Odin Sphere is a platforming role-playing game originally released on the PS2. I played the Leifthrasir PS4 remake of this adventure with its rich story, beautiful artwork and breathing animation. I’ve played a couple of other Vanillaware games, but Odin Sphere is one of their earliest classics I missed out on back when it was originally released. The artwork is incredible, although the action did get a little bland. At just around 37 hours, the rich and complex story seemed to go well with the casual gameplay.

Odin Sphere is a game where the story is told out of order. You play as several characters, each which go through several chapters of an adventure, along with an epilogue. Each of these sequences is very similar, with a prelude, a battle map to transverse and explore, and a final boss fight leading to the next sequence.

The gameplay is fairly basic. A single button is used for attacks and blocks. Each battle is ranked. At first, I thought they were ranked for variation of moves and style, similar to a Devil May Cry game. Instead, they seem to be ranked purely on time. There’s some simple item crafting, and most of the battle stages use a unique, small wraparound 2D platform space. It’s pretty easy to get S rank in the majority of battle stages. Most of the game UI is snappy, except for the skill tree upgrade selection, which is slow and annoying.

There are a variety of attacks, skills and spells to learn for each character, even with the simple attack controls. The lower triggers on the controller were left unused. Most of the gameplay is pretty basic, where you spam the same attacks and combos. Health and experience upgrades mostly come from a detailed food mechanic, with lots of well-drawn recipes and dishes. It was over four chapters before I experienced my first death while playing on normal mode. The battle feels as basic as modern games like Final Fantasy XVI, except even the boss fights started to feel repetitive. There are a few truly difficult battles scattered throughout the game, but even most of those can be handled with learning basic evasion.

When you move on to each character, they all start from the very beginning with low skills and experience. Many times they fight the same enemies and visit the same lands with slightly different maps. I do like the way the story comes together, and the lore is creative and dark. The characters also have their own unique abilities and fighting styles. The only real puzzle in the game involves certain story decisions around prophecy.

Overall, there’s a lot I like about Odin Sphere. The world building is well done, and the animation has subtle movements that make the characters and world move as if they are breathing‐a trademark of Vanillaware titles. However, some of the later dungeons felt repetitive. I’m glad you can go back and view cut sequences sequentially at any point during the game, because the details of the lore can be quite confusing. The game does allow you to replay the final battles to see different endings, and there are a lot of subtle details that are woven together beautifully.

It’s a fascinating early look into the company that would eventually release games with incredible stories like 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, or incredible gameplay like Unicorn Overlord. I think it could have been better if it was a bit shorter. Yet, it was still engaging to the end, and the artwork is very impressive and memorable.