Knights of the Round
Next-gen 2D is here, it just happens to be that Odin Sphere landed on the PS2.
Published: June 11, 2007
The other use for Phozons is in quite literally growing ingredients. For the better part of the first character's perspective, you'll use stray Phozons to feed seeds planted in the ground to grow everything from berries that provide food and experience (more on that in a second), to straight restoratives to ingredients for the game's impressively deep alchemy system. A balance, then, must be struck between powering-up attacks and learning new abilities and nurturing the many seeds you'll collect along the way.
For all characters, growing fruits and berries early on is the key to helping them to grow in hit points, which is entirely different from the Psypher level. See, eating stuff gives you varying levels of experience (usually the higher-experience items you'll grow will require far, far more Phozons than the low-level stuff that only heals a few hit points at a time), so by simply healing yourself, you'll gain HP levels as well. It's a very, very cool system, and one that constantly has you weighing your options about how to spend the stray Phozons constantly trying to escape to the netherworld. It's quite possible to have a ton of health but do very little damage to enemies, and vice versa, so it's really all about how you use Phozons.
It's not as important early on for all but the most basic of materials, but the game's synthesis system becomes quite important later on. Everything in the game can be combined with base materials to make a handful of potions that do everything from converting every item on the ground to something else to providing restoratives to offensive potions like fire or poison. Each potion requires a set list of ingredients (the recipes for which you'll find almost constantly) and raw materials with a particular number attached. Since you can combine most low-level items such as the ones found when you simply jump over where a hidden, buried little critter is hiding in a level, you're able to nudge up the number associated with that material.
Better still, you can combine materials of a particular number, thus multiplying their raw materials count. Since the recipes only track a given digit, you can actually generate spare Phozons while making a base potion, which is yet another way to constantly keep your stock of experience-rich comestibles... well, stocked. Because you're constantly learning new recipes and because the game really tries to empress upon you the fact that limited item storage (at least early on) means you have to be creating more useful items from basic ingredients, you're almost constantly creating new things. Granted, the interface can be a little clunky at times (this is due to the fact that you can only use one item at a time, and inventory is stored across multiple bags, so flipping through them to combine things is a little cumbersome), but as a whole it works fairly well.
And so, you're stuck zipping around each branching sub-world, exploring everything from snowy mountaintops to boiling rivers of magma underground to faerie forests and sun-kissed glades and beyond. Every single one of the parts of the world has its own unique look and feel, though the layouts never really change. Though the levels are side-scrolling, they're represented on the map as a loop (or -- wait for it -- a sphere), connected by exit points that take you to the next section. Once you have the map, you can see how each of the rings is connected, where final and mini-bosses are and a one to five star indicator of how hard that ring will be.
This is important, because in addition to seeing the layout and the difficulty of levels (not to mention if a boss or shopkeeper is there), you'll also see what beating all the enemies in that section will get you. See, you're graded both on how much time you take to kill 'em all, and how much damage you do. Get a score of 1000 or more points and you're rewarded with an S grade and the end-level treasure chest will cough up more valuables. For ever 100 points less, the rewards get smaller, but that one item indicated on the map will always be part of the spoils. Not only does this allow you to plan your way around the level, avoiding more dangerous paths, but you can re-visit levels to farm important items to grow experience-rich fruit early on.
