Odin Sphere is a very unique and interesting experience.
The artistic choice has been to make this game sprite based, which has led to an interesting use of something that resembles a 2D fighting game perspective with circular stages, containing mini-challenges with a variety of monsters and bosses for you to fight. While the games hand drawn sprites not only look amazing but also present some interesting gameplay, there are many problems that come with it. It doesn't really make sense as to why these issues arise, but as more and more sprites are on the screen, a very noticeable slowdown occurs. In fact it became so bad at one point, that my system actually locked up - making me lose some of my progress.
The size and detail of the sprites also come at a price - the camera is zoomed way in, in order to show the detail off, and I often found myself wanting to see more of the screen but not being able to. The camera also behaves very odd and there is seemingly no control over it, which is a bummer since they could totally have put the camera controls on the right analog stick. While fighting, I often found myself looking at the mini map (which resembles an old Atari game) instead of looking at the beautiful sprites. Because if you don't do that you would have to rely on blind fire and it just doesn't feel right. At one of the bosses the camera does actually zoom out so it's not like they couldn't have done this - but I guess it must have been some kind of hardware limitation that prevented them from doing such.
You play through the game as five different characters following their own progression through the same story. And for the most part, the game does a good job in tying these individual stories together in various ways. All the dialogue is voiced, which I didn't expect coming in to the game, so I was pleasantly surprised by that. Some of the voice acting is superb and gives birth to some very memorable characters - but some is straight up awful and breaks immersion. This goes for both the English and Japanese cast.
When first starting off as one of these characters you begin your journey as a low level character. At this point Odin Sphere presents plenty of opportunities to grief the player to the point of anger and frustration. Most of it felt like straight up poor design choices. Things like the POW-system (which I believe is in place to hold you back from button-mashing) stand out as really annoying game features. So basically as you're hitting your attack button you're also draining your POW, and once it runs out it basically renders your character completely unmovable for some time while regaining power. You're obviously susceptible to damage while this happens, and the countless deaths and potential grief situations caused by this system is obvious. At least you're still able to use some magic powers and such while slowly regaining your power. But it's like the game doesn't want you to fight. In order to conserve your power you'll have to jump away constantly to regain it, and while this in itself isn't super tedious since it requires some very basic form of tactics, the problem is that you have to be on the ground while charging up - and this can become very annoying on stages with many enemies.
The different characters all play differently enough to keep you interested, but some of the systems feel broken. For example, some of the characters have a block system. Seems fair enough right? Well no, not really. Because even if you block you still receive damage, so why would you ever want to use that feature? This is especially a problem when some of the enemies are designed in such a way where you feel like you pretty much have to take damage when fighting them in order to kill them. It becomes a choice where you can either block, take damage, and deal no damage at all - or attack, take more damage, but actually deal damage, turning battles into those of attrition instead of skill.
That said, there's lots of cheap enemies in the game that can really mess you up if you're not paying attention, and early on if feels like even regular enemies can put up a serious fight. The bosses you encounter might appear to present some clear patterns and seem interesting at first - you might even feel they're doable. And that's when it hits you. 1 hit K.O. bye bye thanks for playing. Yeah that's some great boss design right there. Especially when the boss isn't even on screen or mini map because you maybe jumped away to regain your POW, reload or to heal up. Some of the bosses feel so cheap that you'd actually be better of to just go back and grind it out in order to beat them. That's not enjoyable. At least the game lets you start of right from the stage or boss you died on and it's easy enough to leave and return at a later point.
Another thing that isn't enjoyable is getting hit right as you heal up. Is not only cheap, but since you can't actually move or do anything to prevent taking damage it becomes nothing but an extra dice roll to decide if you're going to be able to beat a boss or not. Now the bosses on their own wouldn't really be a problem though. I personally like cheap bosses because it makes me want to beat them even more - but really what makes the bosses in Odin Sphere so frustrating is their minions. Small, annoying things that serve no purpose what so ever but to bump in to you and mess up everything.
They're not designed to have a purpose like in some games where you perhaps kill the minions in order to damage the boss. No, no. These guys are designed for one purpose and one purpose only. And that is pissing you the hell off. That's the only purpose they serve. So maybe you're thinking "well just kill them and be done with it". Nope, sorry, the game isn't havin' that. These guys will respawn - so there's no point what so ever in fighting them. Try to dodge them while figuring out the boss patterns and grinding down the health of the boss. In my opinion, the boss battles would have been much more focused and enjoyable without these annoyances. Especially since they also bring down the framerate. The minions are especially annoying in stages with mini-bosses - where, even if you beat the boss, minions can still grief you and make you have to redo the entire thing again. Thankfully the game is kind enough not to make you redo the big bosses if you deliver a killing blow and then die from a cheap minion. I guess these minions were put in, in order for the player to get an unlimited supply of souls, so that you'll have an unlimited supply of magic - but because they give so little it's just not worth it. You'd be dead before you got enough souls to throw of another spell. Some bosses will also heal up, so there's really NO reason to waste time on the minions.
As I mentioned, sometimes it's better to just save yourself the grief and just go and grind it out a little before fighting the boss. Most of the grief can be avoided by grinding. Now, beating a really hard and cheap boss can feel really good in its own right - but there's something extra fun about coming back later to these areas as a high level character and just destroying everything and getting S Ranks left and right as you burn through it, getting your well deserved revenge on all the things that previously caused you so much grief. So while there can be some grief early on it does get better later in the game as your character gets more powerful. And in fact, once you really get the hang of things you'll develop your own ways of griefing the bosses with your powerful magics and items. This leads to a clear sense of progression, where it really feels like your character is becoming more and more powerful.
There's obviously another way, and that is to swallow your pride and just turn down the difficulty setting. From my experience you didn't have to do much grinding on easy until the very late stages of the game where the game even tells you something in the vein of "hey you know what dude, you might want to level up some before jumping into this other stuff". I don't know... Personally I would have liked it if these bosses instead had level based damage (this is already in the game for some things) and that the game was designed in such a way where you didn't have to revisit stuff in order to beat it. Now while a playthrough can take anything from 3 to 10 hours on one character, it quickly adds up and revisiting areas to level up becomes a very tedious task. Especially if you have to do it on a character you really don't like playing as.
Now I quickly mentioned S Ranks. Surprisingly enough, that's actually something that stood out when playing this game. Why? Well, the game grades you on all the stages and mini bosses you complete. It's not really clear as to where that score actually goes or what the whole point of that stuff is, but I guess if you S Rank a stage you'd probably get better items at the end of it or something like that. It doesn't really matter - because at the end of the day there's something very enjoyable about beating a stage and knowing you did a damn good job on it, and also have the game acknowledge that fact. I would have liked for them to do some more with that feature though - perhaps keeping track on what stages you've S-Ranked and keeping track on your total score and stuff like that. Maybe provided some ways of revisiting areas that you haven't yet S-Ranked. That would make the revisiting of stages much less painful.
One thing I found very interesting is that, while you can only have one item equipped, the items in the game all make perfect sense. Hate pushing down to pick up items? Maybe a Draw Ring is for you. Feel it takes to much time eating food? Maybe a Gourmet Ring can help. Hate the POW system? Maybe this unlimited POW potion is right up your alley. I really liked that stuff - and there's also some micro management to be had if you really want to.
All in all I'm really torn about this game. Some points had me go "man I hate this game" and some had me go "oh man I love this game". Overall I really enjoyed it... But it all boils down to the frame rate issues. If I wanted to play a game with poor framerates I could have just loaded something up on my 8 year old computer. One of the most important points for me when it comes to console games is steady framerates. This game does not deliver on that part. Is the story, gameplay and beautiful graphics worth the frame rate issues? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. If you're willing to look past those issues, I can definitely recommend it.