It feels like a fantastic VN and a mediocre Earthbound clone crammed together like oil and water.

Wonderful and haunting story about overcoming a very well-portrayed trauma, with each character given adequate spotlight in its emotional core.

Annoyingly dragged-out, plodding gameplay and combat that majorly take place in a setting completely irrelevant to the story, to the point where you're begging the game to just get on with it. If the idea was to represent the futility of repression and escapism, I'd say it overstayed its welcome more than a little bit in that aspect.

Again, the story is worth it and there are enough characters here to relate to when it comes to shitty childhood experiences of growing up in a dull countryside town, but whether you can stomach the gameplay or not is up to you.

Omori is... strange. Omori's story is the kind that can only be properly communicated through the dynamic and interactive medium of video games... but at the same time, it's the fact that Omori is a video game that holds it back from being truly amazing. It needed to be a video game, but the actual gameplay is the curse that prevents Omori from stepping into the sun.

There's so much good buried inside of Omori that giving the game a 3.5/5 feels like an insincere disservice to Omocat's darling pet project... but at the same time, a 3.5/5 feels awfully generous for what ultimately amounts to a decent but grindey Earthbound-like RPG that never fully understands the meaning of 'restraint'... or 'balance', for that matter. The more time passes, the more issues I have with this game. It is simultaneously misguided as hell while also being a genuine passion project, although I do think it leans more towards the 'passion project' side of things. It's strange. Omori is hard to nail down. Omori is both a genuine work of art and an intermittently-frustrating slog all at once.

Omori is too fucking long, for one thing. I was already starting to feel fatigue around Sweetheart's castle (a crying shame given how excellently-crafted the dungeon actually is, it's easily one of the mechanical highlights of the game), and realizing there was even more game to go through was a real killer. Omori is a serviceable eight-ten hour game that stretches itself out to twenty, and that's frankly unacceptable because there isn't a whole lot to actually do in Omori a lot of the time. There are several points throughout the game where Omori drags its heels and dicks around, seemingly because the game wants to use its bloated runtime to justify the $20 price tag. There are "sidequests", but they're pointless little endeavors that amount to you fetch-quest meandering all over the place for what amounts to a pat on the back and a slap on the wrist. There's a lot of interactable objects, but a lot of them just say basic things like "a fire hydrant, nothing special" or "a cutting board", momentary little time-wasters that add up over time because sometimes you click on something and it actually has something funny or enlightening to say, leading to this annoying cycle where you'll keep tapping Z on every object you see even though you know 85% of them are going to say nothing of merit. (In stark contrast to Undertale, where interacting with objects was one of the highlights of the game because it felt like everything had unique dialogue attached to it.)

Perhaps the biggest pacing issue is the fact that sizable portions of Omori honestly feel like filler. When the game starts and you're fighting charming, spunky characters like Space Boyfriend and Sweetheart, it's easy to enjoy yourself and simultaneously get lost in their zany antics while also acknowledging their psychological potential for Omori's character (it's clever how Space Boyfriend's lovesickness is a parallel for Omori's fear of connection, and how Sweetheart's obnoxious arrogance is a personification of Omori's own problems with self-love). But over time when you fight people like the Bread Twins and the shark guy Mr. Jawsum and those strangely hot mermaid slime girls and that dickhead whale Humphrey, you start wondering... what's the point of all this? What is this all building up to? And the truth is that it doesn't add up to much at all. So much of the goofy shit that happens in Headspace has honestly very little to do with the actual plot of the game: the character arc of Omori coming to terms with the loss of a loved one. After a certain point, it stops having much of anything to do about Omori or Basil or Aubrey or any of the main characters, really. All it does is reinforce the fact that Omori absolutely did not have to be this long - if they'd trimmed the fat and focused, then Headspace could have been a clever and creative tool to visibly demonstrate Omori's character growth. Instead, it's more of a playground of occasionally-great and hard-hitting moments underscored by frustrating backtracking, narrative aimlessness, and frankly unfair difficulty spikes.

I wouldn't call Omori 'hard' per se, but I would call Omori unfair if you go through it normally (without any substantive grinding, anyway). Omori has a serious balancing problem that permeates throughout the entire game. Grunt enemies can take away like a third of your health bar, and Omori loves surprising you with bullshit damage-sponge boss encounters that utterly cleave away at your health and barely give you any time to breathe. Any moment when you have to go on the defensive and heal/revive your teammates, you are absolutely at a disadvantage, and you're probably going to die. Healing items cost way too much money for a game with damage outputs as sometimes busted as this, and it commits the cardinal sin of turn-based RPGs: Omori dying ends the entire fight prematurely, an aggravating and outdated JRPG trope that, while it makes narrative sense given that it's all in Omori's mind, is annoying and counterintuitive to consistent game design. And as neat as the Emotion System is, I feel like it ultimately doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things compared to raw damage output. Most times I was just using it for the sake of damage output, like making Omori sad to improve his shanking skills (somehow), or making Aubrey & Kel angry to make their multi-hits hit harder. Once you find the singularly useful and damaging thing that any given Emotion can do, you're never given much reason to variate from that because this game can be demanding and difficult if you're underleveled or breaking even.

The game is practically screaming at you to GRIND. Grind for money, grind for items, grind for level-ups. Work for that bread. I had to grind considerably to even dream of making it through Sweetheart's boss battle, and even then she had me on the ropes near the climax of the battle. And frankly, I was overleveled by that point in the game. As much as I enjoyed being on the edge of my seat and constantly thinking in the moment, I couldn't help but realize "I would be fucking infuriated if I was at the recommended level cap for this". Now, grinding doesn't take too long in Omori, teammates level up fairly quickly. But the process of grinding in this game is boring, and I don't enjoy having to grind more than I'm inclined to in the first place. It constantly feels like a chore, and it doesn't make any narrative sense given that Omori's world is an escapist one.

So much about Omori frustrates me... that it completely blindsides me whenever the game decides to be good. Like, REALLY good. There are moments, decisions, and ideas in Omori that are absolutely stellar. The actual smallness of the real-world narrative paints a compelling parallel to the goofy grandiosity of Omori's dream world. All of Omori's friends are fleshed-out and well-written, and it's easy to genuinely care about them whenever something happens to them. The artstyle is wonderful, a blend of cutesy pastel colors and lively, anime-esque colored-pencil sketches that only adds to the dreamlike and psychedelic quality of the game's presentation. Sometimes the synergy of the battle system actually clicks and you're making thrilling tactical decisions just to stay alive (I like the interplay of passing attacks between allies and how every single pass between two people have different mechanics attached to them). The fact that there's an entire hidden second route ('Hikikomori Route') that you can access simply by choosing not to open the door when you wake up is fascinating. Omori is a wonderful silent protagonist, full of character and depth and nuance in spite of the fact that he virtually never opens his mouth; practically the entire game is an inside-out exploration of his deep-seated fears and guilt. The eclectic and energetic soundtrack is fucking terrific. Omori is genuinely funny, never letting the horror drag the comedy down or vice versa.

Some of the narrative moments in this game really fucking hit: the haunting Black Space, the peaceful yet heartbreaking Lost Library sequence, Aubrey in the church, the stark contrast between IRL Aubrey vs. Dream Aubrey, Omori following the trail of photos to relive the truth, the terrific ending of the game. And while not all of the horror really sticks the landing, most of the time Omori fucking nails it in the psychological-horror department, like the oppressive dark blues and blacks in Sunny's house late at night, the simple but haunting design of 'Something', the frequent but subtle usage of droning bass, and the aforementioned minimalism of Black Space, a genuinely inspired Yume Nikki-esque monochrome realm containing some of the most abstract and ghoulish imagery the game has to offer. Omori is genuinely unnerving throughout its runtime, and I have to admire that even if it sometimes lapses into eyeroll-inducing creepypasta territory (only sometimes; it's much, much better than DDLC in this regard).

I don't know. Omori is both really special but also really lost in its own sauce. Omori's style and presentation is wonderful, a darling blend of space-pastel pixel art, notebook sketches, and these off-kilter, oversaturated photorealistic backgrounds that heighten the dreamy aspects of the overall game... but it all starts to lose its charm thanks to samey dungeon design and an overt amount of backtracking and fumbling around. The main characters and some of the side cast are genuinely enjoyable and have a lot to say for themselves. There's some terrific character writing here, but sometimes they don't really get a proper chance to shine due to the aimlessness of the overall plot, a plot that manages to be both harrowingly moving and distressingly aimless. Omori has a powerful and heartfelt message at the core of its messy, poorly-paced story, but you have to be willing to wade through a fair deal of monotony in order to actually see the diamonds in the rough, see what makes the narrative special. It is wonderfully-written and confused all at once.

And I think that's the most apt description I could cook up for Omori. It has the core of a really great game, but a sometimes-hollow and unflattering shell that doesn't do its greatness any favors. The nucleus of the game is good. Really good, in fact. There's a fantastic video game hidden inside of Omori, just barely out of sight - you can make out the shadow of it most of the time, and sometimes you even manage to see the jewel in the emperor's clothes... but these momentary flashes of lightning in a bottle never last long enough to make the overall experience completely 'worth it'. Omori just being "pretty decent" is honestly kind of a pity. I love what it has to say, I love how it looks, and sometimes I find myself just loving it, indubitably and unambiguously... but frankly, it's a hard game to love. Perhaps if Omori had been shorter and had some sharper design choices, I'd be singing a different tune. It's so, so close to being great. But as it stands, Omori, as a video game, merely stands in the shadow of greatness, only occasionally stepping into the sunlight and making itself known... much like its own reclusive and deeply shy protagonist.

Omori is a game that commits to what it set out to do, in some ways for better and others for worse. It's not a game I fell in love with, which many seem to have done, but I did at least admire parts of in spite of the issues I had with it, and that's worthy of merit. Maybe I'm just spoiled on the wider JRPG genre as a whole already, I dunno, but I just feel that many of the aspects of this game that have garnered it such praise are done better elsewhere, though that isn't to say they were all done poorly here. There's still a few qualms I have with some of these, however.

No major, but some minor spoilers ahead.

As someone who has been diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and autism, and has been on meds for nearly a decade, and still suffers from suicidal tendencies, I don't vibe with the way mental illness is portrayed at all. It feels incredibly exaggerated, and in many cases played up for the game's horror. Yes; the game is sending a valuable message - mental health is a serious issue, and you should always offer help to someone with potentially suicidal tendencies before it's too late, or that you should try speaking to someone if you're going through a rough time, but in Omori it just..completely lacks subtelty, and that bugs me. We're given a direct look into the mind of a boy with suicidal tendencies, coping with trauma by shutting himself away from the world and retreating to his imagination, but I dunno man, literally starting your game with the only way to progress being to stab yourself in your imagination feels distatesful. The fact that it's from the point of view of someone who has been struggling for years may mean that there's no need for subtlety, and a big part of the game's appeal is finding out the specifics as to why they truly have that trauma to begin with, but it doesn't change the fact that the game's themes feel forced, something that I Omori's themes probably shouldn't be. It's something that I feel should be put front and center, but the way it's initially presented doesn't feel natural, as if it's used for shock value. Suicidal tendencies aren't easily percievable either, and having a player's potential first impression be that this game shows it too plainly may not only put them off from playing further, but may also reinforce the unfortunately common idea that, "oh, it's just attention seeking". Give the player context before showing scenes like this, show them a natural, realistic build up and revelation of these themes. Show them that suicidal tendencies and signs of depression are not easily noticeable. Don't give the impression that it's something that you can see from the outset upon meeting someone. Maybe it's a loud cry from its creator for help (in which case they seriously need it and I pray for their health), or the misguided perception of what it's like to be suicidal, but I was not able to empathise with some of its darker themes as a result. I can at least commend it for trying to, and in many cases succeeding in sending a valuable message, however.

As a JRPG veteran, there were many design choices that I found either odd but inconsequential, or poorly done. They're mostly nitpicks, but there's a lot of them, and they add up. One example of a minor nitpick would be the liberal use of rpgmaker - there's nothing inherently wrong with it, but there's a certain air about games made in the engine that feel weird and unnatural to me. It's not an issue of laziness, like I've seen of other rpgmaker games, and Omori's far from lazy, too - there's a lot of lovely pixelated and hand drawn sprites and art, and it (for the most part) maintains a vibrant artstyle. Omori's far and away the best rpgmaker game I've played, I just can't shake the feeling that the game's trying too hard to look or be retro by using the engine, but the engine's quirks are still apparent. Some areas also look really flat, blocky, and lacking depth, in spite of the actual quality of the sprites, for example. A weird outlier I noticed was the run cycle - it's really unnaturally fluid compared to other sprite animations that actually look in line with the simple pixel artstyle. Again, got to preface that these are nitpicks from the perspective of someone whose played many games in the genre and examines things too closely, and this is far from a major detractor of the experience.

An example of a genuine issue I have would be the erratic placement of overworld encounters that, in the early game, were actually fairly challenging and incentivised fights to get levels and exp on track, but in the lategame, were comically easy and a waste of time as exp and levels lost importance. Omori also shows that it's hard to place enemies on the overworld without ruining game flow. High random encounter rates and grinding suck, but in Omori, in one area I'd feel that I would have to go too far out of the way to initiate battles so that I didn't get underlevelled, and in the next, felt encounters were placed too close together, were too easy, had become a-button mashing fests that required no thought, and that I'd gotten overlevelled - so I just ran from them all. It felt less like understanding the game's mechanics (because in truth, it's actually really easy once you get past the starting areas because of how abusable the emotion system is) and moreso that the game's difficulty dropped off the face of the Earth as time went on. I'd just make Omori and Aubrey angry, make my enemy sad, use defence debuffs, and wail on them with my strongest attacks for every single story fight. It sucks too, because it's a fundamentally cool system that takes a rock paper scissors mechanic - something more typical of a strategy rpg, and puts it in a turn based one. There're lots of potential party setups you can make around different emotions, but the game's difficulty just doesn't necessitate this. Oh, right, the story. While I feel Omori misses the mark when it comes to the gameplay side of a jrpg, I think it gets the story right in the long run, but it's a slow burner, and it's complicated as to why.

See, the true route's story is split into two sections; the real world, and headspace. In the real world, Sunny spends his final few days in town being...well, socially and emotionally distant, and getting roped into reconnecting with his friends before he has to move out of town. It's a really heartwarming story of your resident sand-eater next-door neighbour, I mean Kel, doing everything he can to clear up lose ends before Sunny leaves town and get their friend group back together. Being perfectly honest, I kind of wish both Kel and Sunny shared roles as protagonists, as they mirror one another perfectly. Kel's the driving force behind a lot of the real world stuff too - but making it him from his point of view probably wouldn't really work for the larger narrative..Regardless, I really like the real world part of the game, it almost completely forgoes the rpg elements to focus on Sunny as a regular human being, and focuses in on things going on in town both around him and because of him, doing odd jobs and interacting with the residents - something that sounds really mundane but actually contrasts the dream world perfectly. Omocat's clear talent for telling a story with emotional storybeats, characters who behave realistically and can be empathised with flourishes, and I do think that the game overall would benefit from being set primarily in the real world, dropping most of headspace and saving it for short sections between each day. The light rpg mechanics work to the game's benefit too, acting as both a parody of traditional jrpgs and contextualising certain story moments and sidequests so that they're easier to experience from Sunny's point of view.

In headspace...it uh...yeah it's honestly mostly kinda pointless and contributes little to the plot save for how Sunny percieves his friends, but also one thing at the very end of the true route that ties in extremely well with the game's themes. This is why it's complicated - the real world portion of the game is great, and the way it contrasts and counterracts headspace is even better, but the problem is that the majority of your playthrough will be in headspace. It's the wacky adventure part of the game where all the fun stuff happens, where the rpg part of the game is actually prevalent, but it's almost completely detached from Omori's main themes. Some things from the real world do come into play, like Sunny's fears and the how he percieves his friends, but the whole thing feels like needless padding and, regardless of how well it works narratively, I'm unsure if I can say it works from an overall game experience standpoint. I mean, this is 17 or so hours out of a 23 hour game spent doing stuff that only very occasionally offers small doses of story insight and plot revelations. Even if the way it all comes together is brilliant, it doesn't change the fact that headspace feels like it could very easily be condensed and still be further used as a narrative device. Your game doesn't need to constantly progressing the story to be engaging, but you should at least have a larger or roughly equal ratio of story progression to time spent. I remember after the sweetheart scenario, I was expecting some kind of speech about how it's okay to want a partner, that there's plenty of fish in the sea, all that stuff, but also how wrong it is to be self indulgent, that you shouldn't dwell on things too much in spite of what may have happened in the past. This could've been a great moment to have headspace make a significant impact on Sunny's thoughts, but the whole thing was played up for a joke and, if anything, resulted in an outcome that was far worse than how things were from the scenario's outset. Stuff like this is why I wound up disliking headspace, on top of the way the actual rpg part of the game was handled. A lot of the humour didn't gel with me either, though that's a personal thing. I feel the game would've been better if headspace was far more concise or had a far more tangible effect on the plot.

From what I can gather, Omori's development was long and difficult, and the two differing parts of the game seem to indicate that Omocat didn't really know the exact direction to take with the game. I'm glad it turned out the way it did, though. It's a unique concept that can work better, and I'd be happy to see what a second attempt at it would look like. I absolutely understand why this game has become so beloved, and I respect it for what it does, even if I didn't like the portrayal of some of its core themes.