OMORI (2020)

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you've turned to page 56 in our lovely gamedev cookbook--wanting to create a smash indie hit yourself? not to worry, i have you covered. first, you'll want some hyper friendly, super inoffensive art. really smooth those edges. "wait, i want a dark twist to it!" of course you do, because your indie darling isn't taking off without one. now what you're gonna do is contrast the inoffensiveness with, i don't know, edgy scribblings found on an eighth grade desk or somewhere in the 2008 archives of deviantart? obviously we can't have anything ACTUALLY visually disturbing or raw, because then you're going down the hylics path, and noooo one cares about hylics. no, it needs to be scary in the same way a hatsune miku vocaloid music video about a "serious" subject is scary--draw a circle a bunch over itself until it's got a tone of lines and looks super disoriented. creepy, right? yeah just do that for everything.

well, that's pretty much it! with the cutesy sparkle artstyle contrasting just the right tint of edge to unnerve slendermen veterans, you just need some basic, serviceable writing and to hire a musician better at music than you are at game dev, and you've got a real shot at things (but make sure it's real easy, too, or your players are gonezo)! what, don't believe me? just take a look at undertale, OFF, super paper mario, doki doki literature club: cute presentations, horror twists, easy to beat. except... you know... every single of these games (okay, maybe not doki) does omori's job better in just about every single way. see, these games have biting writing and make bold, aesthetic decisions, and they all do it in brevity. off, hylics, space funeral, and undertale may all be inspired by earthbound, but their developers each understood that aping its absurd, overly stretched out game length is a BAD idea. hoh, but not omocat!

no, in fact, omori is actually longer than earthbound.

and to what purpose? because after over eight hours, i'm completely checked out of this endurance tester designed to absolutely waste your time. and i'm not saying that in like a "every second of this game sucks" way, but a "no seriously, there is so much garbage and fluff in this game designed to waste your time". backtracking plagues omori like a virus as you juggle tasks and side quests that amount to a lot of holding one direction forward while running for five, six, twenty screens. worse, the game lacks the grace to let you run up and down ladders, so those to-and-fro journeys are best aided with a phone in your free hand. there's this minecart section where you slowly drift down a lane for two screens until coming to a missing piece that then... slowly sends you back another two screens. but perhaps the absolute most grating time and effort waste comes from trying to navigate absurdly inefficient menus.

no, seriously. here's how many actions i have to get through just to heal a party member with another member's heart spell.

1) b button for menu

2) 3 analog clicks to the right

3) a button to select "skills"

4) 3 analog clicks to the right

5) a button to bring up health character

6) a button to select healing spell

7) a button to select "use"

8) 1-3 analog clicks to the right to select character to heal

9) a button to heal

10) 4 b buttons to get out of all the menus and back into the game

holy fuck.

i'm being really hard on the game's pacing because it really, truly is miserable. it's annoying that nearly every object has a useless description attached--does pressing A on, what, a fire hydrant need to give me a text box that says "fire hydrant"? no shit. tell a joke or don't have the box at all. enemies respawn every new screen catching you in a battle with whatever variation of rabbit you're definitely sick of fighting by a certain point. the dialogue's the worst, though, and i'm not even yet discussing its actual quality: it's just so much. there's so much of it (like this review). there is so many words used and a fourth of them are to any actual merit. so much dialogue is wasteful, unfunny, flat, basic, and bloated, and you just sit through it hoping someone will say something interesting.

they never will. omori's a game that decides earthbound wasn't insufferably quirky enough and proceeds to ham it up to infinity but with little purpose, and it results in writing and a world that feels disingenuous. not always, of course--there's a very specific interesting contrast that occurs in the dialogue when you first go from real world back to dream world, and it feels poignant and interesting. this feeling also lasts a very limited amount of time as you realize, yes, you really HAVE been ripped from the curious part of the game and sent back to a creative wasteland, the game proceeding to hammer in a point you already got two hours ago.

let's talk more about that real world dream world contrast more but, first, the combat. it's actually pretty clever and i enjoy the synergy between your characters and how to manipulate that to take on even the biggest of challenges. but then, the game presents a different problem where MOST battle encounters will not actually involve using the system in any meaningful way, the simplest and most straightforward (and successful) way of fighting through your enemies being a mash A fest a la OFF. why? because nothing in this game has any fucking health. and you know what's really crazy about that? the people who play this game do NOT fucking care about the combat. oh, what, you think that's presumptious of me? at the time of writing this, only 29% of players bothered fighting and beating two optional minibosses early in the game. meanwhile, 60% of players finished the first dream world day (taking place post-minibosses)... which means another 40% didn't even bother to get that far.

what this tells me is that half of omori's actual playerbase don't understand the combat system and don't care enough to learn it, and they're just here for the very syrupy soft pastel story. oh, and i'm saying that with confidence because i'm among the only 10% that did not return a character's high five. it's telling.

additionally to combat, i really enjoy the effort put in to give several enemies different "mood" states that may reflect new animations and designs, and that's really cool. the battle ui is sharp, even, and its a great use of colors all around--easily beating out the utterly generic world design otherwise. but getting back to the real world/dream world contrast, what really bothers me about omori is that the game rips this system out of your hands and gives you something immeasurably boring to work with in the real world. but the thing about said real world is that it has the more "interesting" narrative going on and so, when you're sent back to the dream world, you've got the fun(er) combat back but are trapped with a half of the story that you don't care about or don't really need to hear. additionally, the real world shows just as much creative prowess as the dream world in its design--all a series of hallways. it's really flat.

there's moments of charm, like the sound effects similar to animal crossing on the gamecube, pushing over a cardboard dumptruck, and a character that holds a trophy for "most horse second place". and there are moments of complete reverse charm where the intention is inept, like a list of "whatchamacallit"s to collect, a character named smol, and that entire cheese rat segment that just goes on and on and on... like the game. like the game does. the game goes on and on.

i don't know, i've written SO much about this game i clearly don't enjoy, and a majority of where this is coming from really is in response to critical reception i can't understand whatsoever. and i didn't understand the reception undertale got six years ago and felt annoyed by its heavy presence on the internet, but then, well, i started playing it and the experience was instantly lovely, and there was no "oh dude just play thirty hours to get to the cuhrazey part!". it was fun from the start, like a video game should be, and half the length of omori, too. as is OFF, and hylics, and barkley, space funeral, ib, yume nikki--all of these brief indie rpgs i would recommend to anyone over playing ape inc's sloppy seconds.

when i look at omori, i certainly do see omocat in its design: bland, easily digestible, inoffensive, and round edged--just like those t-shirts. and then i realize what this game really is.