Didn't finish this because it got just too fiddly damn it. It's a cool idea to have level ups based on items you buy, but when you can't buy in bulk and only have limited inventory slots... pain.

Dug this though! The basic concept of dungeon crawl but with new worlds on every 5 or so levels of the tower is evocative. Each of the worlds is distinct, if gestural, and it has that existential quality I really like in FF1 and its ilk. It's also neat that it ratchets up in narrative complexity from floor to floor. Perfect road trip game.

So this year I was going to make a conscious effort to work through my backlog. Buy less games, play more etc. That quickly fell apart in the first month however I've done decently at playing them so far and the Odin Sphere remaster Leifthrasir is one of the older PSN purchase I have yet to play . I decided it was a good title to finally finish on my 2024 games played list.

Odin Sphere is the third Vanillaware title I've played at the time of writing. The first was Dragon's Crown, a game I truly hated but perhaps approached wrong expecting a four player Guardian Heroes. The second was 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim which I utterly adored for it's keep you guessing sci-fi story. (First quick review I wrote on Backloggd actually) It's fitting then that Odin Sphere would sit somewhere in the middle between them as a game I like but with a lot of flaws preventing me loving it and hard to actually recommend.

So lets get the positive aspects out in the open first as this game does have a lot of good going for it. Firstly the artwork and animations are pretty stunning. Vanillaware is pretty famous for it's layered 2D art style and animations. The characters and enemies all stand out and the usage of colour and style makes it feel like a painting in motion. To carry on the presentation side of my positive compliments, the whimsical soundtrack is stunning. I especially like the theme song but it's all gorgeous wrapping up Odin Sphere into a great looking and sounding package.

I actually had to double check this was originally a PS2 game because even as a remaster it just doesn't feel like it. Equally it just doesn't play like it came from that console. The combat animations and battles are all so smooth chaining from moves to move. This isn't an insult to the PS2, it was an amazing system, just a compliment to Odin sphere's visuals and animations. When in combat the characters have a large amount of moves with more unlocking as the game progresses. It allows you to chain various moves and skills into large combos. Hitting a group of enemies into a huge combo with perfect blocks to keep the chain is initially really fun. I'm saying initially because this is where my praise of Odin sphere starts to breakdown a bit unfortunately. The game is based around five characters:

- Gwyndolin, a Valkyrie Princess.
- Cornelius, a prince cursed into a beast form.
- Mercedes, a fairy Princess.
- Oswald, an orphaned knight with a cursed sword.
- Velvet, a forest Witch.

Similar to Vanillaware's later title 13 Sentinels each character has their own story arc playing the game from different perspectives before a final chapter linking the full story together. In principal the idea is great. Vanillaware themselves proved this can work wonderfully as a concept. Here it is extremely flawed though. My biggest issue is there is no variety between each character play through. They have different moves, weapons and some unique skills on a couple of them but they are fundamentally the same. When you take that into account along with the fact that each one of them plays through the same 6 locations fighting the same 20 ish enemies and same bosses and no matter how gorgeous Odin Sphere is, and no matter how nicely it plays it just becomes tedious. You have to play all five scenarios to see the ending and by the 4th character I was just feeling burnt out of it all.

Perhaps because it's an action RPG there is a greater downtime between the story sections that could have kept the mystery going for me to want to push onwards but I feel the narrative behind the game overall just isn't strong enough to justify the multiple perspectives. There isn't a huge mystery that gets unveiled or a surprise twist. Each scenario explains a few things more but I didn't find any of it compelling. Everything around the multiple protagonist formula here undermines the story and the mechanics. Some of the story arcs on each character don't quite match with some odd reasons to make sure the character does visit the snow mountain or lava kingdom etc. Having a food resource cooking mini game for levelling is a neat little idea but gets boring having to save ingredients and feed each character as a core way to level them up every time. Exploring never has anything new on different characters, same levels, same equipment. This feels like a 6 hour game padded out to a 30 hour game and the fairy tale esq setting and lore aren't strong enough to carry that.

I hate typing this as I wanted to love Odin Sphere like I did 13 Sentinels. I am however grateful to it for being the game that put Vanillaware on the map, the game that is almost like a later prototype they built on. I'm glad I played it, it's well made, and looks and plays wonderfully it's just lacking meat on it's bones.

I wish you really could just grow sheep from trees.

+ Gorgeous art design.
+ Fun , fast and fluid combat system.
+ Pleasant whimsical soundtrack and great voice acting (I played it in Japanese).

- The game loop is extremely repetitive and the story cannot carry nearly the exact same content from a slightly different view point. Only one real negative but it's a big one.

Vanillaware's first game released in the US, coming out only a month before Odin Sphere, GrimGrimoire has a pretty interesting premise: an RTS, on a console, played from a sidescrolling perspective instead of the usual top-down.

Do these ideas work? Not really!

Using a controller for an RTS is already a pretty hairy prospect, but the perspective makes it even worse, as units often overlap with each other. This means the best strategy is often "select everyone, move them to enemy". This is exacerbated by the skill trees new to this version, where you get coins to power up certain unit types. It ends up creating a feedback loop where you just keep using the same types because they're what you've put points into.

There's supposed to be a rock-paper-scissors type dynamic between the schools of magic (Glamour [Nature] -> Necromancy [Ghosts] -> Sorcery [Demons] -> Alchemy [Golems]) but I cruised through the game by simply sticking to Glamour, which you start with. Depending on the level, either amassing huge amounts of leveled-up Fairies (sending them in groups of 10 or so to avoid getting wiped out by AOEs) or Morning Stars (bigger units with AOE blasts themselves) would win every time. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the difficulty was lowered in this version because I remember the original being balls-hard.

While the skill tree kinda sucks, a welcome new feature for this remaster is the fast-forward function. By default, the game is SLOW, probably to accommodate the awkward controls and micro-management, and the fast-forward makes the gameplay much more tolerable.

The story is kinda... Whatever. It's a time-loop scenario about a girl at a wizard school. Most characters are underdeveloped and the plot made very little sense to me. At the end I was left scratching my head wondering what the hell happened, as it gave me an Animal House-style "and here's what happened to the other characters~!" montage.

Of course, as is always the case with Vanillaware, the art is top-notch. Character and unit designs are excellent across the board. Some of them are very cool (the Golems and Chimera are incredible) and some of them are very funny (the demon turrets are succubi that wiggle their giant asses), but the art is probably the main reason to play this game.

Of course, if you want good art with a good game to go with it... Maybe just check out Odin Sphere.

Without a trace of irony: god bless Vanillaware's hardline stance against game balancing. GrimGrimoire and 13 Sentinels are the only RTSes I've ever played and I am not here to learn how the genre works. I beat the original back in the day pretty much entirely by repeatedly summoning dragons and I regret nothing.

That said, I think it's a good sign that OnceMore made me really enjoy branching out more. Everything that's not dragons feels a lot more distinct and effective, and the fast forward button is a tremendously important addition. It's not as complete a transformation as Odin Sphere Leifthrasir, but Vanillaware is so good at jazzing up their classics with new game mechanics. The original I mostly considered noteworthy for the developer standard knocked-out-of-the-park presentation and also the lesbians, but OnceMore I can really recommend as an actual great game.

The obvious Harry Potter references have unfortunately only gotten exponentially more cringe, but the story is a cute, weird diversion nonetheless. And OnceMore contains a huge number of brand new gorgeous art CGs--you unlock one after every battle, and the fact that most of them are essentially little slice of life micro-vignettes helps make the characters feel a little more fleshed out.

I don't have a summary here, so, I dunno, buy Vanillaware games. Buy them for full price! I Am No Longer Asking.