The rise and fall of my vanilla love

Vanillaware… what a glorious company name! I wanted to say something about two of their games: GrimGrimoire & Odin Sphere… both unique pieces of art, one that made me fall in love and the other that made me fall out… even though they both had quite good artwork.

First I would like to say that YES, i do see what you see: anime look + children main characters… and yes that does seriously put me off: I am looking for more serious stories. Doesn’t mean I don’t like animes as a style, in fact they can be very deep even with that means of expression (eg. Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Ghost in the Shell…) but I do find something wrong when there are no mature characters, and characters who look like they’re all 14 play roles of mature stories… That being said though you’re in for a great surprise. At least I was. GrimGrimoire blew me away with a mature story, of time paradoxes, characters, demons and angels, love and manipulation… that coupled with finding a way to go through the game at an easy level enderead itself to me. It helped that all the artwork was delightfully well done while keeping with it’s internal style. Which is why I started Odin Sphere too… but while i had like a few hours of excitement like I only get from great masterpieces they were later erased by many more hours of the great big flaws i see in games:
- a LOT of repetition, level grinding, stoping story progression because you have to go back and get some new powers, items… even worse, through places you’ve already been
- bosses & hard fights
well, they’re basically the same, or at least related… but that’s how they (again) ruined some great art for me.
Now obviously there’s something really great with these games: otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about them (I don’t see anything constructive in just compaining!). I’m talking about great graphics, superb story, interesting characters & music. Even in terms of game mechanics there are some fascinating stuffs: I got totally hooked to the recipe gathering in Odin Sphere and Grim Grimoire has a brilliantly fresh approach to strategy that actually works with a gamepad!

But my true love are still the superb stories. They have some very rare ingredients: touching on subjects of time, choice & destiniy, stories told from multiple points of view with no overbearing sense of morality (you actually get to see/feel how different characters all have their own agendas which each could be somehow considered valid even though put together they are conflicting). So what I’m trying to say is: I’m recomending these for a try, you might find they’re just as anime-ish as you thought and you don’t like that, or on the contrary you might find that hidden behind the presentation is something quite different and surprising. Few other games go into such subjects as being trapped in a time loop of failure, a daughter’s desperate attempts to gain the love of her father, forced love turning into true love, devil’s who might find themselves doing good, the curse of being different and losing your old life…