Odin Sphere Opinions

This game is a bit of a conundrum.

The bad points:

-its hugely repetitive, similar dungeons, then it tells you to replay them again to fight the big bosses
-i ended up stocking what I needed on a first play through, once, but its such hard work and I dont feel like doing it a second time
-the final plot epilogue doesnt make sense, as it is set before the events that bring it to an end. Why is that even there?

The good:

-the graphics are beautiful
-those phozons increase your level and make you very powerful
-in terms of its action RPG mechanics, its interesting
-the alchemy is good (especially napalm)
-the recipes are interesting
-and (spoken like a true lit graduate) its postmodern (to say anymore would be a spoiler)
-the story is good

Your opinions?

Isn't it Vanillaware? Every Vanillaware game I've experienced has had similar issues. Very pretty aesthetic, though sometimes taken to gross extremes (Dragon's Crown), and fun gameplay that gets really repetitive and not a very well-done structure to pull the story and everything else together. One of the sad things about liking Muramasa, and not actually wanting to continue playing it. It is pretty, and fun, but stopped actually being fun (at least I think that was them)

The new Odin Sphere coming out looks pretty. But I don't expect them to overcome their shortcomings as a studio. So I'd only check it out on a rental or getting it super cheap or used or something

Odin Sphere is one of my favorite games of all time. Vanilla Ware are a shining example of Art being more important then graphics. There are only a select few games out there that look better then Odin Sphere.

Vanillaware, but...........Im sure Square Enix had something to do with it too. So many different gaming companies working on the same game

Love this game.

And yeah, it was published by square in the PAL region. If you live in Japan or North America you'd have seen the Atlus logo on the case though. It can be hard to keep track of who publishes what around the world when it's so frequently different. Last I heard square was publishing call of duty in Japan of all things. It's usually just down to who has the distribution channels in each region and if a deal can be struck.

I had the PS2 version but I gave up on it because I couldn't handle the enormous loading times.