It’s curious how people describe Omori. To me it’s about a lonely, broken boy in the middle of a 2000’s small town quaint suburbia, (even if almost as scenery only) that has his home shaken by death and loss. He’s soon moving from the town that he virtually doesn’t live anymore, and reality is knocking at his door. Can he give life another chance? That’s what Omori is about. And if you ask me, every person needs a rite of passage story to call his own, and this one resonated with me.
Its characters, and there’s no way around this, are just kids. The circle affected by
Mari's death are still dealing with loss, craving for the way things were, when they were closer, being themselves. The dialogue can be superficial, but it captures how kids deal to uncomfortable situations, — not dealing with it, really — with Kel wanting to resolve everything even if not possible, Hero stumbling to keep the older, responsible brother façade, Aubrey growing rebellious and antisocial, contrasting with her old, bubbly and social child personality, and Basil growing melancholic, acting as a protector of the group memories guarding their old, good moments photo album - Everyone of them is scarred, and every moment between them does not feel right.
But Omori really shines in its portrayals of Sunny’s inside lingering trauma in a raw, adolescent way, unfiltered, confusing, at times with grand cold images of his alter ego at the same time he adventures through the dream world dwindling naivety. Omocat managed to transmit the feeling of feeling the external cracks of reality pouring into innaction, in an unique, intuitive accessible manner. There’s so much to feel! It shines juxtaposing the innocent, pure feeling of familiar love with dark, strong feelings of guilt. The duet scene does this well, being very emotional, after all the tussle he goes through. The real world feels like a constant dream, with its unfamiliarity, and going from raw emotion at times to living nightmares. Sunny almost has no control.
The visual interpretative cutscenes and Yume Nikki style segments dwindles the gamey parts, gamey parts that don't bother me, neither do I find them amazing. Sometimes the Dream World felt like a collection of cool quirky things too much, and seemed dull in retrospect, even if it represented escapism. With its long walkable sections, I saw myself running all the time. The music, scenario and enemies' art saved it.
An ambitious game that paid off. Six years in the making, with viral campaigns of crowdfunding, and a team of millennial artists of the likes of
Toby Fox and
bo en in it’s soundtrack, I would say that pulling off acclaimed status from a style that has Earthbound and MOTHER 3 as stepping stones is no easy feat, and it only shows how new games are as a media.
This feeling just makes the world-building all seem incredibly underbaked. We don't really get a ton of actual, in depth characterization of the main characters, especially before Mari's death and as a result, there isn't a very rich 'before' picture to compare with the 'after' picture of the real world setting. This is why I feel that the responses to Mari's death feel so exaggerated; we don't have the opportunity to see its repercussions in all of the small ways that it would affect them, so in order to communicate the effects the narrative has to show it with relatively exaggerated responses. The fact that most of the real world sections of the narrative are pretty much solely about Mari's death and its repercussions also hinders the chances to see its effects in a more subtle way. Mother 3, LISA: The Painful, and Echo all have the experience of death at a young age as a major part of their stories, but for them all the majority of the narrative is about something else entirely, which gives them a lot more space to explore things.