OMORI

[wtfNeedSignUp]

So my idea how could Omori have been a good game:
1. Don't focus on Sunny and Omori (who is a complete plot hole) and instead have all the party share the dreamscape. Each chapter would have a different main character of the four and it would focus on their life issues. That way the entire cast has a point and depth (the dream world being an idealized past).
2. Make the town itself face a crisis that has the four banding together and solving it, using verbal communication rather than physical force for battles. Remove the edgelord twist.
3. Have the ending feature the characters accept that the past had flaws they scrubbed away (not ridiculously so, for example make mary a normal kid rather than a saint), make them decide to let it die and focus on their future. Even a literal fight between the modern party and the past party.
4. Make battles 2x faster. Remove the weapon triangle and instead make emotions massively more complex. Every skill should change the emotion for you or the enemy.

 

[armoreddinnerjacket]

So my idea how could Omori have been a good game:
1. Don't focus on Sunny and Omori (who is a complete plot hole) and instead have all the party share the dreamscape. Each chapter would have a different main character of the four and it would focus on their life issues. That way the entire cast has a point and depth (the dream world being an idealized past).
2. Make the town itself face a crisis that has the four banding together and solving it, using verbal communication rather than physical force for battles. Remove the edgelord twist.
3. Have the ending feature the characters accept that the past had flaws they scrubbed away (not ridiculously so, for example make mary a normal kid rather than a saint), make them decide to let it die and focus on their future. Even a literal fight between the modern party and the past party.
4. Make battles 2x faster. Remove the weapon triangle and instead make emotions massively more complex. Every skill should change the emotion for you or the enemy.

May make for a more satisfying story, but it wouldn't make any more sense than what we got. Besides, strip out the nostalgic factor and no amount of shonen shenanigans would make up for it.

 

[LucasSomething]

So my idea how could Omori have been a good game:
1. Don't focus on Sunny and Omori (who is a complete plot hole) and instead have all the party share the dreamscape. Each chapter would have a different main character of the four and it would focus on their life issues. That way the entire cast has a point and depth (the dream world being an idealized past).
2. Make the town itself face a crisis that has the four banding together and solving it, using verbal communication rather than physical force for battles. Remove the edgelord twist.
3. Have the ending feature the characters accept that the past had flaws they scrubbed away (not ridiculously so, for example make mary a normal kid rather than a saint), make them decide to let it die and focus on their future. Even a literal fight between the modern party and the past party.
4. Make battles 2x faster. Remove the weapon triangle and instead make emotions massively more complex. Every skill should change the emotion for you or the enemy.

Giving everyone a dream would be nice but not help much since these characters are all bad. Omori's main problem is that the dreamworld is the worst and most pointless ever made in a videogame, and that's bad when your main selling point was supposed to be "The dreams of a hikikomori".

1-It's too long and nothing matters. Yes, i get the idea that "It's intentionally pointless so omori and his friends forget basil" but it's shit and fails when the game keeps explicitly reminding you of that.

2-There is no symbolism because Sunny has no personality. Ever noticed how every conflict in the dreamworld is driven by Sweetheart? Why is this literal magic girl OC so prevalent on Sunny's dream? Lorefags/theorists will insist she represents sunny and spaceboy is sunny and X is sunny and this is a metaphor for depression blabla shut up.

3-It plays like garbage so the "escapism fantasy" fails hard. Persona is fun cause i get to forget my life problems and go shoot demons. Dreamworld is so bad it makes real life look more fun.

4-Sunny literally only had ONE BAD MEMORY HIS WHOLE LIFE which is the shitty twist. You'd think these perfect memories were mostly embelished copium for the player to decipher but nope, their life was that perfect.

You know why silent hill 2 monsters are good? Cause they represent James' inner demons and i can tell that cause James has an actual personality that drives his past and future actions. The bosses of omori are : Anime spare pirate, magical girl, shark in a suit, 3 slime girls and a whale. I could ramble forever about how much better Jimmy and the pulsating mass is better and that game also had a silent protag.

If i had to change omori i would either:

A-Remove the ending twist and make the dreams actually symbolic for sunny. Hard improve the gameplay, pacing, characters and give more real life days + a conclusive ending.

B-Full blown change the whole story and twist Omori into an actual supernatural horror game. Wait 10 hours to reveal that the ghost is real, the dreams affect the real world and vice versa, people are actually dying and the town is haunted. I dont care if it sounds like persona or Yiik, just do anything.

 

[Doji]

Shit. I liked Omori, I guess maybe because I had no expectations.

I enjoyed looking for creepy scary secrets at the end of the hikikomori route.

The music was banger too, really liked sweetheart's battle theme among others.

 

[Nuns with guns]

Finished it yesterday and god damn it was a waste of time. The game has issues on just about every front besides the admittedly interesting looks and alright music every couple of bosses.

The absolute worst part is the pacing. If a message can be passed in a 10 second dialogue box, Omori will say it ten times in different minute long conversations spread over with long ass animations and seconds of walking. By the end it's a chore to play. Possible emotional minutes go to waste as you just end up fast forwarding conversations because nothing is fucking happening. Even in gameplay dungeons outstay their welcome and are rarely fun to play.

The plot is basically non existent. Most of the game is in the protagonist head, without the usual twist of events inside affecting the outside world. So it's all a setup for a reveal that's not that interesting. The real world is just the anime Anohana with somehow even more boring characters. The dream world characters are just boring, and their real world counterparts are barely used.

Basically, the entire game events is setting up for the ending, but due to the game being way too padded by that point you lose interest and guess there will be some obvious edgelord reveal, which what exactly happens. There are also ridiculous amounts of "scary" moments that are just the usual scare chord or creepypsata shit that's not scaring anyone.

The gameplay is too simple and easy, and easily reduced to the same strategies. And by the end it's barely existant. The game just gives up on making itself fun and phones it in. It also never ties the gameplay to the story. It really feels like the game wants to be a Visual Novel by the end.

Also I played on my potato laptop and I had multiple crashes.

Finally, the game is also a really bad game about Depression. I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure a way to move forward with your life is not constantly looking back at the good times of your past. Yeah the hero accepts the past, but he is still very much stuck and defined by it. It might as well tell you your dead sister cured you with the power of love.

You said it better than me without a huge spergout.

So my idea how could Omori have been a good game:
1. Don't focus on Sunny and Omori (who is a complete plot hole) and instead have all the party share the dreamscape. Each chapter would have a different main character of the four and it would focus on their life issues. That way the entire cast has a point and depth (the dream world being an idealized past).
2. Make the town itself face a crisis that has the four banding together and solving it, using verbal communication rather than physical force for battles. Remove the edgelord twist.
3. Have the ending feature the characters accept that the past had flaws they scrubbed away (not ridiculously so, for example make mary a normal kid rather than a saint), make them decide to let it die and focus on their future. Even a literal fight between the modern party and the past party.
4. Make battles 2x faster. Remove the weapon triangle and instead make emotions massively more complex. Every skill should change the emotion for you or the enemy.

I think the only solution is to not make the game. Seriously, once you start to nitpick the story there's nothing of value. Any changes might as well be something else.

Shit. I liked Omori, I guess maybe because I had no expectations.

I enjoyed looking for creepy scary secrets at the end of the hikikomori route.

The music was banger too, really liked sweetheart's battle theme among others.

I keep hearing how the music is a silver lining, but I honestly don't remember any track. Say what you want about Undertale but that game had a good OST.

 

[Doji]

I keep hearing how the music is a silver lining, but I honestly don't remember any track. Say what you want about Undertale but that game had a good OST.

Here are my favorites. (Hint, basically a good chunk of the boss fights.)

Spoiler: Songs

I really liked the world in Omori and the bosses.

 

[Nuns with guns]

Here are my favorites. (Hint, basically a good chunk of the boss fights.)

Spoiler: Songs

I really liked the world in Omori and the bosses.

Yeah, those were good songs now that I remember. The backgrounds are great, and I liked the Shark Boss mechanic of constantly summoning minions. Other than that, they were somewhat flat on playstyle.

 

[Doji]

Yeah, those were good songs now that I remember. The backgrounds are great, and I liked the Shark Boss mechanic of constantly summoning minions. Other than that, they were somewhat flat on playstyle.

In turn based rpgs, if you ask me, the combat is generally nothing amazing but with cool looking effects and music, it just is.

In good turn based rpgs the relatively simple fight system feeds itself with many growth systems outside of the fight, the outcome of an rpg fight starts to be decided before the fight itself (Stats, Gear, Builds, Knowledge of weaknesses).

Omori doesn't have any outside of the fight influencers other than some simple gear you can wear so the combat is just for show (It's passably cool and entertaining imo), there's some strategizing to find out the best way to use your resources (HP, MP, Items) and that's about it. Heck, the hardest boss fight in Omori is just having a high enough level and enough high end recovery items to outlast the boss.

The strength in Omori doesn't come from the fighting itself but from the world and the characters, I didn't care that much for the story but it was enough to get the game going along and giving you an excuse to see the world. The boss fights are just a representation of conflict for the characters to overcome and the little mob fights are xp you can grind so you can beat the bosses even if you're a dumb potato by being a high enough level.

Say what you want about Undertale but that game had a good OST.

Undertale also had actually challenging fights with different gimmicks but it's a more of a bullet hell than it is an rpg. I guess you could call it a hybrid.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I think the only solution is to not make the game. Seriously, once you start to nitpick the story there's nothing of value. Any changes might as well be something else.

Technically yeah but that's the boring answer. I guess in the end the problem with the game is that it tries to be about depression, a group of friends coming back together after breaking up, and uncovering a main character's dark past. And pretty much every one of them is mutally exclusive.
A depression plot mean the hero needs to be cut from outside support (minus a family) so no friends, and making it about a dark secret is just ridiculous when the suicide should be reason enough for a lot of people to get broken mentally. And friends uncovering a dark secret doesn't work when one of them already knows the secret.
If the game stuck to one of them it might had at least a plot.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

I just played this blind a month or so ago and enjoyed it overall, although I think the pacing does have issues and some stuff pointed out earlier really doesn't hold together. I can accept the dreamworld dialog flowing like an episode of a kids show but it really should've deviated more in the real world.

My solution to fixing the plot would be removing the suicide entirely. Have Mari trip over Omori's violin and fall down the stairs to set up the guilt plotline and replace the manifestation of Something with a really large spider to mislead the player about what he's really afraid of/pretending not to see, and then have the reveal be that it's actually Mari at the bottom of the stairs with her hair splayed out.

Oh, and remove half the goddamn Yume Nikki references. Black space tried way too hard.

If anyone's slogged through it twice, did anything of note get added to the switch version?

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Had some time to think about the game and there are a lot of narrative fails that I might as well sperg about:
* Modern Aubrey's weapon is a fucking bat with nail stamped over it. I know it's almost certainely the dev thinking it looks cool but holy shit that's a weapon that will absolutely put you in jail for walking around with, and will cause you severe bleeding and scarring if it hits. And the bitch calls Sunny a psycho for going at her with a knife. In general her gang isn't the little bit dark, so it makes her falling into deliquency fall flat.

* Sunny's phobias in the game make no sense. In every decent piece of media the phobias will build up into foreshadowing the reveal. His fear of height makes no sense considering he lives in the second floor. His fear of bugs has no bearing on the plot. And the fear of Water is due to an entirely unrelated incident, which is a huge cop out. It will make far more sense for him to have a fear of stairs (Bathmophobia), fear of physical contact (Haphephobia) and fear of looking people in the eye (Scoptophobia). Which won't only be massive foreshadowing for the reveal, but will have great gameplay opportunities like impeding specific exploration, having modern Sunny not be able to attack and not showing the complete portraits of the modern characters until the end.
* What the hell is Omori (besides a piano)? He seems to replace Sunny in the dream but how much he knows about his task is never clear. Does he know nothing until both he and Sunny make a discovery, or does he know everything and just plays along? Because if so you'd think he would play a role of either pointing you in the correct/incorrect direction.
* What with the photographs in the reveal, did Basil make a snuff film? Since he appears in some of them as if he took them rather than memories.
* The entire time gap between the suicide and the current time makes no sense. For example did Aubrey steal the photo album immediately after and Basil tried to get it for the last 3 fucking years, or did she wait 3 years to steal it to coincide with the plot. Both cases make little sense. Why did Kell seemingly did nothing for so much time when both Aubrey and Basil were in shit condition? It's like the dev wanted a conclusion but didn't try to justify it despite how characters would logically act to get there. Not to mention it gives a completely different sense of what happened as if Basil caused the death and Aubrey had a huge involvement in it, rather than Basil taking the fall for painting over some pictures.

 

[LucasSomething]

it looks cool but holy shit that's a weapon that will absolutely put you in jail for walking around with, and will cause you severe bleeding and scarring if it hits. And the bitch calls Sunny a psycho for going at her with a knife.

Every youtuber i saw laughs at that scene and says Kel is retarded for calling Sunny out. It's meant to convey that Sunny is so detached from reality he cant understand this isnt a game bro and people get hurt for REAL but it fails because

1-It was literally self defense against a maniac holding a nail bat.
2-The very next scene has Kel and Sunny beat the shit of some small kid and it's played for laughs.

I agree with the phobias, yours would make a lot more sense and actually foreshadow but i guess they require some research and height/spider/water phobias are more "cinematic" and normie friendly.

The photographs in the reveal are just artistic liberty but they shouldnt exist inside Sunny's memories since they are from Basil's POV.

What the hell is Omori (besides a piano)?

Omori is clearly a symbolic representation of young sunny but i still dont know why he exist or what's his "goal", which i firmly believe is intentional but it's too vague and sometimes contradictory.

Spoiler: spoilers

Omori seems to exist so Sunny can go on fun quests and forget about Basil which indicates rejecting the past. But at the same time Omori opens the black space and "kills" the memory of Basil indicating Sunny hates basil and considers him a reminder of Mari's death but why did he open black space in the first place?

Later on we have Omori as a boss and he says it's your fault and you should kill yourself so he obviously represents Sunny's suicidal guilt but why tho when it seemed he was trying to protect sunny so long? Why does he hug you? For the "feeeels"?

Also interesting note, Omori was originally a anctual hikikOMORI as in, a NEET who would reject reality to spend all day watching porn. OMOCAT would lather make a ministory where he is sitting then and then his friends appear (no mari or basil) which would eventually become game fuel.

The entire time gap between the suicide and the current time makes no sense.

That's the one main thing that kills the real life narrative but everytime i point this out online people say it i'm crazy. This isnt like life is strange where "I left for years and my friend thinks i abandoned them so now they hate me" kinda of deal, Sunny hasnt left his house for 3-4 years.

-Kel is an asshole for not visiting sunny and a hypocrite for pretending he cares but the game paints him as perfect.
-Hero is a double asshole since (AFAIK) he didnt even try to meet sunny.
-Aubrey turned into Chloe from LiS (dead father and everything) but i wasnt sold on her relationship with Mari being THAT great anyway.
-Basil was Sunny's best friend and never tried. Also, instead of finding a way to move on, he spent years waiting for sunny to do anything and once he finds out

Spoiler

Sunny is moving out he's ready to kill himself AND sunny too

for some reason??.

It also makes the family look insane by allowing this to go on for this long. Sunny hasnt left the house or talked with anyone for a whole year and you didnt get him a psychiatrist or medicine? It's very obvious they wanted some sort of time skip but they didnt put any thought into it so it just happens so it's like Sunny was frozen in time for 3-4 years.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

The gameplay of this one lost me fairly early-on, although I've been meaning here and there to continue away at it - if only because I really do enjoy the aesthetic.

But reading a bit of spoilers here and there, jesus fucking christ, you would swear that all of these people trying to make content about depression have never actually been fucking depressed. It reads like the drama is bloated to the gills with tropes and is simply the idea of depression stretched out over ideas drawn from other pop-culture. I'll still probably work my way into seeing how it fails, exactly, but with a bit more wariness.

 

[Nuns with guns]

The gameplay of this one lost me fairly early-on, although I've been meaning here and there to continue away at it - if only because I really do enjoy the aesthetic.

But reading a bit of spoilers here and there, jesus fucking christ, you would swear that all of these people trying to make content about depression have never actually been fucking depressed. It reads like the drama is bloated to the gills with tropes and is simply the idea of depression stretched out over ideas drawn from other pop-culture. I'll still probably work my way into seeing how it fails, exactly, but with a bit more wariness.

Omocat is basically a rich Californian Chinese which inherited millions from her father, who worked on Big Pharma. Her relationship with her mother is a bit weird because Omocat irl is ugly and her mother pressured her into getting plastic surgery (yet she still looks like shit). Other than that and teenage angst, I don't think she had many struggles in life. She's basically a fujoshi loving anime shirt artist that decided to make a video game because she made cute gay prepubescent boys comics. The game eventually snowballed as Omocat's work ethic is awful, the team is full of groomers, and Omocat herself became obsessed with being better than Undertale. The end product is just a pathetic excuse for a game with a nice aesthetic, but a cheap narrative and hidden easter eggs hoping one of the fight scenes becomes the next Megalovania.

I learned all of this from the other farms. I know many of you are weebs but I guess you don't have your heads so deep in animated child pornography that you would care about this type of gossip. Omocat is definitely lolcow material though.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

you would swear that all of these people trying to make content about depression have never actually been fucking depressed

This is as old as the internet. Depression is for tumblerites is half fetish (think the Coomer meme) half "victimization point" that's designed primarily for asspats and attention whoring. At best those people are on so many daily meds that their brain is barely functioning, but most cases are just faking. Omori as a game shows this by paying lip service for the classic depression symptons (not going out, not eating) only for the hero to effortlessly walk with his friends around town without any necessary player effort, because that's what the creator does only she pretends she feels really bad about this. Ditto every phobia is solved by being told by your virgin Mary sister how much of a brave person you are for pressing Z to overcome it. You don't overcome any thing in the game as the last part is completely linear and does not require any kind of thought or action to solve.

Not that depression is real anyways.

 

[Colon capital V]

* Sunny's phobias in the game make no sense. In every decent piece of media the phobias will build up into foreshadowing the reveal. His fear of height makes no sense considering he lives in the second floor. His fear of bugs has no bearing on the plot. And the fear of Water is due to an entirely unrelated incident, which is a huge cop out. It will make far more sense for him to have a fear of stairs (Bathmophobia), fear of physical contact (Haphephobia) and fear of looking people in the eye (Scoptophobia). Which won't only be massive foreshadowing for the reveal, but will have great gameplay opportunities like impeding specific exploration, having modern Sunny not be able to attack and not showing the complete portraits of the modern characters until the end.

I was always under the impression after beating the game that the phobia fights were because they all had something to do with Mari's involvement (stairs, drowning) and they all give Sunny painful flashbacks. But that doesn't really make sense in that regard either because, while the stairs/height is understandable, why would you have an entire section/boss fight dedicated to fighting against fear of spiders or fear of water if it reminds him of that one time Mari came in and squished a little fucker or saved him from drowning once? In that case, why not have a section for fear of stoves? I'm sure sunny would've burned himself that one time had Mari not come in and pulled his arm away from it. Or having a fear of pianos? I know there's a section of the game where there's a room that sunny refuses to go in because Mari's piano is in there but if that's the case, why have a boss fight for stairs but not one for the piano?
I agree the phobia fights should've been more in-line with how Sunny would act post-Mari suicide and not this weird flip-flopping between fear sections that only tangitionally relate to Mari and fear sections that don't exist.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I was always under the impression after beating the game that the phobia fights were because they all had something to do with Mari's involvement (stairs, drowning) and they all give Sunny painful flashbacks. But that doesn't really make sense in that regard either because, while the stairs/height is understandable, why would you have an entire section/boss fight dedicated to fighting against fear of spiders or fear of water if it reminds him of that one time Mari came in and squished a little fucker or saved him from drowning once? In that case, why not have a section for fear of stoves? I'm sure sunny would've burned himself that one time had Mari not come in and pulled his arm away from it. Or having a fear of pianos? I know there's a section of the game where there's a room that sunny refuses to go in because Mari's piano is in there but if that's the case, why have a boss fight for stairs but not one for the piano?
I agree the phobia fights should've been more in-line with how Sunny would act post-Mari suicide and not this weird flip-flopping between fear sections that only tangitionally relate to Mari and fear sections that don't exist.

I actually searched online if there was a reason for the spider phobia and the official deep lore is that in the past, Sunny climbed on a pillar by the lake (don't you have a piller near your town lake?), Saw a spider, jumped back into the water and nearly drowned, causing all 3 phobias at a single incident. Seriously.

Also if you think about it, Sunny having a fear of water/drowning would mean he would very rarely shower and be an absolutely smelly fucker.

 

[Colon capital V]

Also if you think about it, Sunny having a fear of water/drowning would mean he would very rarely shower and be an absolutely smelly fucker.

I think that might actually be implied because in the hikkik route when Sunny is taking a bath it causes the waterphobia fight to start. And since we see actual days go by without him washing himself... ew

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I think that might actually be implied because in the hikkik route when Sunny is taking a bath it causes the waterphobia fight to start. And since we see actual days go by without him washing himself... ew

It's the bizarre case of women writing fap bait that they'll never even conceive to attempt to have a relationship with.

 

[Oilspill Battery]

Is this one of those overrated "2deep5me" 2D games like Undertale?

Omori is the definition of bait. On the surface it looks like a faggot ridden tumblr-esque "3deep6me" hispter "muh mental trauma" depression quest weebtrash knockoff but that's literally just a coat of paint to throw off your expectations, once you actually get past the surface underneath is one of the most masterfuly writen and well executed narratives you're ever going to experience across, games, movies, series and I'd argue books.

Yes, headspace is basically completely fucking pointless, and yes, gameplay sucks shit and yes, the game is probably 10 hours longer than it needs to be, but it doesn't matter because the core narrative is so tightly writen and the last third of the game is a masterclass of presentation, direction and storytelling that its absolutely worth it to suffer through the bad parts just to reach it and see the art, the music, the aesthetic, the writing and the direction finally come toogether in (what I'd consider at least) a timeless masterpiece.

Also, for anyone worried (because I assume a lot of people here are considering how the game looks on the and other comments on the thread), the game is completely apolitical, there's absolutely no gay shit, no tranny shit, no politics right leaning or left leaning of any kind.


I don't know if the creator is a lolcow, or an sjw or a tumblrite or whatever, but omori really was a labour of love enough that the creators left politics out the door when making it. I feel like a lot of people in the thread are assuming that the game is tumblrite sjw shit because the artstyle and presentation hit all the wrong notes on the surface and are eager to pre-judge it and shit on it because of that, but its really really not.

This game was made because someone wanted to tell a genuine story.


Also, mind you, this review is from someone who has never played a jrpg in their entire life and has an general distaste for weebshit.

I actually searched online if there was a reason for the spider phobia and the official deep lore is that in the past, Sunny climbed on a pillar by the lake (don't you have a piller near your town lake?), Saw a spider, jumped back into the water and nearly drowned, causing all 3 phobias at a single incident. Seriously.

Spoiler: Story Spoilers

Except you're leaving half the story out because its more complicated than that, its not that the event happened and suddently he got 3 phobias out the blue, yes the event did happen and yes he did nearly drown, but Mari was the one who saved him from drowning, and after the staircase incident he realized that she had literally saved his own life in the past.

All memories associated with mari became painful, and the fact that he was responsible for taking the life of the one who had saved his is what caused those three things to bloom into fully fledge phobias, because he didn't want to remember the time Mari literally saved his life because it made what he did all the more awful.

Its not 3 random things from a random unrelated event that have nothing to do with the story. She saved his life, he took hers, and the memories of that event became even more traumatic because of that.

Water, spiders and heights are a reminder of the greatest kindness Mari ever gave him, that's why he doesn't want to be near them.