Spin Cycle

To kick off the long holiday weekend, I spent Thursday afternoon playing kickball with several of my colleagues. Although the play was certainly "idyllic" and "pastoral," as we hoped, it also resulted in some very sore muscles and a wicked allergy attack, so I spent Friday at home, on the couch, with a family-sized box of Kleenex and my shiny new copy of Odin Sphere (one could say that I regressed to my "larval stage" for a day). Kickball notwithstanding, I am an adult, so I also devoted part of my day to doing laundry. That's in the interest of full disclosure.

After playing kickball, on Thursday night, I dropped in on my local Gamestop to see if they had any copies of Odin Sphere in stock. They did, just one (the gutted store copy). The clerk indicated to me that they weren't expecting this title to be a quick seller. However, when Penny Arcade calls something "an absolute must play" it's probably going to get a significant sales boost. For my part, the PA endorsement went a long way but in my household we're big fans of anything localized by Atlus USA (so many [hundreds of] hours sunk into Disgaea and Disgaea 2) so I probably would have picked it up in any case.

Odin Sphere employs a narrative framing device that sets all the action within a series of books being read by little girl in the attic of her home. The story of each of the main characters---Gwendolyn, Cornelius, Mercedes, Oswald, and Velvet---plays out in a separate book, but each story intertwines with all the others to produce the main narrative of Odin Sphere. A character who has tragically died in one book might appear again in another as the events of each book unfold before, during, and after the events of the others.

The sprites and animation are very beautiful and detailed. I think almost everyone knows by now that this is a two-dimensional, side-scrolling beat-em-up/RPG hybrid, but there's a twist. Each stage is a ring, so if you scroll in one direction long enough you'll eventually scroll back around to the starting point. Several of these rings are strung together in a non-linear group to form a level. Clearing the final boss stage clears the level, so you can proceed by a direct path to the boss or you can meander through all of the different stages to max out on experience for your weapon and your hit-point gauge.

The alchemy/gardening system adds several layers of depth and strategy. You can grow fruit and even animals from seeds and eat the proceeds to restore hit points and gain experience toward leveling them up. Later in the game, you can carry food items from the battlefield to the "Pooka village" restaurant to create gourmet dishes that will rapidly upgrade your hit points (if you can stomach the Pooka proprietess' terrible voice acting). You can also combine nearly any item in the game with a "Material" to create potions for healing or buffing yourself, potions to damage or debuff enemies, and other miscellaneous potions (for instance, Juggler magically transforms all of the items on the ground into different items at random---great for potentially turning your inventory trash into treasure).

The only other drawback (that is, other than the few instances of over-the-top acting in an otherwise excellent vocal track) is a ridiculous slowdown in the framerate in a few places. So far I've only noticed this on major boss stages that have a lot of action going on, but when this slowdown happens it's incredibly annoying. I'm thinking of playing through the first book again on my PS2 to determine if the slowdown is endemic or if it's a product of playing a PS2 game on a system it wasn't designed for (the PS3). Additionally, the PS3 occasionally reads the save data as corrupted, but the data is actually fine. Exiting to the XMB and then re-loading the game turns up a perfectly fine save.

Atlus USA is known for pressing limited quantities of their games, so if you plan to get this game (and I highly recommend that you do, if you like this sort of game), get it now before it goes all Valkyrie Profile. (Or "all MvC2," as Killa would say.)