Counter-Review - Odin Sphere

Playstation 2
New Release
$40 New
(I borrowed Mike's copy)


Odin Sphere is a polished, unique, well-executed video game that I don’t like very much. Actually, I like half of it, and can’t stand the other half.

The thing I should love about Odin Sphere is the game's courage to blend action brawler elements with RPG elements with farming elements to create a unique gameplay experience. This is not what draws me to Odin Sphere. The thing about Odin Sphere that blows me away is that it is so damn pretty. It is an absolute 2D feast for the eyes. Playing this game on the PS2, it felt like I was looking into a window where video games had gone another way, where polygons hadn’t killed the sprite.

As a fan of 2D beat-em-ups, I really want to like Odin Sphere. It has a tight combat engine with well-considered strategies and balance. An engine that tight on a game this pretty, this should be a slam dunk game. Problem is, this game isn’t a straight brawler. It is an action-RPG hybrid, and the RPG elements grind away my joy in playing it. I’ve spent years coming to terms with the fact that I don’t like RPGs, and this game has all the elements I hate in the genre.

When you play Odin Sphere there is a general pattern of clear a board, manage resources, repeat. And the game’s resource system is very clever and very elegant. It is also not at all my idea of fun. I don’t want to spend half of my time in an action game brewing potions from complex recipes, I want to kick some ass and then kick some more ass. Unfortunately it felt like managing your items took more time than clearing the stages.

I tried to look past my annoyance with the micromanaging, but when I learned that you can add an item to a bottle of “materials” to make it more potent, and then do the same again with a second bottle, and that each potency would be measured by a number, and then you could mix the two bottles together, and that the resulting mixture would use multiplication to create a super potent mixture, and that you had to pay attention to what the ones place and the tens place of the new mixture were… well, that was when I realized that I hated Odin Sphere.

If the idea of multiplication in an action game doesn’t offend you, you’ll probably love Odin Sphere. Personally, I wish they would make an ass-kick remix of the game that keeps the killing and ditches the cooking.