Odin Sphere anticipation

It seems like I’ve been waiting for Odin Sphere to come out since forever. It’s use of 2D art and old school animation looks fantastic. It doesn’t appear to have alternate costumes, but the core designs are good enough without them. I’ll be posting more about it once I start playing, but there are a few other titles that caught my eye recently.

Etrian Oddyessy came out this week for the DS and looks to be a very old fashioned dungeon crawler that forces you to manually map your exploration. The character art looks pretty neat, although some of it is waaaaay too loli-rific for my tastes. I mean, check out the female Ronin art. Bandages across her chest. CREEPY. It’s gotten average to low reviews, but the killer for me is there is nearly zero story. It’s all about the challenge of leveling and exploring. Count me out.


I was always tempted by Shining Force Neo. Diablo-style game mechanics + the Shining world sounded like a great mix. The graphics and other issues kept me away though. Released a few weeks ago, Shining Force EXA is the follow-up to that game and seems to have improvements in every meaningful area. The most pertinent to this blog are two playable characters who each have 10 (I think it’s at least ten) different outfits. I believe it’s tied to level progression, but it may be possible to change into whichever one you like.