Odin Sphere - Many stories combine into one.

Odin's Sphere was a game that was made by Atlus back in 2007 for the PS2. The game features 2D sidescrolling movement and five playable characters, each with a detailed backstory that twines and intersects with the others to make a grand tale that tells the story of a world and the nations it contains.

Each of the five main characters is a noble from one of the five nations, each fighting to make their own nation the winner of the war, but eventually the real issues rise, and they find themselves fighting together to protect the world, the kingdoms, and each other safe from the inexorable tide that threatens them all.

Let's start off with the graphics. This is one of the highlights of the game in my personal world next to the story. The graphics themselves are simple, making the levels feel like a classic 2D side scrolling adventure, but everything loops around to create an arena for each character to battle the enemies in.

The backgrounds and areas are all highly detailed despite the simplistic style they picked, and can feature four or five layers of scenery, making the world feel like it's right out of a pop up book. The character and enemy models are unique, fun, and engaging, making you want to keep going to see what's next.

The sound track for this game is very alluring. Though it might not have the most variation in the world compared to other games, they managed to make each individual song fit the scene, character, or place with an amazing amount of accuracy, helping add to the story element, or setting the scene for a particular emotion filled scene.

Story, now this is where the game truly excels in a way few games manage. It's hard enough coming up with an entrancing story that draws people in for one character, but these guys managed to do that with five characters, and then still managed to link all the stories together in a convincing and interesting way to create the final chapter of the game.

It's not even that they just made five stories and linked them at the end. No, they took and made each story link together all the way through the game. You play through person by person, seeing each characters view of the world, their personality and desires, and how they interact and think of each other character in the game. Then move on to the next, and with each person you go through the story is shaped and expanded, revealing truths and secrets not seen in the other paths.

Now the characters themselves, this is the real heart of the game. You have Gwendolyn the Valkrye, Cornelius the Pooka Prince, Mercedes the Fairy Princess, Oswald the Shadow Knight, and Velvet the Scarlet Witch. Each one has unique ways of attacking, unique abilities, and of course, a unique story.

Let's talk about the characters a little bit more. The first one, Gwendolyn, is a valkrye, as stated before. So her weapon of choice is a spear with a psypher tip on it that she inherited from her sister. Her attacks have good range and speed, and is probably the easiest character to use over all. Her abilities including being able to glide with the wings on her hips and create a shadow clone.

Cornelius is a a human who got cursed and turned into one of the furry creatures known as Pooka. He's really fast and light on his feet, but his attack range is a little lacking despite the sword he uses thanks to being the smallest of all the characters. But his use of a sword is nearly unmatched in the game.

Mercedes is the princess of the fairy land Ringwold, and the only main character to have a truly ranged weapon with the crossbow. Being a fairy she's able to fly, and proves to be a lot faster and agile in the air than she does on the ground, proving that to be the preferred method of combat.

Oswald is able to harness the powers of shadow from the world of the dead, wrapping himself in it and drastically increasing his speed and damage for a short time. He's also one of the more agile characters, being able to jump the highest and run quickly, only truly being beaten by Mercedes in ability to get around.

Velvet is the weakest character in the game physically, but has a larger range of moves to pull from. Her chain allows her to have a decent range, as well as tracking foes, and she learns the spells from her pyspher at a lower level than the others, allowing her to fling into a much flashier fight much faster in exchange for the low power.



Now the whole story of the game is actually being portrayed as a story being read by a young girl. You control her and select the story to read, with each book being one character, then then eventually you get a sixth book for the final chapter. If you make the right choices in this sixth book, you can get one more describing the events and the true ending for the story.



Now as for how the game plays, it's really good and doesn't detract from the story at all. Let's just set bosses to the side for a moment and focus on normal combat first. All the characters have normal attacks with their weapons that have different attack speeds, ranges, damage, etc, making combat with each person a unique affair, and that's to say nothing of the special abilities each one has that you can use.

The way these work is you enter into an area and anywhere from three up to twenty enemies could spawn in a specific room that you have to beat before you can advance to the next area. Now because of how many opponents you could have at a time and each person's specialties, you might end up standing back and weakening the group down from afar before finishing them off with an ability. You might just charge head in and carve huge swaths of opponents like a living lawnmower. Either way they manage to keep combat entertaining and keep you on your toes and constantly reacting.

Each stage will have a boss, and usually two mini bosses. The mini bosses might have enemies with them, they might not. Depends on where you are. But the mini bosses require you to use your abilities and evasion to getting in, apply hurt and get out of there, only making things harder when you have other enemies to dodge in the process.

Main bosses feel similar to something out of a movie if done right, and they're usually either another playable character, or something that far out classes you in size. You're right in there, trading blows, dodging attacks, applying as much damage as possible without getting hurt yourself. This isn't to say that up close is the only way to fight, and some bosses actually punish you for trying that, so you have to always be fast thinking and adaptable to changing battle situations.


Now to help you level up your abilities and health they have a couple of options. The first is a little area that's run by a race of cursed rabbit like people called Pooka. The Pooka have set up a restaurant that you can head to and eat which will raise the experience for your health, psypher, or both. This can be a little expensive, but it also is one of the easiest ways to gain a lot of experience quickly.

The second and most frequent way is by growing and eating food out in the field. Most of the food you find will be more geared towards restoring health so you can continue fighting, but there are several foods that will give more experience than they'll restore health, and most plants will drop their own seed when you're done, so you can keep on reusing them. The catch is that the seeds grow by absorbing the energy from dead enemies. No enemies, no fruit. So you got to be careful there, especially since absorbing those souls yourself is one of the ways you gain power.

The game also introduces an interesting alchemy mechanic. You can get materials, that when you fuse different things with different level materials will create different items for you to use for healing or combat purposes. One of the main ways you can do this is by fusing two materials together. This will multiply their levels together, but you can't go higher than level 99 or it looks back around to 1. The higher the level of the materials, the more phozons get released upon alchemization to help power you up even further or grow your plants. So creating something at level 1, and creating the same thing for level 51 will result in the same item just with more phozons.

Over all this is an amazing game, and well worth picking up to play if you haven't tried it already. Got reviews from IGN, 1up, and Metacritic here if you want to see other thoughts on the game as well.

Quest 64 - Gotta Catch 'em All, Element Version.

Quest 64 is a game released back in 1998 by THQ. It was the first RPG that was made for the Nintendo 64 after it's release, and was known as Holy Magic Century in parts of Europe and Australia when it was released. The story itself is simple. You play as a boy of unknown age as he travels across the continent gathering elements and elemental stones while searching for his father who disappeared a month previous, and in the end unearth a big bad evil monster trying to take control and banish it. In other words your more or less typical RPG story.

The graphics for the time the game came out were amazing. We look at them now and see all manner of crazy pixels everywhere and badly defined monsters, uninspiring attacks, but looking at it when it was released as a new game, those same things were amazing, awe inspiring, and a tribute to the power of technology.

The sound was uninspired, even in that time. They played very little variation in music, and they didn't even have battle music for anything except for the final boss. The sound effects for the attacks was nice, but they really should have spent a little more time on music for the rest of the game.

World design. Now this one I have to give them credit for. While there are still ways they could have improved things, they did a really good job I think of designing a large and beautiful world for you to explore and find things in. From towns to forests, caves and deserts, every part of the world is designed amazingly well for a game as old as this.

For game play you don't get much special. Single button interaction with most things which is also the same button you use for attacking something physically in combat. What really interested me was how they work spells. You start with one in each of the four elements, fire, water, earth, and wind. Each of these gives you the most basic spell for that element. As you collect more elements, you choose where to put them, and start getting new spells.


Fire spells are generally the offensive spells, with most of the attacks being either beams that can hit multiple opponents, or pillars that have a smaller range of effect, but often do more damage over all. You also get the power to buff your physical attack through the fire element.







Water spells can be and do many things, but the primary use is healing. Unless you plan on carrying a lot of items with you, healing with water element is going to be your best friend through most of the game. Water element also gets some of the same high damage, low accuracy pillars flame does, as well as ice attacks that could freeze a foe in their tracks.





Earth spells involve a lot of chucking large rocks at people's heads, but also allows you to tap into and shake things up by hitting people with earthquakes. Earth hits hard, possibly even harder than fire, but requires a lot more skill to be able to aim and use well.  They also govern the buffs to increase your defensive stats.

Lastly wind spells. Wind spells are generally the weakest attack wise, but make up for it by firing multiple blades at a time, allowing the damage to really stack up quickly, especially against an opponent weak to it. But you can also make one large attack that hits lots of enemies in a line, or buff up your agility to make it harder for you to get hit by anything.






The surprisingly large variation in skills combined with enemies that will have varying levels up weakness or resistance to different elements makes this a really fun game. It might not catch the attention of someone who's played a lot of RPGs before due to rather simplistic story and sound elements, but is still a fairly solid game for people looking to get into RPGs for the first time.

To read more reviews by other people you can check out the ones here by IGN, Gamespot, and RPGFan.

Gitaroo Man - Music Battle, Go!

Gitaroo Man is a very unique game. It was made for the PS2 by iNiS studios in mid June of 2001. iNiS Studios specializes in music and rhythm games, and Gitaroo Man is no exception to this franchise. The game itself focuses on a kid from earth who inherits an instrument from another planet called the Gitaroo, and this sets an adventure in motion that involves him traveling and fighting music battles.

You end up fighting anything from guys in bee suits, to skeletons, to robot sharks, and all other manner of interesting colourful characters. And over the course of the game end up freeing the planet where the Gitaroo originally came from before heading back home. Now some of you might say this is spoilers, but the game makes your goal clear right from the first stage or two.

Jumping right in, the graphics in this game are goofy and blocky, but the style of it fits the goofyness of the game pretty well. Luckily on games like this your primary focus is on the music and game play, not on the graphics. So while they aren't astounding, they're good enough not to detract from the game in anyway. Course we do have to keep in mind this game was made over ten years ago.

Sound. Now this is where the game really drags you in. The music tracks in this game are varied, and the enemies you're fighting always fit the music well. They designed it in a way that even if it takes you a few tries, or a few dozen, you aren't likely to get bored by hearing the same tracks over and over again. You jump from rock, to electronic, to jazz, to acoustic, and that's only a small selection of the musical flavor that they have in this game.

Now as for the story, there really isn't much of one. You can pretty much figure out the whole plot of the game by the time you reach the third stage at the latest as they don't worry about plot twists or anything all that much. This isn't to say that the story isn't interesting. It's just focused a little bit more on being a funny story to watch unfold than anything dramatic to draw you in deeper. The music and game play are the real hooks into the attraction for this game.

Now then for the game play. They follow the easy to learn, hard to master approach with this game. The game is divided into two main phases. The attack phase, and the defense phase.

In the attack phase you use the control stick to follow a line around and it weaves about. In time to the music you have bars that appear on this line that you have to press and hold the button for the duration of the bar, then let up right as it hits the end. This seems like a really simple concept, but combining the two with how fast some of the songs get can be really complex.

In the defense phase you have the different symbols from the controller coming in from the edge of the screen to the center. You just have to hit the correct button as it hits the center of the screen. Simple, right? Well at the start it is because you only have a few notes coming in at a time. As you start getting closer and closer to the end of the game, you start having to keep track of multiple notes from multiple directions at the same time.

Now just to make things a little harder they give you almost no time at all to switch from your attack phase to your defense phase, and you lose health for every action you miss. So if you lose all your health before the end up the song, you have to start over from the beginning, while trying to get the opponents health down instead.

In conclusion, while the game itself might not be the prettiest thing around, the music and simple yet addicting game play will be enough to keep many gamers entertained for hours or days at a time, possibly even more than that. Got reviews from IGN, Gamespot, and Eurogamer there so you can see what other people think.

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne - The beginning, or the end?

Nocturne is an usual game compared to many as the game starts with the end of the world. Not a fake end, or even the treat of it ending. Within the first five minutes of the game the world explodes. Kaput, gone. Those familiar with Atlus and the SMT series won't find this as surprising as others, especially since this is one of the games that follows their mature game theme.

The story itself unfolds in the world that is created with the destruction of the old one. It's a temporary world, used to help shape what the new world will be in the cycle. Your character, the main character, is a human to start off with, just like the friends who got dragged with you into this messed up world. You are all that's left of humanity in a world full of demons, but even you aren't safe, getting turned into a demon yourself by none other than Lucifer.

Your job is to navigate the world, fighting demons and growing in strength, while figuring out what happened to the world, and trying to find your friends in the process. But with the state of the world how it is, that's easier said than done, and you have to fight your way through organizations vying for the ability to shape the world with their ideals.

Now, this game might have come out in Feb 2003, but is still one of the best games that has come out to date as far as I'm concerned. And here's why I think this.

We'll start with the things that people notice first in most cases. The graphics. Considering that the game came out ten years ago, the graphics are amazing. The world is a little dull, but considering you're looking at an apocalyptic chaos world after everything is destroyed, it makes sense that there isn't much colour anymore.

Next thing I tend to notice is the sound. Does the sound actually please the ears or help set the scene? Yeah, I think it does in this. The soundtrack is amazing, and they've made it so it fits the scene and enhances the mood and feel of the interactions with the different people and places.

Next thing I'm going to hit on is design and story. Now, without spoiling the story at all, I'm going to say that they managed to draw me into the story and hook me. I couldn't put the controller down, I had to know what was going to happen next. It was really well written, even if the protagonist doesn't speak through the whole game.

Now the world design. You would think that there's only so much you could do with a world that was destroyed so recently and so completely, but they managed to combine real places from Japan with places that have sprung up from nothing or been modified. Going from a destroyed hospital  to the center of destroyed Tokyo, traveling to this high tech super dome, and even into the cyber realm. Each place skillfully done and unique from the rest.

Gameplay has a few things that are involved in it. The thing most people think of is how the player interacts with the game, but there's also the extra features and everything else they added to keep things interesting and interactive for the player.

The players interaction to the world is simple, which isn't always a bad thing. It's a single button to interact with the characters and the world, simple and easy to navigate menus for both in and out of combat, and the combat is entirely turn based. What makes things a bit more complex combat wise to keep things interesting, is that you get a number of turns equal to the number of people you have in combat with a max of four. If you hit an elemental weak point, you get an extra turn. But if you hit a resistance it takes two turns, and if you hit an immunity it takes all of your remaining turns, so learning your enemies is important to success.

What really helps me appreciate how much time and effort they put into this game is the sheer number of demons that you fight in this game, though calling them demons is slightly misleading. All of the enemies in the game with very few exceptions, are actual gods, demons, or creatures from someones mythology. You have Inugami from Japanese culture next to Vishnu from Hindu, Agni of the Vedic lore next to Echidna of the Greek mythology. And to make this even better, any enemy you find throughout the game you can get in your party in one of several ways.

You can negotiate with them and convince them to join you, though this doesn't work with all demons. The other way is by a method called Demon Fusing. Using this method you take two demons of different types and fuse them together, passing skills on that the resulting demon might not learn normally, as well as creating a whole new demon in most cases to join your party.

A lot of the most powerful demons can only be obtained by fusing, and there are several demons you can get by fusing that aren't possible to get any other way. What's more, they actually have multiple endings to this game.

You can side with Law and the angels who follow a path similar to the Buddhism concept of nirvana where everyone has a purpose and fits that purpose with a single minded devotion.

The Neutral path follows the sense of self to the extreme, believing that you can only trust in yourself and your own abilities, and shouldn't trust anyone else.

Following the Chaos path relies on strength above all else. If you aren't strong, and don't seek to be stronger, then you'll be killed. Very much focusing on survival of the fittest.

But you can choose not to follow any of those paths if you wanted. Doing this leads to a good path where you restore the world to it's previous state, or the Demon path where you take over everything.

This specific release of the game also featured a sixth ending not available in the original marked as the true-demon ending. In this ending you actually end up siding with Lucifer before the end, but only if you complete the optional area included in the game.

This game ended up getting good ratings from several other sites, too. And if you want to see what they have to say you can find IGN, Gamespot, and Metacritic's reviews right there. They aren't as careful with spoilers as I was, so read at your own risk. Either way I consider this game one of the all time must plays for the PS2 system.

Kenju