ODIN SPHERE: Oswald

I should first say that I've been playing Odin Sphere for a few months so I'll be starting my posts about this one (and more than a few others) in media res. I'll come up with a list of the titles I'm playing at some future point. As for the experience of playing Odin Sphere to this point I have to say it's been a major blast.

It's as if Final Fight got into a steamy love affair with the movie "Legend". The results are really something. The artwork and story are top notch. The game looks so impressive the name "George Kamitani" (the game's director) will be one you remember. The main tale is told from five perspectives. One for each playable character. I am currently playing through the story for Oswald, the Black Knight. He's the fourth of five, so I am more than halfway done with the game. The three others I have already played, Valkyrie, the Pooka Prince and the Fairy Princess are set up in a similar fashion, with the major differences coming in the attacks and abilities of the characters themselves.

At it's heart the game is a side scrolling brawler so the way you play the Black Knight is very different from the way you played the Pooka Prince. Just try to remember how the combos for Guy and Cody of Final Fight forced different play styles and you'll have the basic idea. Some of the characters have to fight at range, others are straight up brawlers that need to be up close and the Valkyrie and I am assuming Velvet (the final character) are stick-and-run types able to do a little of both.

Now on to Oswald, the Black Knight. He's a guy we have already seen many times in the stories of the other characters. To put it bluntly, he spends the majority of his screen time being a tool, and killing dragons and the like for a variety of dumb reasons. His story is one of a lost soul finding his way through love... Sounds sappy, right? Well out of the entire cast so far, Oswald is the most devil may care of them all. He resorts to killing and intimidation with little regard for the opinions of others. After grinding my teeth through the "Fairy Princess" story this was quite a welcome change. Oswald's job is essentially to be as bad ass as humanly possible. Put more simply, he's the Chuck Norris of the Fairy Kingdom. He fills this role with aplomb, even if he gets a little emo at points.

His combos and moveset are easily the strongest in the game. His weapon, the "Belderiever", is often said to the most powerful weapon ever crafted, and the ease with which it slays the heck out of stuff backs this up. It's really novel that in this instance when you are told that you are the most potent warrior ever, you actually are! In many RPGs, especially western RPGs, the strongest weapon or most powerful arcane knowledge imaginable ends up being just a palette swap of some other weapon or spell with slightly better stats. That of course does not mean that his boss battles are easy, on the contrary some of them are annoyingly difficult, but the rabble that comes in between them is nearly inconsequential. Just think of Swartzenegger in Commando. There's a very similar effect here.

So Oswald is all offense and little defense, but what really gives his part of the game some challenge is a restriction on where you are actually allowed to go. Usually after beating an area of the game map you are allowed to return there and get reagents for potions and exps and all of the good things that come from fighting evil. Not so here.

This brings us to a discussion of the ever elusive Carroteer. Now, a carroteer is just like a carrot, except it is part of a class of various in-game vegetables known as mandagoras and it has some kind of magical property that allows you to turn them into healing potions. This of course makes them the ONLY mandagoras a roughneck like Oswald is going to ever care about. Different areas of the game have these tubers in varying amounts. The ground will yield one or sometimes two different kinds. It is usually customary halfway though a story to take a break from the main road to go back and grind a little in the Carroteer's favorite zone to stock up on healing potions. The trouble is that Oswald, so love stricken at the time, could never imagine doubling back to help make life a little easier for the player. That is that these previously played areas are simply not selectable. Very annoying.

I suppose this makes an offset to the Belderiever's amazing offensive power, but at certain points at the end this restriction makes getting hit by enemies at all a serious problem. Oswald's low defensive qualities combined with no healing makes things harder. Add this to the fact that Oswald's quest for love gets him into a number of boss fights where the air is filled with swarms of weaker enemies, making him a finesse fighter all of the sudden. Switching gears between the normal fights and the boss fights with Oswald is part of the challenge here for sure. It's an interesting design choice, making the situation play the character instead of the other way around.

The very end of Oswald's story is actually the start of the last movement of the Valkyrie's story, where he plays a major role. Of course I've already seen that, so I know how his play really ends, but it's so interesting to see how Oswald went from a deadly enemy at the start of Valkyrie's story to something totally different by the end of his own tale. Here we see how the stories intertwine and feed on one another. This is accomplished with the aid of the extensive "Drama" menu that lays out every cut scene in the game in a linear timeline. As you see them in game they become available for review, or for a complete replay from start to end with touch of one button. This is nothing to sneeze at as in one continuous play the Fairy Princess' story took over 25 mins from beginning to end.