Got past the 2nd lord and just not enjoying it at all. The writing is awful and reminiscent of recent disgaea games with its incessant need to constantly repeat certain topics over and over again. You can practically see the shallow writing process in the 2nd area where the unique thing about it is the "snake eyes" keeping an eye on everyone so every 2 minutes someone will mention the snake eyes until the section is over. The party interactions are insufferable with shionne being a completely unlikable tsundere and everyone repeatedly having the "Are you sure you want to help a renan/dahnan?" back-and-forth among other cliches. The new refined combat system is fun with its smooth animations and satisfying comboing but enemies quickly become tedious damage sponges (especially bosses) and Alphen seems to be the only character that's actually fun to play as. Visually the game looks great and is pretty much the only tales game to impress with its artstyle. The music felt as generic as the story and I really didn't dig how needlessly grandiose it could be at times. Maybe I'll get back to it sometime but at the moment I just don't feel the motivation to put up with the flaws.

I finished Omori thinking it was an alright 3 hour game that stretched itself into 12 hours, but the more I thought about the game and its story, the more those 3 hours lost their value and the weakness of its execution came to the forefront of my mind. It's a game that I wish was less afraid of showing its unique aspects, but it plays it safe and refuses to dig deeper into all the touchy subject matter that it brings up. The game is spends most of its time indulging in the escapist fantasy while leaving the meat of the story feel undeveloped, held back by the game's desire to fit into the mold of Earthbound-inspired RPGs.

Much has been said about the game’s pacing issues, the hours and hours it spends on tedious progression in the dreamworld before letting you get tidbits of real story. That content was probably meant to be fun for its own sake and that’s probably the biggest disconnect between me and someone who likes the game. As charming as the visuals were at first, they weren't exactly carrying the weight for me given how standard most of the areas feel for a place rooted in imagination. The quirky humor also fell flat for me as I found it to be missing good gags or any unique bite, most of the jokes felt kinda played out to me before they even started. The various “puzzles” and collection quests didn't do much but waste time when I wish they acted as space for compelling character interactions or story development. I only have good things to say about the music though, which was great throughout.

The combat also took a big chunk of the game, with most of the content geared around it given that the primary reward for all the sidecontent is items to make combat easier.
I’ve never been a big fan of turn based RPG combat and Omori did little to change my mind, as I found it an easy and boring exercise in attack/heal for most part. The emotion system, which gives party members unique effects such as using their mana pool as an extra hp pool, increasing crit chance, e.t.c was badly used IMO. I had hoped the game would allow me to use those emotions creatively to solve problems, but instead, the game explicitly states that it's an RPS system where certain emotions will inherently win against others, turning it into a glorified element system.

It doesn’t help that the story bosses were mainly a knowledge test of whether or not you guessed which emotion they would be inclined to. The only time I ever died was to Kite-Kid, who locked himself into a happy state early in the fight, and I lost because I already had some party members set to Angry. Restarting the fight with this knowledge in advance and setting my party members to sad preemptively made the fight a cakewalk. It was hard to get anything out of the combat for me when it operated on such a simple knowledge check.
That one death also exposed me to an oversight in the game’s design that would make it a chore even if it did attempt to leverage its systems to be challenging. If you lose, it's probably because you don’t have the right skills equipped to take advantage of the emotion you are meant to use. Unfortunately, if you die, the game will restart you right at the fight without giving an opportunity to change your build, forcing you to exit the game and reload your save to do so. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that most bosses were preceded by long unskippable dialogue scenes, so I can’t imagine how miserable the experience would be if you weren’t as lucky as I was with the equipped skills.

Now unto the story, and this is where my feelings with the game get complicated.
The game’s biggest disappointment to me is the criminal misuse of its setup. The game introduces a dreamworld that our depressed protagonist escapes to in their sleep, where he gets to hang around with “dream” versions of people he knew, and then switches gears to the real world, where most of the plot progression happens, and continues to alternate between the two. I think it's a no-brainer that one would use the dreamworld to explore the boy’s deeper psyche and issues through the metaphor and symbolism offered by the flexibility of the dreamworld’s visuals, giving us perspective into his personality, thoughts, and the way he views the world and people around him. Then, that internal struggle that he goes through in the dreamworld would then affect his behaviour and actions in the real world as payoff, right?

Unfortunately, the application of this idea is extremely limited in the game. I get that the dreamworld is meant to be an escapist fantasy, and that is well established within the first hour of the game. We spend a lot of time interacting with characters in the dreamworld, who’s antics and storylines end up being shallow and unfulfilling and fail to give any insight into the real story that’s going on. I can attempt to read into it by saying that SWEETHEART’s antagonistic antics are reflective of Sunny’s negative view of self love, Space Boyfriend’s heartbreak as his fear of relationships, and the whale as his fear of...water? Even with these interpretations, it all feels incredibly weak, at best tangential to the game’s plot, and not nearly enough substance to justify the sheer amount of time spent in the dreamworld.

The reading that makes most sense to me is that the time in the dreamworld was simply meant to depict the protagonist's escapism and how he used it to avoid meaningfully confronting his problems. Maybe it was just that I didn’t find that ecapsim to be fun and worth escaping to in the first place that made it not work for me, but even if it did, I feel like this use of the dreamworld falls so short of its potential that I can’t help but be disappointed.

I understand that the warning posted on the Steam page and the start of the game is a trigger warning for people who are sensitive to those subjects, but the way it's presented almost makes me feel like its the game flaunting what it’s really about before it even gets to pull the rug on you in its intro. It’s unfortunate then, that the game seems to shy away from exploring any of those subjects meaningfully, especially given how ripe the dreamworld setup is for that purpose. I am not asking the game to give a clinical examination or intense psychoanalysis, but the game struggles to use its dialogue and characters to give us a lens to how our protagonist is affected by and parses all his trauma. Instead, much of the game is about him intentionally forgetting the source of his trauma amidst his dreamworld escapism and the conclusion of it being him finally remembering.

The game’s clearest thematic throughline instead, is that of communication, everything else feels like fluff that is only lightly touched upon. The protag’s want to save one of his friends who direly needs him, but his fear of communicating with him and acknowledging what they have done is what drives a major part of the story. Given this theme, I expected Sunny’s position as a silent protagonist to be deconstructed or at least acknowledged, but it's often ignored in a way that is customary of the genre but feels ill-fitting for the game’s themes. On top of that, the game does little in most of its run time to give us his perspective on those fears, and instead is content only implying the depth the character might have.

There is one section of the game however, where the theme and setup is used incredibly effectively, and that is the Black Space chapter. The game homes in on its Yume Nikke inspirations and presents a series of horror vignettes that represent the protagonists darkest thoughts and fears. Not all of it was a hit, as seeing the protag’s friend die gruesomely from neglect loses its shock factor after the third time in a row, but the way it was presented was very captivating to me and I appreciate that the game finally decided to use its visuals to effectively communicate something. It felt like the game was finally delivering in these scenes, but then it ends very quickly and doesn’t feel worth all the tedium of the 8 hours preceding it. I would have preferred if the storytelling of Black Space was something that was spread all around the dreamworld, perhaps delivered with varying levels of subtlety, rather than the way it used now which feels too little and too late.

The biggest victim of the game’s unwillingness to explore its protagonist is the ending. By the time the protag finally confronts his friend and overcomes his fear of communication, it feels undeserved as I never got to know how he parsed through that fear and what he did to overcome it, given that most of the game is spent avoiding the issue entirely. The journey in his mind fails to meaningfully reflect on his actions in the real world, making its “power of friendship” way of solving things feel rote and unimpactful by the end.
Instead, most of all development happens very quickly with him rediscovering the reason behind his trauma. In retrospect that story beat really hurt the game for me, as the reason ends up being so overdramatic and extreme for an otherwise grounded story that it impaired the story's ability to approach these issues in any relatable manner.

Given all that, I have to confess that a big part of my disappointment with this game is likely my fault, given the issues I was tackling when I played the game and still do. I too am afraid of communicating and the hurt I can cause, I’ve spent many nights crippled by my inability to reach out to people who really cared about me. A part of me wanted the game to tell me something nice and inspire me to get better, which is unreasonable to expect from any piece of media, but it's what happened regardless.
Despite all I said about Omori, I do think it has a heart and the strong impression it makes is not a fluke. It hurts for me to dislike this game knowing how personal it must have been to its creator. To tell someone that their depiction of their mental struggles was weak and unimpactful is so awful that I’d rather believe that it’s my own fault for being unable to appreciate what the game does, but to me the game itself feels like it's afraid of communicating too. It feels like a declawed version of itself, afraid of opening up about the issues it wants to talk about and too scared of hurting anyone with its content.
There is a strong chance that I’m just projecting, but regardless, I hope the devs don’t take any of what I said as discouragement. While it didn’t work for me, your game has earned its recognition and popularity for a reason. It might not have left the most positive impression on me, but I can appreciate its heart, the captivating imagery, and the sentiments it wanted to stir. I just hope the success will empower you to be more honest and more daring with your future projects.