Kintaro said:
I say go ahead and explain. The game was gorgeous, but the actual combat was pretty shallow. The potion making was interesting, but as the game became more and more repetitive, so did the potion making. It became downright annoying.
Alright this may be a little long but here it goes. The combat was shallow because it had NOTHING to do with the actual game. In contrast it would be like saying "The Witcher's" gameplay is shallow because all you do to attack enemies is pointing and clicking. If you thought of "Odin Sphere" playing like "Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories" (GBA version) or like Guardian Heroes then you are as far and away from the game as possible. The game doesn't work by you running up and attacking the enemy and then using potions. Actually the game works completely opposite of that.
"Odin Sphere" revolved around the player observing the enemies and their patterns then forming a strategy to take them down. This is why I made the comparison toward "The Witcher" and similar games to it. In those games you have to observe the enemy and constantly observe your stats and ablities to attack your enemy in comparison to a game like Kingdom Hearts where you just concentrate in attacking first then alchemy next. So in short the game worked like this. Go to the next area. run around/look at map to see all the enemies, observe the enemies movements and form your tactics (do you lure enemies to certain locations to form chain attacks? Use alchemy to take them out? Confuse enemies so they attack each other? Start with air based enemies and work your way down?). In short the game involved you making strategys to take down enemies with a very straight forward but deep battle system, the entire game was one big real-time battle system.
And no I didn't find some secret way to play it. This IS the way you play the game. It's why the combat was so laggy (in the same way many WRPG ones were laggy) because it was meant to be played to think first and attack laster. This is why the game repeated with different characters in each chapter, because while the enemies and locations were similar the game played very different. This is why the maps were in shape of a sphere because the whole area was one giant battlemap. This is why the game had a headline map in each area only showing enemies and projectiles, so that the player can only focus on those things. This is why there were so many bottles and seeds lying around the field, because you had to use them to form your strategies. This is why you leveled by eating, because you weren't suppose to level up much in the first place because you won battles by your strategy and wit, not by your characters attack power and defense hence why leveling up was a simply gimmick. And this is also why IGN, GameTrailers, RPGamer, and all other RPG centric sites (I know IGN and GT aren't ones) highly praised the games battle system and often referring it to as heavily strategic and deep.
I am not saying that it was a flawless masterpiece, there are still some problems with it (slowdown, load times, repeating backgrounds, some times inconsistent difficulty) but I'm just saying that this game is largely misunderstood. Playing the game like a brawler would be like playing Super Metroid like Megaman or playing Shin Megami Tensei like Skies of Arcadia by not fusing demons and keeping only the first demons that you invite to your party and just grind from there, you're getting a very different experience to what the game is actually suppose to offer. That saying it seems that only Gaf, 1up, and SRK are the only forum sites I've seen this game get heavy criticized on. Every other site just say it as another quality game (just found that odd.) Was the game like hyped to hell or something on here for being something else? Because I haven't been on Gaf that long.