Odama

A group of simulation game experts naively wandering into the arcade domain results in the rich fabric of mechanics combining the best of each genre coming out patchy. The box pitch (yell commands to your troops while you play pinball on the controller) presents the two concepts as separate, but in reality the troop manipulation rarely progresses past keeping up a tempo of pressing your troops forward and rallying them around occasional interactables. Instead, the uneasy alliance between the mighty Odama and your comparatively diminutive troops takes the forefront.

Every soldier organizes around a group of four shirtless beefcakes lugging a large ceremonial bell, who automatically spawn at the start of each mission and attempt to march the bells towards the exit. The player can manually spawn extra troops to push the “bell crew” past enemy squadrons. When two squadrons lock together, they push at each other, each attempting to overtake the other based on active troop count and relative morale. Pushing forward through voice commands requires morale, which increases when troops enter the battlefield or when rice balls are consumed into their vicinity. The Odama intersects at multiple points here: the Odama can kill both allied and enemy troops by rolling over them, and tossing it into the bell causes a clatter that knocks down enemy troops, making pushes temporarily more effective. Collecting a green orb powerup from killing troops or destroying obstacles will transform the pinball into a “heavenly Odama,” which phases through allied troops while transferring enemy troops it tramples into your reserves. Thus, the command tempo bleeds into a morale / troop spawn tempo, where keeping the bell moving on pace requires ringing it regularly and keeping the reserves full requires finding heavenly powerups to roll up enemies. These combine with the heart powerups, which imbue the bell with a white glow that turns the Odama into its heavenly variant the next time it rings. The otherwise random item drops can be superseded with a tempo for heavenly transformations as well, where the player attempts to gobble up the instant green powerups while storing a backup transformation in the bell for when powerups are sparse… of course, this precludes one being able to ring the bell and thus keep up the crew movement pace, and one can see where the decision-making rolls back into itself.

Within the opening levels of the game, you must already juggle the Odama and your tactics with rivers that flush away troops that attempt to cross. Stopping their flow with the Odama is easy, and accidentally restarting the flow is even easier. The onslaught of gimmicks never gets any less hectic the more you play. [src]

When this web of mechanics doesn’t coalesce, the game falters. Long stretches without items, such as in the long-winded march through Karasuma Road, will inevitably drain the reserves and shorten the loop to repeated slow pushes punctuated by fallbacks to consume a rice ball (these can also be used to distract enemies, which gives them a bit more heft than simply being a morale gain fail-safe). Shorter stages snowball towards the end, where initial bursts of momentum triumph over careful troop preservation. Bosses all take the form of gigantic generals the player can topple with the Odama before rallying troops to attack them prone; the lack of movement and ability to stunlock the bosses makes morale trickle rather than plummet, and thus these levels depend more on the player’s pinball finesse. There are wrinkles that help keep the game fresh when it can’t quite maximize its primary mechanical interactions, such as timing reserve troops to spawn at the drain while the Odama is at the other end of the field or attempting to move the bell towards the back of a squadron to find a clean spot to smack it, but the inevitability of losing troops means the rest of the loop revolves around diminishing its consequences with a constant flow of new troops (this is taken to its limits in levels such as Karasuma Town). At its worst, the game completely ignores the loop and lets you leave the bell crew in stasis while solving other puzzles, such as the Spider Temple being built around setting up walls and clearing a path for the Odama to open up the temple exit.

In the course of the last paragraph, I’ve described at least half of the levels in the game; the campaign rings in at a slim 11 levels, and you’ll likely get completely stuck on half of those while breezing through the other half. It’s admirable how quickly the game pivots in terms of gimmicks, and the integration of design tropes such as highways and up-field flippers into each battlefield never falters, especially in two later stages that have multiple flipper pairs and drains around a center landmark. Still, in a rare instance I would actually prefer for the game to stretch its legs a bit and play with each of the ideas on display. Vivarium ignored their publisher’s vulgar adherence to obstacle escalation in favor of this extremely uneven scenario lineup, and in doing so they privilege the weaker ideas in their repertoire while stronger ones pass by a hurry. One could see a modernized version of this game having a longer campaign with more iteration on each of its existing ideas: capturable enemy flippers that make your ball only hurt your own troops, hands that throw the ball and the bell crew, water rapids controllable via either switches or commands, warps to different areas, construction of ladders and bridges, etc. The insistence on having troop reserves and morale carry from stage to stage likely precluded them from stretching the campaign out much longer than it is. Still, plainer levels could have exemplified the strengths of the core system throughout while peppering each with gimmicks instead of going full-hog on every level and overseasoning the dish in the process. I would have loved to see this eventually stretch into the implicit multi-squad management the game hints at with its rally system, although it’s questionable whether the game could have really fleshed out those ideas under its own restraints.