THIS POST CONSISTS ENTIRELY OF GAMEPLAY SPOILERS FOR ODIN SPHERE
To recap for anyone who didn't listen to the audio of my first hour and a half with the game Odin Sphere is a beautiful 2D action RPG.
It's also pretty grind intensive. Usually I hate that, but there are so many choices and ways to be clever about it that I completed the first campaign in the game (on which I spent over 24 hours) before tiring of it.
Economy
Phozons
Phozons are experience points which level up your attacks and replenish your magic if absorbed. They also grow fruit. You get seeds in the game and when you plant them they absorb phozons to produce fruit (or in the strange case of one seed, a plant that makes sheep). You eat the fruit (or kill the sheep and eat the meat) to gain food XP, which raises your health. Later on you open up restaurants. If you don't mind cluttering your inventory with eggs and veggies and making sure to not to spend the types of coins they use, you can reap some massive food XP.
There are five types of coins in the game. Restaurants include specific coins in the recipe for a dish. If you have a coin (even one you know they'll take from another recipe) that's worth more, they won't even make change. It's stupid.
But if you've got enough health already, you can also sell food to raise cash. Many areas in the game will hurt you constantly if you don't have protection. Protection charms cost 100, so there's a lot of literal farming to do, if you don't want to be taking constant damage.
Alchemy
There are "material bottles". They have numbers on them. If you combine two materials, those numbers multiply. If you add a potion to a material, the number doubles. If you add pretty much anything else, it will add a fixed point value. Edible food items add five points (even if you've already taken a bite or two). Bones from meat add three points. And most other items (eggs, seeds, and food remains like apple cores and grape stems) add one. Numbers go to 99 and then start over at 0.
So what's the big deal about the numbers? Well, the ones digit determines what types of potions can be made from the materials. Besides the fruits and meats you grow, there are native vegetable creatures in each zone that live in the ground. They squeak if you run over them and pop out and run away if you jump on them. You acquire potion recipes that use them to make poison antidotes, potions to protect from the elements (in case you didn't want to farm for charms), and weapon potions like napalm and poison.
The tens digit determines how many phozons will be released as a side effect of the potion. Higher is better. This leads to a lot of hasty math, trying to figure out what items can be combined to make the right number in the 90s to make the desired potion. I eventually just broke down and used the back of an envelope as keeping everything in my head was untenable.
Economy Summary
With so many ways to go and multi-purpose resources (I didn't even mention using seeds to raise chickens.), there are still ways I could almost certainly do things more efficiently. Trying to calculate the relative gold and phozon values of every transaction in the game was further than I wanted to go. But it was apparent that a good amount of thought had gone into them. And trying to work out the smaller problems I had in front of me kept me feeling taxed and clever without burning me out (like Final Fantasy Tactics), which is what games ideally do.
Next up: Combat
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