Captain Morton's Notes

Ashes is definitely the shortest of the DLCs Fromsoft has done for any of it's games. It clocked in at about 4 hours for me, and that was with me doing a clean sweep of everything there was to find and/or kill. It's also one of my favourites, not least as it evokes one of my favourite parts of the original Dark Souls. Dark Souls 3 is the most self-referential of the Souls series. Naturally so, coming off the back of two games worth of rich lore with little connective tissue, it's a game that pushes the series' lore forwards rather than outwards, as 2 did, progressing the story of the world as a whole, of each decrepit gear as they turn, rust and break. Ashes of Ariandel is openly drawing from the Painted World of Ariamis in Dark Souls The First, and plucks on the heartstrings of fans in much the same way as the main game did, so if you were one of weird people that thought that somehow made 3 a lesser game this isn't going to do much for you. But for those of us who...

Odin Sphere has no qualms with challenging RPG traditions. Broadly, it still fits pretty well into the "JRPG" box, being a character-driven linear RPG, but it's a game that knows it's priorities well enough that it can work the fundamentals of the genre into something more comfortable for what it's trying to do. It has varying degrees of success, but on the whole it makes for a wonderful experience. Screenshots nicked from Videogamer, which only had 3 screenshots, so not exactly a whole lot of variety, but still, cheers. Odin Sphere is the absolute monarch of twists. That's the one thing that stood out to me the most from it's excellent story. It never seems to run out of surprises and revelations that turn everything on it's head. I can only imagine the lengths Vanillaware must have gone to in structuring this beast. The game's main hook is that it's structured around 5 campaigns with 5 different playable characters, each covering roughly the ...