Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir

A bit over a week ago I dabbled in a game called Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir for about two or three hours on easy difficulty. I never finished it, and never intended to in the first place, as it’s a game I just wanted to briefly try but not really sink much time into since I had other things I was more interested in working on. Consequently, I’m not going to place this short discussion of Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir in my Late to the Party series of posts, but instead treat it as a standalone video game writing piece. I can’t give any serious or in-depth judgment—such a thing would extremely unfair—but I can quickly talk about the little piece of it I played.

Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir, referred to hereafter as just Leifthrasir, is a remake of the original Odin Sphere, which I never played, that came out on PS2 in 2007. Leifthrasir is a sidescrolling action RPG where you run and fight your way through a world reminiscent of a fairy tale. From what I’ve read online, the game has multiple characters that you play as, but in my brief time with Leifthrasir I only played as the valkyrie Gwendolyn—a young female warrior who is trying to win the love of her father, King Odin. I have no idea where the story goes, but it seems to revolve around a prophesied apocalypse that everyone is trying to get on the winning side of. Gameplay is very fast and fluid, running at a buttery smooth 60 frames per second, with a strong emphasis on quick reflexes and chaining together combos. A skill tree, inventory management, and an alchemy system for combining and creating potions add on the base gameplay. Leifthrasir’s art style is also as strong as its gameplay, perfectly capturing the aesthetic of the colorful fairy tale books I remember reading as a kid, with vibrant colors saturating every area I played through. Though I didn’t get very far in Leifthrasir before I stopped playing, what I saw was an extremely promising start, and it has gotten very good reviews from the games media. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to come back to Leifthrasir in the future, but from what I experienced of Leifthrasir I suspect that if I did so I would have even more good things to say about it.

Below is the single video I recorded while playing Leifthrasir. Despite being over eleven minutes long, it only captures a small part of what it’s like to play Leifthrasir, and for whatever reason I was completely ignoring the game’s map during this time, so you just see me aimlessly wandering around and fighting whatever I run into. Still, it’s better than nothing. Enjoy.