Odin Sphere (aka, delicious 2D love)

[Fayore]

It was released about a week ago, which was -surprisingly enough - a mere five days after the JP release!

Odin Sphere is an incredibly awesome game (made by the people who did Princess Crown!); it's most well-known for the incredible detail in the game and relatively (and by relatively, I mean in comparison to other anime styled artworks) unique art - everything looks like it's been painted. It also has AMAZING animation. It's completely 2D and the sprites are HUGE. Incredibly HUGE. Sometimes they (especially the bosses ) take up the whole screen, lmao.

It has a dungeon-crawler kinda feel to it, but it's not that bad; most of the stages only have around ten rooms in them, and some of them can be quite short. The fighting system is also really great. It's simple, but has a good amount of strategy involved. It also has an alchemy and cooking system, and since there's a very limited amount of inventory space, it really forces you to manage your inventory well. This game requires quite a bit of planning and strategy (wow, amazing for an (action) RPG) to get through; even on easy mode, if you're just mashing the attack button, you're gonna die. A lot.

The storyline is also quite good and certainly much more involved than other RPGs (thinking of Final Fantasy, lmao). It plays as five books, each about a different character, and the events of the world as they see it, more or less. It gets amazingly complicated (enough to remind me of some of Shakespeare's plays XD), too.

The music is also excellent, done by Hitoshi Sakimoto (FFT, anyone?).

This game is probably going to get quite rare (like Disgaea) since Atlus doesn't really make a lot of copies of their games. I mean, I bought my copy five days ago when it came in to the store I preordered at, and five days later, all their copies are gone. o3o; But if you can, I really recommend buying it, or renting it at the very least. It's so beautiful. *_*

Here's Atlus' official site for Odin Sphere - http://www.atlus.com/odinsphere/
They have a trailer and a piece of music for sampling on there, too. 83

And why not, a few screenshots:
[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v430/fayore/odin-sphere-20070423114401042.jpg[/img]
[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v430/fayore/odin-sphere-20070423114401589.jpg[/img]
[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v430/fayore/odin-sphere-20070423114402167.jpg[/img]
(Obviously, ganked off IGN. Their gallery is ([url=http://media.ps2.ign.com/media/884/884204/imgs_1.html]here[/url]); their review ([url=http://ps2.ign.com/articles/791/791756p1.html]here[/url]).)

[Pabbit_da_Rabbit]

Oh man. I saw the ad in Play magazine, and fell in love with the art. It also got a good review, which made me want it even more! ANDDDD it's for the PS2, which means I can get it!

The animations/cutscenes and battle scenes remind me of a storybook. It's so cute, yet strange.
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