ODIN SPHERE: Armageddon

I have beaten this game and seen both endings and I can say that it will be in my PS2 top-five for all time. An amazingly good game with an equally great story and the best 2d artwork of ANY game on the system hands down. Also, Odin Sphere is unique amongst my favorites for getting it's spot the list for it's story foremost, then graphics and then gameplay. More novel-like than any game I have played, it is not only completely voice acted, but those voices never detract from the presentation instead enhancing the gameplay whenever characters speak. Atlus USA should be lauded for it's job on the localization. All of these elements make Odin Sphere a real triumph. Now how did the game end, you're wondering?

I won't be giving anything away when I tell people that the end of Odin Sphere is the end of the world. You can make guesses at that after looking at the cover of the game, the game's titular king, Odin, is a character from Norse mythology where the event of Ragnarok (the Norse end of all creation) figures heavily. This world-ending has a different name, but the myth is borrowed from in parts along with a few others from other cultures to make the game's overall theme. Where the endgame gets it's texture and context is in a series of texts known generally as the prophecies. These can be accessed any time for reading in the 'prophecy' menu, and are won from npcs in story events mostly. The old manuscripts tell about the end of the world from a number of different perspectives, but the major ideas do not change. The world will be visited by five calamities and in the end the land will fall away into the void and the sky eaten by the Lord of Serpents. During the Armageddon Mode, the entire experience changes. The beauty that the world once possessed is shattered and just about everyone perishes in the calamities.

It is easy to look at the graphical style and the characters, a fairy princess for example, and think that Odin Sphere is for youngsters but it is relevant on the adult-level far more often than it is not. I think the art style and the lush nature of the environments are designed to be placed next to the blasted devastation of the armageddon mode as a contrast. Kamitani (the director) wanted us to mourn for Erion, I think. The npcs lament, cry and beg for release from the doom of their senseless deaths. The forests burn, and mountains are brought low and the great cities razed without exception. We are to be given the explicit message that nothing survives this devastation. There is a 'good' ending obviously but as always these things are relative.

That brings me to the way the endings are handled. Each of the five calamities must be defeated by one of the five main characters. Not only that, but for the 'good' ending each calamity needs to be fought by a particular character, and the choices are not obvious even when you use the prophecies as a guide. There is one curve ball that pretty much guarantees that you will see the bad ending before the good, though this is probably by design however as nothing in the game was done without a great amount of thought.

Now before and after each of these five battles there are cut scenes, and for each of the five characters there are good and bad cut scenes depending on who you choose and therefore which track you are on. I should say that some of the best story in the whole game is given over in 'bad' endings for the various characters, so you will probably need at least three trips through armageddon mode to see it all. It's certainly worth the effort.

I really can't go any further without giving too much away, but this kind of match-the-character approach to ending the game allows for an amazingly multi-layered story to close out this epic. You get many viewpoints to the end days of Erion and you even have a chance to end things on a lighter note if you are careful about it. If you folllow the path the texts lead you along, there is one last book to read where the fate of the world is decided. As a videogame, Odin Sphere will most likely be referred to by designers time and time again for the way in handles narrative and plot. Right now there isn't a game that does it better. As I mentioned in a previous post, George Kamitani is going to be a big Kojima-like deal before too long. Count on it.

ODIN SPHERE: Healthy cooking for the coming apocalypse

I am knocking on the end of this game, but I have encountered the dreaded endgame grind that I once thought would be confined to the various Fantasies Final. The occasion of needing to power-up the various characters of Odin Sphere leads me to use a system that I only rarely visited during the normal game. There are two parts to it actually; The Pooka Kitchen and The Pooka Cafe.

I should explain what a pooka is first I guess. A pooka is a little rabbit-person who once used to be an actual human but was effected by the "Curse of the Pooka". The entire nation of Valentine was afflicted with this curse through the machinations of it's mad king. Valentine is not a very nice place to be at the moment, but the Pooka still live there underground. They get involved in various plots to heal their land, mainly trough the Pooka Prince and Velvet, the princess of Valentine. This underground village is where the cafe and kitchen are located and all the characters gain access to this place eventually, but some much later than others.

Now once you have access to the village you can start cooking, and cooking is all about hit points. Each character has two levels instead of one, one level rank for your psypher weapon and another level rank for your hit points. You get experience for your psypher by killing foes and collecting the phozons(little purple firefly like things) that appear when they die. You get experience for your hit points by eating food. There is no other way. You often find various food items in the course of battle, and often seeds from which to grow more food as well. These seeds eat the aforementioned phozons to grow into trees or vines that give fruit. When you eat the food whatever it is you get an immediate healing effect, which fills your current total of HP, but you also get an about of xp that goes towards your HP level. The higher this level the higher your maximum hit points will be.

This is why cooking is so important; the food you cook in the pooka village (kitchen or cafe, they both work the same way) gives WAY more xps than the food you find laying around or grow from seeds. They have complicated recipes as well, which you find in the treasure left behind by enemies. One of the oddities here is that you actually need to bring the food you want to cook to the pookas, instead of just buying it when you get there. Times are lean for the little guys I guess. At any rate, one of my favorite recipes is for Yogurt Stew. Doesn't sound so good, eh? Well remember that what we want is levels, and this particular dish has good xp for not too much trouble. The recepie goes like this, one carroteer, one yogurt, one portion of chicken, and an ariel coin(one of the various coins featured in the game). The important part of this particular recipe is that most of the ingredients can be manufactured without too much trouble.

Yogurt is easy to get from milk, and milk is available from many shopkeepers in the game. The carroteers can be found in the ground in certain places, you just need to know where to look. The chicken comes from eggs. This makes sense, right? Well, in Erion the process for getting the chicken is most curious. First take your egg and place it on the ground, after a bit a little yellow chick will hatch from it without any help from a mother hen. This little chick will wander the level, eating whatever plant seeds it finds. Once three seeds are eaten it will quite magically transform into a big grey hen. It then becomes your job to beat on the poor thing until it once again magically transmogrifies into a chicken bone with meat attached. This parody of agriculture could only be more ridiculous if it actually changed into a bucket of KFC original recipe.

I like to get the components for four of these dishes before I trek to the kitchen. It takes a little time but it's worth it, seeing as four stews will double your max hps if you're anywhere near the 300 mark. I haven't found the need to balloon my max hps in this way until this point, but it is an interesting little system. In a way, if you had the necessary components and access to the village you could shoot way past the intended hit point totals needed for where ever you are in the game. I suppose the investment in time is good deterrent, but there isn't anything really stopping you from grinding previously visited levels and getting fat on HPs.

It should be mentioned that the ingredients for the more complex dishes aren't available in most stories until after the midway point. So those are harder to abuse, but it isn't like phozons where the only way to get them is by slaying enemies. Is it the devs allowing the player to ratchet their own level of difficulty a bit, just some fault-tolerant design? With the heavy twitch-factor involved it might have been a stroke genius to include the kitchen and the cafe, but it is obvious that by the point I am at now I was supposed to have been using them much more.

ODIN SPHERE: Velvet

Velvet is the final character and her tale, "Fate" is the final book in the main story. At this point both NPCs and texts of prophecy have hinted at a story after the current one, but the focus of this post is of course on the chain wielding vixen herself. Tooling about with her is about as different as I think would be possible in the game engine.

Now my assumption earlier that she was a 'stick and run' kind of character was correct, but I only barely scratched the surface there. As a matter of course when Velvet uses her dual-psypher chain against enemies, they do not take any knockback. That is that when you are comboing into an enemy Valkyrie, she's comboing right into you at the same time. Your weapon does less damage than the average, and at the same time will not keep anyone from attacking you up close. It is also very easy for enemy attacks to knock you out of your combo, creating a real offensive lack in comparison to the other characters.


Another layer in the failcake that makes Velvet's combat skills inferior is that her combos in general are longer. This means that it takes more time to get to the most damaging attacks which are invariably at the end of the combo. During this time she is standing stock still, getting attacked from behind or above. She does excel in a few areas though. First thing to remember is that she is a range fighter first, and whenever she can you have to use the range advantage because of the lack of knockback from her chains. The upshot of this is that she is a menace against smaller enemies, including flying enemies. Her special trick is a "homing chain" attack that basically just streaks out beyond the screen and wreaks havok with any number goblins, frogs and various spirits so long as they are in range. At higher psypher levels this is usually a one shot kill.


Secondly her spinning dance-like attacks seem to shield her from whirling swords, arrows and fireballs while she is attacking. The value of this is felt especially against wizards, who's many crimes have already been discussed. Lastly she is a good mover and can get around quickly, using her chain in a tarzan swing across the screen during which she is totally invulnerable to attack for some reason. Using this often is sometimes key to nailing down the bosses because it falls perfectly into the 'run' part of the 'stick and run' strategy. These positives though fun to play with, and while not failing to make fighting with her interesting, don't really make up for her overall lack of punch in most cases. Chalk this one up to your usual increase in difficulty over time of gameplay.

Now there are many good things about Velvet, not the least of which is that she is a bastard princess that dresses like a old-timey burlesque dancer. Always appreciated. Her voice work is easily the best in the game outside of Odin himself. The voice actor in this case really conveys the correct emotion in all instances and enhances the game to the effect of my next point. Velvet's story is the most compelling in my opinion. It is ultimately tragic, (I think they all could be eventually...) but it deals with some real issues and carries the player a little bit beyond the screen in the way the FFVII did.


"Fate" is actually about Velvet and her brother, Ingway. Ingway is a fav of mine despite the fact that he is never actually controllable. He figures in major ways in two of the other four tales so you do get to know him pretty well by the time Velvet is the subject of the game. His story is a bad boy makes good kind of tale, which meshes nicely with Velvet's fight against her prophesied destiny. Being at the end of the main game, Velvet's tale plays a little of the 'clean-up' role in Odin Sphere. So she does spend a little time re-treading some ground already traversed by others, but in return she also ends up learning the most about the game world and seems to have complete dominion over the 'shockers' in the story. Events here go most of the way in explaining why things are the way they are, so story wise she is easily the best character.

Now strictly speaking the end of Velvet's tale is not the end at all. At this I have to admit that I was a little disappointed, after all I am ready to move on to something new. What awaits on the other side of her tale is the Armageddon Mode, which at the moment I do not understand in the slightest so I'm not commenting on it now. I am taking a break from this one for a week or so however. So expect something different next time.

ODIN SPHERE: Frigging Wizards

I love this game, but there is one enemy that just makes me completely lose patience. This is the wizard. These little jerks are raised in a dingy city known at Titania, where I have spent some of the most frustrating moments of the entire game. Part of this is due to the fact that wizardly biology allows for a single wizard mother to whelp a litter of between eight and twelve of the beard-stroking abominations in a single breeding.

The other is their annoying propensity to teleport away the very second you hit them. Of course only the 'pointy hat' breed of wizard will perform this particular injustice upon you, the weaker (and far less numerous) 'hoodie' breed of wizard will just stand there and take their beatings like normal enemies, bless their little hearts.

Now all of this is really not even the issue, because this part of the wizard experience is totally manageable, cute even. It is when you add their varied and totally cheap attacks into the mix that you begin to understand true evil. Both species of odinius wizaratus have the following player-enraging powers;

1. throwing fireballs (natch)
2. summoning little eyeball familiars (not too annoying here)
3. creating whirling swords that shoot out at you in various mesmerizing patterns and do serious damage (not my favorite)
4. summoning ice spirts (this one we don't need)
5. summoning fire spirits (also wik)
6. summoning incorporeal as in untouchable yet still quite damaging spirit beasties from the netherworld (WTF?)
7. damaging+poisoning you from half a level away (We need more wizard regulation in America!)
8. AND turning you into a frigging frog.

As you can see any extended battle with two or more of these wretches quickly leads to ten or so other flying beasties chasing you down as you try to dodge whirling swords and fireballs while poisoned. THEN when you finally get to them and they TELEPORT away! What gives? Why do these game developers hate us so? Is it karma? Is there a god?

You might want to wait to ask yourself the last question because these terrible, hateful robe wearing demons can also be bosses. No no, not mid-bosses, the real deal. There are three wizards in the main story; Urzur, Skuldi, and Beldor and they all suck ass. Why sugar coat it? All three need to be fought at different times, though it seems only once each. Beldor appears as the handler of a dragon named Belial at a few times at the start of the game. Of course you don't fight Beldor at that point because anyone confronted with his cheap ass bull so early on would probably quit the game.

I don't want people to get the wrong idea, these little fucks can be beaten. I've done it a bunch of times already. You just need to strike their whirling swords back at them, which stuns them momentarily and keeps them from teleporting away. The problem becomes doing this twenty times against the wizard bosses while fighting all their pets. I am currently stuck on the Beldor boss battle where you have to fight the wizard and the dragon at the same time. This is probably the hardest boss battle in the game, in my defense. All I have to say is... this charade ends tonight, Beldor.

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.