A Minor Variation

Also, last night I finally finished Odin Sphere, which involved playing through Armageddon three times doing everything wrong in order to unlock the best ending. Which is still pretty traumatic, by the way.

Overall I ended up enjoying the game a lot. The gameplay, never my strong suit, took some time to learn, but by the endgame I had enough of a grasp on it to use it more or less effectively (aside from never mastering Cornelius's spin attack ever). Note that using the gameplay effectively quickly gets ridiculous when it involves, say, painkiller + unlimited power + overload and things like Oswald's Shadow Form or Gwendolyn's Shadow Ally. Especially Gwendolyn, who somehow ended up a couple of orders of magnitude more badass than any of the other playable characters. (Bad endings with her were kind of ridiculous, considering the way she tore through the actual boss fights. I cannot escape the impression that her deaths in the bad endings were pretty much just destiny reaching down and bitchslapping her for not being the one prophesied to win those particular battles.)

Also, since I haven't mentioned before: the artwork is gorgeous. My biggest complaint about the game is that everything is so lovingly rendered that combat can unfortunately slow down to a crawl if too much is going on at a time, as inevitably happens during, for example, all of the Odette boss fights. (You could have done away with the jiggle physics in the name of conserving processing power, guys, really. I am just saying.) The character designs are occasionally improbable (see: Gwendolyn's battle tutu, and just how is it that Ragnanival women are all so dainty but the men are all so huge?) but always adorable.

( Further natter about storyline and characters, with spoilers. )

Next up... I am not sure. I'd like to try out Tales of the Abyss sometime, but I don't have a copy immediately accessible.