoffs are massive, because many of the meals give huge stat bonuses.
Taking all of this - the item gathering, the strength building - into account is hugely important. The idea is that you should spend most of your time running away from enemies, breaking them into smaller groups (if possible) and conserving your magic power so you can attempt to blow away the otherwise insurmountable hordes. Boss fights largely revolve around running in, getting in a few quick hits, and quickly getting the hell away before your opponents stomps all over you. What if you don't have enough magic stored up? What if you don't have the right items? This is where the role playing mechanic comes in - your skill in fighting enemies is secondary compared to how smart you are in planning ahead. And ultimately, victory is determined in how well you can use and ration those items in combat, all while dodging your foes attacks.
To use a classic analogy, remember The Grim Reaper in the fifth level of the first Castlevania? Remember what an asshole he was? It was possible - if maddeningly difficult - to kill him with just your whip. The best way to kill him was to get either a boomerang or holy water special item from earlier in the level, power it up so you can toss them three times at once, and then face the boss. You've basically broken the game and found an exploit, even though it's not explicitly cheating.
Odin Sphere relies on this mechanic almost constantly. Some boss battles are incredibly frustrating if you try to fight them with just your standard weapons. But if you head into a fight with full magic, you can walk right next to them and unleash a constant barrage of attacks that will wipe a significant amount of their health, if not killing them outright, by the time you're drained of mana. Naturally, this is easily said than done since you're constantly dodging their attacks. Furthermore, all of your life is restored once you reach a new health experience level - so the trick is to eat enough food until just before you're about to level up, then enter a boss battle and chow down on anything when you're at critical, and then you're back at max. It's a hugely difficult game at first - the selectable "Easy" mode does little to alleviate any aggravation - but once you've figured out these tricks, and how to use your spells and items efficiently, Odin Sphere becomes substantially more manageable. That's not to say combat isn't based on skill at all - you're graded at the end of each sphere on your speed and how much damage you've taken, which then rewards you with additional items or cash - but ultimately, the fighting aspect not as huge as you'd expect.
In fact, many of these elements seemed to be what Princess Crown was shooting for, but didn't quite make. Princess Crown forced you into bringing an extremely limited number of items into a fight. Odin Sphere has a very strict inventory limit at the beginning, but you can easily buy more backpacks as you traipse through each chapter, doubling, tripling, quadrupling or quintupling your inventory space. You can use all items at all times, which is also pretty handy. While there are a number of attack based items, all of the magic is draining through power stocks, so you rarely need to clutter up space with any other junk. Other aggravations have been fixed too. Although coins disappear after a few seconds, most items will stay on the playing field permanently until you pick them up, so there's no fear of those stupid goblins whisking away your loot. Some fruit will rot if they're not picked quickly enough, reducing their bonuses, but it's better than nothing. There are a few minor references to its predecessor - some enemies, like the zombie ghosts in the Netherworld, are also redesigned versions of the Ghouls from Princess Crown.
But by far the best improvement revolves around the difficulty. Odin Sphere may get hugely annoying at parts, but when you die, you simply restart the given sphere. If you die at a boss, you restart again, right at the boss. This is a huge improvement over the obnoxious save points of Princess Crown. At most, you lose a few minutes of progress if you die. In fact, you can save at practically any time. If a boss is totally demolishing you because you didn't prepare adequately, you're given the option to leave the encounter to explore the rest of the stage. If you want, you can leave the stage entirely to replay other levels, beat up more bad guys or harvest more items. This is the kind of polished user friendliness that Princess Crown lacked, undoubtedly the result of the games being released ten years apart.
All of this strengthened by the incredible soundtracks. All of the music is supplied by Basiscape, which is run by legendary composer Hitoshi Sakimoto, and also consists of his long time partner Masuhara Iwata, along with a few other guys like Manabu Namiki, responsible for several Cave shooter soundtracks. Odin Sphere takes cues from Sakimoto's orchestral soundtracks like Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy XII. Although the action-based tracks are rarely as rousing as the war marches in FF Tactics, or the bombastic battle themes of FFXII, they lend a bit of drama to the action, the type that's pleasantly atypical for the beat-em-up genre, which usually relies on more traditionally video gamey rock synth. It's similar to way that Sakimoto's works gave a refreshing texture to Treasure's Radiant Silvergun, which also featured orchestral leanings in a genre that usually focuses on rock and techno. A main theme is used several times in the game, first sung enchantingly on the title screen, reused with an ethereal choir on the map screen, and later implemented in key cutscenes. The splendidly understated intro focuses on a butterfly as it flies from character to character, introducing them with a spotlight and their chapter title, features a vocal rendition of theme, sung by the leader singer of Japanese folk band Shanachie. This same song is reused and expanded in the final staff roll, which also features a celtic influenced interlude, as if Hitoshi Sakimoto and Yasunori Mitsuda had sat down and shared a few pints before it was composed. This spine chilling piece might actually be the best song ever composed by Sakimoto - which also happens to mean it's one of the best songs ever to originate from a video game.
And yet, the only real problem with the soundtrack is the same with the rest of the game - the crushing repetition. The songs never really change as you progress, so you'll hear the same music over and over again. Additionally, when you clear a stage, a short victory theme will play as your score is tallied up, which eventually leads into a serene post battle theme that continues until you leave the stage. However, this segment is where you'll be doing most of your character development - planting seeds, absorbing phozons, changing around your inventory - so you'll eventually tired of it pretty quickly.
There's a lot of padding in Odin Sphere, which may cause a bit of burnout, considering that you'll probably need to spend roughly thirty or more hours to complete it. This includes the frustrating final chapters. Once you've cleared all of the individual stories, you need to fight a series of boss battles - and if you want to get the "good" ending, you'll need to use a specific character for each specific battle. This practically requires that you have to replay each of their chapters to strengthen them and get more items. During the normal course of gameplay, you rarely need to grind if you play it smart, but these seems like an obnoxious attempt to lengthen a game that's already stretched pretty thin. Furthermore, when you replay a chapter, you start the story from scratch, so you need to play through all of the levels in order. This is particularly frustrating for Gwendolyn, who can't visit the cafes until halfway through her chapter, thus making her the hardest to rebuild. This is the type of crap Nintendo pulls with Metroid Prime and its artifact hunts, or The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker with its Triforce hunt, which are mandatory methods of reintroducing the established world before getting to the final stages. At least in those games, you could use your new powers to see parts of the world you may missed. There's nothing more to see in replaying old chapters in Odin Sphere. But at least it's all worth it - there are a few endings, depending on what characters you pick in the final battle, and the best one is definitely worth the effort. There are some pretty clever fourth wall breaking bits that would make even Hideo Kojima giddy with pleasure
In spite of its numerous flaws - certain developers still haven't realized that longer doesn't necesarily mean better, and many of the chapters would've worked quite well if they'd trimmed them in half - Odin Sphere remains an enchanting game. Not only for its amazing graphics and soundtracks, but also for its unique approach to combining action and role playing elements. That ever teetering balance between action and character building is still tipped off kilter on more than a few occasions, but once you've adjusted to its rules, it's an addicting experience like no other. Since the leap in quality from Princess Crown to Odin Sphere is so substantial, that should hopefully mean that Vanillaware's next action-RPG will turn out to be even more incredible.
MP3s Download here
Intro
Odin Sphere
Odin Sphere
Odin Sphere
Odin Sphere
Odin Sphere
Odin Sphere
Odin Sphere
Odin Sphere
Odin Sphere
Odin Sphere
Odin Sphere
Odin Sphere
Gallery
As an aside, I've always rather liked it when the character building systems are relevant the story - like the materia from Final Fantasy VII or the Guardian Forces from Final Fantasy VIII - and the Phozons provide an interesting subtext to the plot. Since Phozons are the source of all life, they can either be used selfishly to strengthen your character or used to breathe life into plants...which are, again, consumed for your selfishness. This seems to be a comment that humans are using their own selfishness to steal life and empower themselves at the expense of the planet, which in turn parallels the fight of the kingdoms over the Cauldron which is destined to destroy all living creatures on the planet. These theme of environmentalism is prevalent in Japanese culture - this is easily observed by watching any Miyazaki movie like Nausicaa or Princess Mononoke, both of which preach harmony with nature. Additionally, many Japanese citizens share Buddhist beliefs, which are grounded heavily in reincarnation and thus the cycle of life, which also explains where there are a number of video games (Megami Tensei) and anime (Evangelion) that deal with the apocalypse and subsequent rebirth of the world. While many cultures have their own rebirth myths (like Noah's Ark in the Old Testament or pretty much anything out of Revelations), the theme of an upcoming apocalypse - dubbed Ragnarok - is particularly strong in Norse mythology, which Odin Sphere is based on.
Book Select
Map Screen
Tutorial
Victory
Raging Battlegrounds
Elrit Forest
Winterhorn Ridge
Staff Roll
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