I first heard about Omori back when it released four years ago. The tradition it counts itself as part of - the indie (J)RPG that marries the Mother series‘ lighthearted riffs on genre conventions with surreal low-fi internet aesthetics – had a strong hold on me for much of my adolescence. Undertale, Yume Nikki, OFF, and LISA are all games I hold near and dear to my heart. That said, Omori arrived a little late to the party. While the buzz around it intrigued me enough to impulsively buy it, it was not even 30 minutes in that it hit me how little interest I actually had in playing it. I had outgrown the “quirky Earthbound-inspired RPG that is actually about depression”, I thought. The aesthetic, while appealing enough, was nothing I felt I hadn’t seen before, and the prospect of trudging through a 30 hour RPGMaker game just tied my stomach in knots. I eventually refunded and forgot about it, outside of the occasional meme or piece of discourse I happened to catch a glimpse of online.

Four years later, I finished Omori. What changed my mind? There were a couple of factors. One was that its fans diligently shilled it to me. Another was that I was intrigued by its parallels to Deltarune, a game that I’ve frankly become a little obsessed with recently. But I’d say the most important factor was my coming across the wonderfully evocative 2014 announcement trailer. It was all the way up my alley; the rapid cutting, crude hand-drawn visuals, vivid splashes of color, maximalist soundtrack and sudden interjections of high-contrast, digitally manipulated photography made for something intensely formally captivating and immediately sold me on the aesthetic chops of OMOCAT.

Playing through Omori itself ultimately vindicated both of those reactions, and unfortunately the former more than the latter.

The game cares little for wasting your time, especially if you put in the effort of doing many of the side quests, not even to mention replaying for alternate routes and endings. Passing off blatant padding as meaningful content is something I have far less patience for than I used to. To a degree, it’s an issue that’s endemic to RPGs, certainly JRPGS, but the impulse to just passingly accept flawed design because it’s entrenched in the genre is a harmful one. Now, you could certainly argue that the Mother games are to some degree guilty of what I'm accusing Omori of, but it’s a lot easier to forgive games when they’re breaking new ground, and even more so when they make many good faith efforts to try to minimize these superfluous genre holdovers. Mother 2 famously skips battles that you’re overlevelled for, Mother 3 adds a fun skill check to get through combat quicker with the innovation of sound battles. Neither game is heavy on grinding, and both try to avoid monotony and keep up a brisk narrative pace. Something that the first Mother game has over either of them is its emphasis on exploration and non-linear progression, which makes even the shallowest quests more engaging by default. It is unfortunately high on grinding (an issue that is blessedly lessened in some revised versions or romhacks), but the trade-off is that it gives the player more freedom to make their way through its virtual world on their own terms. Omori, by contrast, is far too eager to rely on sloppy design. Only occasionally will its time wasting be motivated, integrating it into a charming gag or narrative moment – far more frequently it will task you with absolutely braindead gameplay because it has no other ideas for how to fill time. This is the case with pretty much every side quest, which in both Headspace and Faraway Town invariably amount to boring treks across the map, combat grinding, or some other piece of trivial but monotonous gameplay.

Compare Omori to some of its genre contemporaries and it becomes clear how little reason there is to put up with gameplay this mediocre. Fear and Hunger 2, in spite of some of its shortcomings, definitively proves that the RPGMaker engine can be leveraged for a genuinely enthralling gameplay experience, with tight resource management, open-ended exploration, limited saves, and tense, punishing combat. LISA showed that gameplay and narrative can be united with devastating choices that have a manifest impact on both. Undertale and Deltarune demonstrate that you can create briskly paced and extremely entertaining JRPG adventures which present choices as seamless extensions of the core mechanics, complete with engaging bullet-hell combat that marries challenge with characterization and humor. If Omori is ahead of these in even just one department, I’m not seeing it.

It’s not all terrible, fortunately – the best piece of optional content Omori has to offer is Dino’s Dig, a dungeon area populated by difficult enemies, in which each floor has keys for progression randomly placed in the ground, while you’re given a shovel with a limited amount of uses to dig them up. The catch is that each time you dig, you might get a special currency which allows you to buy better shovels. This way, you’re forced not only to strategize how you use your shovels but also to account for the higher-level enemies you have to face along the way. This area will necessarily take a couple of tries, but avoids feeling too repetitive thanks to an escalating sense of progression, and the aforementioned strategizing on the part of the player. It ends up doing double duty not only as a fun dungeon area but also as an entertaining method of grinding EXP and farming currency or items. The combat here is also at its best since you’re facing some of the most difficult enemies in the game and are thus forced to make good use of items, special skills and the Emotion mechanic - Omori’s main innovation to turn-based combat. It’s an interesting enough way to spice up otherwise unremarkable RPGMaker combat, so it's a shame you rarely need to interface much with it, since most encounters are piss-easy. Poor balancing robs the mechanic of the chance to make battles feel meaningfully dynamic outside of bosses; most of the time you’re more than able to stick to one strategy which works well on all enemies, especially since checkpoints generously restock your health and mana as well.

The main dungeon areas fare worse than Dino’s Dig, and are reluctant to engage the player on a higher level than making them switch to a different character (complete with a mandatory animation), interact with something in the overworld, and then switch back to the main character. Either that or treating them to "puzzles" which are actually just menial chores that can mostly be summed up as “go to a place, flip a switch and come back”. All this monotony is punctuated by silly gags, witty character interactions and entertaining setpieces, to be sure, but there’s little unity between the gameplay and narrative parts – the former is more concerned with upholding the illusion that you’re doing something stimulating while you wait to be rewarded by the next story bit. This begs the crucial question: Why is this even a game in the first place?

Well, hold your horses. Like its ur-text the Mother series, Omori is an extended riff on JRPG conventions, and the ace up its sleeve is Faraway Town. In Omori, the roleplaying mechanics are contextualized as, well, literal roleplaying, a tailor-made fantasy adventure constructed in the overactive imagination of a depressed hikikomori teenager named Sunny. Over the course of the game, the fantasy starts to break down little by little as Sunny reconnects with his past and is forced to face the trauma that’s had him hiding away in his dreams. The game is structured around chapters alternating between Headspace – Sunny’s dream world – and Faraway Town, the real world community which he lives in and rediscovers after years of locking himself in his room. Sunny’s family is moving away in a couple of days, and each new set of chapters count down the days which Sunny has before all hope is lost of confronting his painful past. Faraway Town is Omori at its most clever when it comes to integration of gameplay, or at least it initially is. The first real world section comes after an extended period of JRPG adventuring, and the player, like Sunny in-universe, will have become pretty accustomed to the logic that world abides by. In what is perhaps the game’s most brilliant moment, Sunny eventually has a rough reunion with a former friend which escalates into a fight, sending you to a familiar battle screen. Without thinking, the player is likely to attack forgetting that they have a steak knife equipped, and has to watch as Sunny slashes at their childhood friend, to the shock and horror of bystanders as well as your companion, who then confiscates the knife for the rest of the game. This is a ludonarrative height that the game does not quite reach again, but it’s the most potent example of why Omori could only truly work as a video game. Unfortunately, the Faraway Town sections are subject to diminishing returns. Initially, there’s an intrinsic joy to exploring the community simply for how different it is to everything that’s come before, and because of how much new narrative information is unveiled. After two more repetitions, though, Faraway Town is largely reduced to the same level of monotony that pervades Headspace. Once more you’re mostly tasked with menial chores, which might’ve been a somewhat amusing bit of satire if it was unique to the quests of the real world sections.

The bulk of Omori’s narrative centers around the mystery of Sunny’s past and the events which led to his falling out with his friends and receding away into Headspace. Over the course of the game it’s revealed that the precipitating trauma is the death of Sunny’s sister Mari, and the twist at the end of the game is that Sunny accidentally killed her and, along with his best friend Basil, covered it up as a suicide. Now, I worked this twist out well in advance and actually found it incredibly evocative and intriguing. The complicated interplay between guilt and embarrassment that would realistically result from a trauma like this is something that I found ripe for exploration through the psychological lens that the game had adopted through the conceit of Headspace. Unfortunately, what I think is the narrative’s main issue rears its head in here, that being that it’s just a little too thinly sketched – too content with gesturing towards interesting ideas rather than actually exploring them in detail. Partly I think the impulse to keep the reveal of Sunny’s murder of Mari an endgame twist is emblematic of this – it’s hard to truly explore something that you’re also trying to hide from the player, and by the time the narrative plays its hand, it’s already too late to imbue it with much depth. The game does not expend much effort at detailing Sunny and Mari’s dynamic and history (something that should absolutely be more of a focus given her importance to the story), Basil’s reasoning for coming up with a cover story (knowing why is not the same thing as understanding it on a psychological level), Sunny’s shame at having to preserve such a brain-meltingly cowardly lie, etc. The game’s reluctance to go into detail infects other parts of Headspace. An example is the question of whether Sunny is fantasizing about Aubrey being in love with him in Headspace, or it being an accurate reflection of their childhood dynamic. The game never really tips the scales one way or the other. There’s a fine line between subtlety and laziness, and too often I found that Omori was content to not mine its ideas for their latent psychological depth and drama.

That said, I certainly wouldn’t deny that Omori has moments of undeniable power. It’s consistently witty and humorous. The characters are all well-defined and interesting (well, except maybe Basil, who remains a bit of a cypher by the end of the game). And while I may have wished for something a little more ambivalent than the melodramatic crescendo it goes out on, it’s also hard to say that the game hasn’t earned the right to that moment.

Omori is a good game, or at least a good narrative, but it lacks the confidence to be great. The running theme of its flaws is an unwillingness to do what it takes to really stand out. Instead of creating unique, engaging and deep gameplay scenarios, it takes the easy route and relies on trivial tasks, genre tropes and unchallenging, by-the-numbers combat. It fares considerably better on the narrative front, but still possesses an unwillingness to fulfill its potential and imbue its ideas with the depth they deserve, leaving too much of that work to the player instead. Even just aesthetically it doesn’t fully live up to the promise of its captivating trailer, feeling too indebted to its inspirations; most of the time it’s operating in the mode of either Mother 2 or Yume Nikki. It’s sort of cute, especially if you’re a fan of either or both, but it’s telling that Omori is happy to stay in the shadows of classics instead of crafting something more unique to itself.