I would say that nostalgia is overrated, but that statement is both A) obvious, and B) completely at odds with how most of us live our lives and enjoy our culture. Remembering how things were when we were younger is a pastime we all partake in; often, the memories are warm and fun, if we were fortunate enough to have a reasonably happy childhood. But if there’s a lot of darkness back there, we either try not to think about it, or we color it in certain ways to make it more palatable.
Omori is a game that uses nostalgia to hook us. Its Earthbound aesthetic is catnip to 90s JRPG fans like me, from the simple, solid-color graphics to the really out-there music to the surprisingly fun battle system. It’s an indie title that feels just like a super polished 90s triple A release, and from a nostalgia perspective, it doesn’t get much better than that.
Omori is also a game that uses nostalgia as a key component of its story. While the age gap between the two sides of this story are not as great as the gap between Modern Cool-Guy Branden (read: sarcasm) and 90s Dweeb Branden, it’s still a notable shift for the main characters. Minor spoiler ahead, but it’s a pretty fundamental part of how the story is told, so I’m just going to come out with it: In Omori, you play as a character in two different periods of his life. In one, he is a young pre-adolescent, and you experience the world through the lens of his imagination, as he goes on adventures with his friends. In the other, he is a high schooler, getting ready for a big move that will take him away from his childhood home for the first time. The connection between these two periods, i.e., the major event that led to the present-day circumstances, forms a large part of the game’s central mystery.
It’s very hard to review a game like Omori without spoiling significant plot details, so I’m putting in a warning now. I’ll be talking about the plot. If you haven’t played the game and want to go in fresh, read this review later. For the rest of you, let’s talk about the story.
***
Omori’s persona exists to shield himself from painful memories. These painful memories surround the death of his older sister, Mari. Simultaneously, we experience Omori’s quest in the past to find his friend Basil, who’s gone missing. Interestingly enough, when we flash forward to the future for the first time, we learn that not only is Omori’s real name “Sunny,” (or whatever you choose to name him, I guess), but that Basil is NOT missing. Sunny is moving away, and his friend group has disintegrated over the years due to Mari’s death. Sunny has been housebound for quite some time, we learn. His older friend Hero is off at college; his next-door neighbor and best friend Kel he hasn’t seen since he stopped going outside. And his friend Aubrey seems to have taken up with a group of mean kids who spend their time picking on Basil and getting into trouble.
These elements of the story hit me so powerfully. Seeing the joy of their friendship, even if only by way of the Omori fantasy sequences, made witnessing the state of their friendship now so sad. The characters all behave so realistically, too, exactly how I think I would have acted at that age in many cases (with the exception of their penchant for entering battle sequences in some pretty inappropriate places). But otherwise, their dialog really drives home how each of them has been dealing with Mari’s absence. Discovering exactly what happened to Mari – and why the Omori sequences are about finding Basil – becomes the key component of that central mystery I mentioned.
***
If I were to level any criticism at the story, it would be that I didn’t feel as strong a connection to real-life events in the fantasy sequences as I would have expected. I’m not saying they weren’t there; but I didn’t feel them if they were. Some of that you can chalk up to me being a dumb-dumb, but I can’t be alone in that feeling. Filling in the gaps between the past events and present events is one of the most thrilling parts of the story, but I was hoping that I’d be able to reflect back on the fantasy events, with my newly gained knowledge of the full story, and see better how they connected to the present. There ARE some connections, but too few, in my mind. It almost makes the fantasy chapters feel perfunctory, as if the developers just needed a reason to have some wacky enemies and abilities.
This might be considered spoilery, but I’m saying it here because I know this is important for some people to know. There are some pretty significant “Trigger-y” things in Omori, most notably significant elements of depression, self-harm, and suicide. I haven’t talked about this much online, but I lost a close family member to suicide, so those elements of the story resonated particularly strongly for me. They’re handled well, at least as well as those sorts of things can be “handled,” and nothing feels cheap or thrown in for shock value. Still, I know that can be upsetting for some people, and I don’t want anyone to pick this up on my recommendation and end up in a bad way, so I wanted to bring it up.
I mentioned the Earthbound-like graphics, but I wanted to give special mention to the manga-style images and sequences that pop up from time to time. The art style is simple, but it’s so emotionally evocative to me, and seeing the characters in full-on portraits at various points adds a lot of weight to the events of the game. They also further add to the game’s scariness, which I don’t know if I mentioned yet, but holy crap, this game is SCARY at some points. A+ horror stuff. The music is also very Earthbound-esque, mixing hummable melodies with weird, discordant guitar sounds and other strange effects. It’s really very good, so props to the team overall on the aesthetics.
Gameplay-wise, it’s a winner, too. The battle system is what I imagine Earthbound’s would have grown into, had the series continued. Much like in the aforementioned game, you face your enemies head-on, but you do see character portraits of your team around the screen. Each of these shows not only their faces, but also their emotional states. There are three main emotions, along with additional emotional states that act as like an amped up version of those main three. They are Happy, Sad, and Angry. The emotion system works like rock-paper-scissors. Happy beats Angry, Angry beats Sad, and Sad beats Happy. So obviously, it’s not just your characters that have emotional states, but your enemies, as well. You can use items and special skills to change your team’s or your enemies’ emotional states in order to give yourself an advantage. And obviously, the trickier bosses will use that same strategy on you. Besides the emotion system, you also can initiate follow-up attacks depending on your group’s power level, and each character’s attack does something a bit different than the rest, so deciding how and when to use a follow-up becomes an important tactical consideration, too.
It has a pleasingly full-feeling battle system for such a relatively short game. It took me about 15 hours to finish, and I definitely did not do every available side quest. I unlocked around a dozen or so, and there could be more, but I can’t say for sure. They’re quirky and will probably be fun for completionists to finish, but I was good mostly following the story.
If you can stomach the subject matter, Omori is so worth your time. It’s an intelligent, nostalgic masterpiece of a game, one that is going to be in strong contention for the best game I played in 2023. It feels like such a confident game, and it’s clear the developers either knew what they were doing, or took the time necessary to figure it out before they released the game. It’s beautiful, it’s moving, it’s scary – it’s a top-tier JRPG.