![]() They will get some establishing traits but are largely mute after that. The biggest weakness of the first two Mother games is how cardboard their party members are. Sense of character is one area that is unquestionably improved from what came before. Most importantly, a huge amount of content is derived from character interaction. Hilarious visual gags include a distressed enemy variation that simply has a huge axe duct-taped to its side. It takes the form of endless one-liners born from weird premises, where inscrutable NPCs sum up their whole being in one non-sequitur. Thankfully, Omori maintains that sense of humor, and I love it. If you hadn’t noticed, comedy in games is really frickin’ hard to write! Very few can pull it off, and even then, jokes hit everyone differently. These elements are all great, but to me, any game following in Mother’s footsteps absolutely must maintain its spirit of writing. Buyer beware, there are some serious earworms in here. Omori also has a vast soundtrack that runs the gamut of instruments and tones. The world, a more fantastical setting than even Mother 3, allows for constant exposure to strange characters that look like they wandered straight off the doodle pad. Most striking is the frequent use of hand-drawn sketch animation that conveys more personality than traditional sprite art, while also opening a window into Omori himself. Omori may stick a little closer to those roots than Undertale or Lisa, but it expands on nearly every central idea to the point where it, too, carves out its own space. There are enough SNES RPGs to fill a swimming pool, but Earthbound’s urban setting and quirky humor lead to an unmistakable identity. The Mother trilogy is beloved decades later because its unapologetic weirdness was a unique trait in the dragon-slaying RPG landscape. Slavish imitation of Earthbound’s surface-level identity is so misguided that it becomes ironic. One I remembered just now is Citizens of Earth, which crammed in tons of direct references while also just not being that fun. My love of Earthbound has taken me to a fair number of its imitators. ![]() The game’s premise, a dream world where real-life friends and neighbors live in fantasy, is essentially an expansion of the Magicant concept. There’s a race of wacky bulbous oddities that, sans the big honker, look just like Mr. A present with a red bow sits in one of the first rooms (though watermelons are this game’s treasure chests). Its pixel art and coloring is the same style that game publications derided in the 90s but adore now. You don’t have to look hard to find echoes of Earthbound in Omori. And I thought I was done with college essays. One could take any number of angles when discussing the game’s themes and symbols, but given my personal area of expertise, I want to tackle a specific one in depth:īy expanding on the signifiers found in its progenitors with greater depth and maturity, Omori is not only reminiscent of the Mother series, but the true successor that fans wished for. Taking the form of a dreamy RPG, Omori puts the player through increasingly tough moments where it explores how old traumas lead to new tragedies. It balances psychological horror, comical role-playing hijinks, and emotional gut punches in equal measure. ![]() Omori is an outwardly simple game with a multitude of hidden layers. With Omori, that scenario may just repeat itself. He’s one of my favorite game critics, and his review of Anodyne 2 got me hooked on what became my game of the year in 2019. The game is lauded from those in the know, yet I never heard a mention of it until I saw Nitro Rad’s video. After finishing the game, however, I really should have. I wasn’t following the game’s interminable development from its Kickstarter in 2014 to its release last Christmas. For transparency, I should say that I had no idea Omori existed until this January.
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