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.