Odin Sphere is good game that came close to greatness if not for a host of nagging issues. The most noticeable of these is the framerate, which routinely drops into single digits and sometimes feels like it might screech to a halt completely. While the art is beautiful, it's hard to appreciate when your eyes are so heavily strained by frame drops.

In my opinion they should have limited the game to three or so characters instead of five, allowing for more focus on developing a deeper combat system for the remaining three. For most of the game each character has a basic combo, an overhead attack and one or two other special abilities, which isn't enough to feel engaging over the tens of hours each character's campaign can last. There is also an enormous amount of recycled content across each campaign.

But there are some strong points to Odin Sphere. Once again the art design is gorgeous. The world structure with each 2D stage containing paths leading to other stages across a branching map for the player to explore is pretty cool. The story is a little melodramatic for my tastes but is still a fairly engaging tale told from multiple perspectives in a morally complex military conflict. But if there's one thing Odin Sphere did really well it's the alchemy system, which remains one of the finest I've encountered to date. The system rewards strategy and arithmetic prowess to allow the player to get the most out of their resources.

It may be a shame that Odin Sphere didn't fully deliver on all of it's potential, but the good news is that Leifdrasir seems to address nearly all of the original games issues with wonderful results!

A very out-of-the-box J-RPG, in comparison to other RPG games released on PS 2. Definitely not for everyone and is kind of an "acquired taste" of a thing. Personally, when I've played this game for the first time ever, I outright HATED it with a truly raging passion. Back then, I thought it was one of the worst J-RPGs I've ever played (and I've played through A LOT of them by that time), but...when I've tried it again three or so years later, I've felt like a total fool. This is actually a pretty great game.