I'm only about ten minutes into the first level when the thought occurs: "This is a pretty crappy game."
That's never a joyous realization - especially when $50 was tossed like so much salt over the shoulder - but it is particularly grating when the game in question is something you've been anticipating for months.
Odama is exactly the kind of offbeat, undefinable game that pulls me in. Games that offer up more than just various degrees of running / jumping / shooting / driving. I live for the thrill of locating games like this. They're underappreciated, underplayed... and in Odama's case, underbaked.
Created by Yoot Saito, the madman behind Seaman and the architect of SimTower, Odama defies all attempts at categorization. The closest you can get in "real-time pinball strategy." WTF. Instant intrigue, if only the game measured up. As it happens, the strategy part is minimal (and unapproachably frustrating) and the pinball part - the part that should have been a slam dunk - is slow and lousy.
The premise, however, is classic. The setting is feudal Japan and you are a warrior general, tasked with reclaiming the honor and locations lost to enemy armies. Your mental path is the Way of Ninten, which is one of several historically-flavored Nintendo in-jokes scattered throughout the game. (There's nothing blatant here, so don't thinking this is another nostalgia-fueled Mario reference fest. Any Nintendo bits are well-obscured and only for the most devout of fans.) Although you have small armies of soldiers and horsemen at your disposal, your chief weapon is the odama... which is a gigantic cannonball that you smack across the field to bash into buildings and roll over phalanxes of troops.
Each level - and there are not that many, which is probably a good thing - is set up like a pinball table. You have flippers at the bottom of the screen (hilariously manned by trios of strongmen) which form the lower boundary of an outdoor environment that uses natural features to create the rest of the pinball table. Houses and trees become bumpers that reveal power-ups. Rivers and trenches become paths for the odama to follow. There is some ingenious layout work here, and some appropriately challenging pinball sequencing... you know, were you have to hit certain targets to make a door drop and things like that. In the lower levels, the open nature of the boards almost makes up for the Jupiter-gravity speed of the ball. When things get cramped, as in the upper levels, it unfortunately compounds the games inherently flawed pinball sim aspects.
Levels are timed, and the game even visually illustrates your time running out by slowly turning the graphics to nightfall. If you beat a board with plenty of seconds left on the clock, you can earn additional balls.
The strategy portion of the game centers around a giant bell that slowly moves to the top of the board. In most levels, you have to protect the bell - through clever management of your armies and by accurate attacks with the odama - as it trudges north. When it reachs the top, you've beaten the level. Why is the game's key artifact a bell? Because it's fun to bang it with the odama, which sends out shockwaves that flatten advancing enemies.
Flanks of soldiers are released in small groups, whenever you hit the Z button. Your men will instinctively gather around the bell, but they also accept voice commands given with the Nintendo Mic (Which is a free pack-in, since we can't count on everybody having purchased Mario Party 6 or 7. Sigh.) You can order your men to march left, march right, halt, advance, press forward, and some other level-specific commands like "flood the river!" This is largely to micromanage the flow of battle, because, unbidden, your men will move on their own along with the march of the bell carriers.
Most of the time, you only have one giant mass of people gathered around the bell. So it's not all that RTS-esque, really. Defeating enemies becomes a numbers game, helped along by the odama's hectic flybys. Have more men than the enemy, and you'll advance up the path faster. Crash the odama through them to improve the odds; use the bell's stun technique to temporarily get them out of your way.
The most fun is to be had when you have to split your seething tumor of helmets and pikes into smaller groups to achieve special mid-level objections. Then you actually have to think about stuff instead of just controlling the odama action. When special locations are triggered on the board, you can use the d-pad to select them and order your troops to Rally! on that spot. Then they can pick up keys, attach water wheels, move giant statues, attack enemy generals, or whatever needs doing to progress.
You also have to consider your army's morale, which drops whenever they are outnumbered or roadblocked. When their morale is down, they will openly ignore your orders, which usually results in a slow retreat (and if your bell ever gets pushed back to the bottom of the screen, you lose.) Improving the groupthink disposition is as easy as releasing backup waves, however, so it's not much of a trial. Unless you're out of troops, chump.
Naturally, rolling a giant metal ball through battalions of troops will crush them. And your hometeam is not immune to the odama's rampage, although your guys usually have a better sense of the odama's approach and will sometimes hurry out of the way. Soldiers of either flag will talk during each battle (in text only, which obnoxiously covers the game board) that often includes their final words. Mr. Saito has been often quoted is press releases as hoping that the odama's lack of discrimination will encourage players to consider the value of human life and the implications of leading men into war... which, while that's a typically Japanese pull quote, isn't exactly the feeling I took away from the game. I spent more time considering how boring and un-fun it was to play.
You can pick up a green power-up that allows the ball to conscript any enemy soldier it touches. This is key to increase your available troop count. Giant rice balls can be launched onto the field (you have a targeting crosshair that is difficult to maneuver) to distract enemies with a tasty meal. Other power-ups include the usual time extenders and extra balls.
Even apart from the mostly-trustworthy voice input, Odama has a quirky control scheme. Your flippers are the shoulder buttons, happily. The X button opens the mic, which you can clip to your GameCube controller (or WaveBird) with a clear plastic claw that snaps over the top end. Z releases more troops. B cycles between selecting a rice ball or mounted soldiers (which, although they sound cool, are largely window dressing), and A actually launches your selected choice. Confusing. The d-pad rotates across the available rally points, including the bell itself.
What is weird is the use of the analog stick. It controls both the launch crosshairs and tilts the entire playfield in any direction. Sort of like a less extreme Monkey Ball. The tilting is fine... and, in fact, necessary to juggle the odama around more effectively. But why slap the crosshairs on there as well? What's the C-stick doing all this time?
This mostly sounds like a silly, ambitious, bizarre title. Which it certainly is. What it is not, unfortunately, is fun. Pinball needs to be fast. Half of playing a good round of pinball is using the ball's speed to your advantage, banking it off your flipper at just the right angle to keep the momentum but control the angle. You simply can't do that in Odama. The ball is stuck in glue and completely loses what little speed it has as soon as it hits the top of its arc. You can yell at your tiny troops all you like, but it's the odama that's going to win the level. So when that part sucks, it removes the game's entire purpose for being.
There are a couple notable boards - a giant three-sided mountain attack against a giant spider-dude being one of the game's main showpieces - but much of it is pure drudgery. And get this: if you want to go back and play one of the previous rounds - you know, one that was more fun than the one you're stuck on - you essentially rewind yourself in time and lose whatever higher levels you had already played! Fucking hell, Odama. And you can't unlock Free Play until you've beaten the game, so any pick-up-and-play value is reserved only for the hardest of hardcore who have the energy to devote to something so frustratingly heavy.
It is also incredibly ugly and plain, like it's been buried in a moldy cave since 2002. Don't bother using the zoom-in pause feature unless you want to make yourself sick.
Such a disappointment. I've been looking forward to this one for well over a year now. If only they would have gotten the damn pinball right. You could have easily overlooked the punishing learning curve of troop management if only you had some good old fashioned pinball fun to enjoy. Yoot should have toned down on the thick morality play and just made a fun game. More troops. Faster play. Crazier boards.
Odama is a painful experience. It is the worst video pinball you've ever played awkwardly married to a simplistic voice-activated Army Men game. It's worth a look on sheer shock value, but it is a terrible purchase at $50. Nintendo should have been upfront about this one and listed it at $20. And still thrown in the free microphone.
