Odin Sphere

So I should talk about Odin Sphere for just a bit.

Oftentimes you will hear a videogame described with the terms "epic" or "saga". This may bring a twitch to the eye of a student of literature: games rarely follow the conventions of epic poetry, much less those of the Norse sagas.

Odin Sphere does.

It is a epic in the Greek style, and an epic in the Wagnerian style, and a saga in the style of the fornaldarsögur. It involves journeys into the underworld and prophecy and lost royalty and clashes between rulers and wise and terrible dragons and several interlinked tales and the end of the world, in sea and in fire. And tragic heroes — not all of whom are player-characters.

It is of byzantine complexity — try tracing the ownership of the ring Titrel over the course of the game — did I mention the shoutouts to Der Ring des Nibelungen? Yeah. Concomitantly it is also massively, massively long. Reading the Iliad followed by the Odyssey followed by the Aeneid followed by the Nibelungenlied followed by the entire Wheel of Time series would have taken me less time than playing this game did. (Admittedly this is largely due to my completionist tendencies, but eliding those just means replacing Wheel of Time with A Song of Ice and Fire.)

It is fun to play. Okay, I am possibly not the best judge of this, but will you at least take the words of Tycho and Gabe? Combat is difficult but rewarding, inventory management is challenging but not actually frustrating, the alchemy system is fun, and the food looks good enough to eat.

Also, although this is not even remotely where I was going with this, it has characters named Valentine.