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Jello Reviews - Omori

OMORI - 7/10This is the first Jello Review voted on by you Patrons! Wow!Omori is a little RPG that half psychological horror and half whack-

OMORI - 7/10

This is the first Jello Review voted on by you Patrons! Wow!

Omori is a little RPG that half psychological horror and half whack-a-doodle childhood friendship silliness.

It's heavily inspired by old RPG Maker horror games like Yume Nikki and oddball RPGs like Earthbound. When this game is being itself instead of constantly nodding towards its influences it's honestly amazing. The rest of the time? Ehh... it's alright.

No spoilers for the bulk of the review. I let you know when spoilers are about to start happening.

Full playthrough of this game available on my Twitch! 

Some clips I mention in the review:

Basil Melon (Part 1, significant spoilers)
Basil Melon (Part 2, significant spoilers)
The Best Moment in the Game (significant spoilers)


Jello Reviews - Omori

Comments

Which is silly, but like, fair enough i suppose

Noah Finch

Also the gouging eye out is that Basil literally chucks his gardening shears at you

Noah Finch

Whixh makes it extra stupid because then the twist could have been it was an accident and their parents just had them cover up that sunny was involved because imagine the hell you'd go through if everyone knew you as the kid who killed your own sister.

Noah Finch

I think that for the suicide stuff, the game implies that their parents knew sunny pushed her, but didn't call him out or tell the others because how the hell do you explain that shit. Because like obviously any investigation would have revealed that, but it makes since that the parents would let the suicide story stick rather than revealing that their son accidentally killed their daughter

Noah Finch

Full game spoilers: God, One of the most frustrating parts about this game for me is the staging of the suicide was a wholly unnecessary decision by Basil. In order for Sunny to actually receive any consequences beyond social or emotional he would have to have his parents press charges against their own kid, him to be found guilty by a jury, (no jury would convict a kid for reckless endangerment or conduct, especially when it’s their sister), and then have the judge not overrule the decision, (if the jury somehow votes Guilty). It makes me wonder what the hell was Basil going through for his first, second, and third thoughts to be, “I’m gonna stage this as a suicide, because Sunny ‘murdered’ his sister, and use a jump rope and their backyard tree.” I also want to say that while the pacing in Headspace being truly awful is on purpose, there were better ways to go about it that weren’t just tacking on an extra phase to an already bloated fight or adding another dungeon to fight through.

Elae Lockwood

Big agree on Yume Nikki, the creator doesn't even categorize it as an actual "horror game". It's just a surreal experience where you can explore a lot of stuff, both scary and otherwise, and it's up to you to choose when the game ends and what the meaning truly is. I'd say Omori is definitely inspired by it in terms of vibes, but they're also extremely different. "Yume Nikki but with linear story and actual answers to all the mysteries" is not even Yume Nikki anymore lol (...a lesson the creators of the 3D reboot needed to learn...)

Bunni89

Tbh Jello I think you undersell the story behind Hero recovering outwardly from Mari’s loss and becoming normal- It’s not making Kel cry that makes Hero go back to normal. It’s Kel crying, and then his mom coming in and *comforting Hero instead while ignoring Kel* that makes him snap out of it. Realizing because he was the favorite him being outwardly distraught left Kel with *nothing* from his parents is what made him go back to normal. Omori is far from perfect, but that small detail is so good!

ASquared

Wow, I completely forgot to comment when you posted this video--I always thought the twist of Basil and Sunny staging her death as a suicide was weird. Even when the game first came out, I remember thinking it was awkward at best and bad at worst; which sucks because I do think they could have had Sunny feel guilty over her death. Like, why couldn't they have argued and he said something terrible to her and that prompted her to take her own life? and then Basil could've either seen it and instead gone to comfort sunny, so thats why they both have this lingering shared guilt and trauma over her death. Also, you're right; its very messed up that the good ending is sunny confessing to them...and then leaving town. like maybe you can infer some time passed and he reconciled with them before he left, but it is...weird. BUT, the fact that the game was good at all after like...7 years in development hell is pretty cool. And the real world stuff is pretty great; Hero is my favorite. I just wanted to give him a hug DX Good Review Also Omori is getting a manga adaptation soon; if you have anything to say about it, i'll be interested in listening

Chandler B

I was talking about the joke stats you get on level-ups

JelloApocalypse

Good review other than some of the actual falsehoods spouted about Earthbound and its combat system such as having stats that literally don't matter when that's just downright false haha.

Cragl3yman343

Spoilers for Omori: Firstly, I'd like to touch on a single part which I think is emblematic of the game's biggest problem, its pacing and refusal to cut out redundant ideas: For the Big Reveal photo section at the end, I think the point was to make the audience assume that the photos of the staircase came *after* the photos of the tree, and then when you're collecting the photos of the tree at the gates-section, the player is being forced to place them chronologically, making for a good "Hang on, I thought they took her down first and moved her to the stairs... why are stairs *before*... oh no..." moment. However, I think it really falls flat at the gate section, where after being forced to put all the photos in the book, the game then decides to show you every photo in sequence *again*. One or the other would've been okay (I personally would've preferred the gates not existing and you being able to voluntarily put the photos in) but I could understand the gates if (and only if) A, the game had quality-of-life things like remembering which page you closed the book at rather than forcing you to flip to the end every time, and B, they didn't shove the sequence in your face afterwards by showing all the photos you've just sorted into order... be in order.) I think it's emblematic of the larger problem of the creators not being able to part with ideas or parts of the game they made, causing the story and levels and game overall to be larger than it should be. As for other issues, I agree with you that the dreamscape levels are *much* larger than they should be for a game like this - smaller levels means less time to emotionally forget about everything so the heavy feels can lurk in the back of the player's mind without being outright forgotten. If I were playing this, I would feel like I was just hopping between two games rather than playing a cohesive game, which is not a good thing. And I also agree that it would have made for a very different but more interesting game if they had the Big Reveal happen 2/3rds of the way through - telling the audience there was Alfred Hitchcock's bomb under the table to build tension rather than springing the bomb at the very end without even getting to watch the aftermath of the bomb making it feel silly and pointless. And that would allow the "fixing the violin" sections to be more scattered throughout the final third, making it less of a backloaded character arc. P.S. Yume Nikki is less a game and more an environment simulator. Like an animated windows background you can explore. Not really a game.

Finn Underwood

It is kindof a bummer that all the gimmicky bossfights and cool innovations with the emotion system are in the post ending locked behind the bad ending.

TiredOf Everything

Totally agree. It really feels like the impetus for creating Omori was the ending - specifically because the other parts of the game are lightyears ahead of the ending in terms of writing. They were clearly conceptualized and then iterated on multiple times, whereas the "dark twist" ending feels like it was always set in stone since the beginning of the project. It's so cheap and amateur compared to everything that came before it.

Waaku Faaku

It does seem like the game wanted to make the dream realm as tedious and boring as they could get away with in order to make it clear Sunny no longer could find escape or pleasure in, since he has been doing it for so long. This however doesn't forgive the dream segments being boring.

Trevor Ryan Stanchfield

[OMORI SPOILERS AHEAD] It's a small thing, but I think it's at least partially implied that the reason that Kel was able to move on from Mari's death faster than everyone else is that he simply wasn't as close to her as the rest of the friend group. Hero and Mari were pretty much dating, Sunny was her brother, and she and Aubrey were essentially gal-pals to the extent that they had planned to get their hair dyed together. While they often hung out as a group, Kel and Mari didn't ever really spend time together individually. As for Basil, I definitely agree that, despite being in the memories, he doesn't really feel particularly connected to anyone in the group. Even in the final cutscene that plays after you defeat Omori that essentially depicts the story of Sunny's entire life, you learn that the way he ended up joining the friend group was just 'Aubrey showed up with him one day.' While he does have some personality, he feels like more of a plot device than a fully fleshed-out character. Staging Mari's death as a suicide is still something I don't fully understand why he decided to do. Also, throughout several instances of your playthrough, you kept claiming that there was no way Basil wasn't going to commit suicide by the end of the game, and since you didn't mention it, that is one of the endings. If you decide to go back to sleep with your friends in his living room rather than confront him, he kills himself with a pair of gardening shears and you wake up the next morning to see all of your friends reacting to finding his body. Then you just leave them grieving and without any answers as the credits roll with ambulance sirens in the background. It's really awful.

Fan Trades

Chat lied to you :( I tested it out myself on my initial playthrough because I was curious and yeah, Sunny explicitly refuses to do it if you beat Omori. If you lose to Omori, you go through a brief sequence that mirrors the beginning of the game without dialogue. You wake up in white space, leave, enter the neighbor's room, see your headspace friends, and when you leave the neighbor's room through the top like normal, instead of exiting through the tree stump, you emerge on the balcony. You can't turn back from there and have to jump. If it were like chat told you and what you had assumed, then yeah, that'd be really stupid to give you the choice at all. Thankfully that is not the case.

Brethren Toons

I know these are all minor but I swear to god there were like fifty of them by the end of the game

JelloApocalypse

I remembered a few more nods to the mother series: - The Artist has a dog that looks exactly like Boney from M3... except it's blond and named Lucas. - I have to assume the weird ongoing rivalry between apple juice and orange juice in the real world is a reference to Apple Kid and Orange Kid. Otherwise I have no idea why it's there since both types of juice are essentially functionless in the real world.

JelloApocalypse

1) I actually did pick up on this! I don't mind this element. 2) Chat told me that in the last hallway when you can either follow Shadow!Basil or your friends one way or the other if you follow your Headspace Party that also triggers the kys ending, which is dumb if true considering the victory in the previous fight.

JelloApocalypse

Good review! I really love Omori, but I acknowledge it has its problems. I actually really like the idea of revealing *THE TWIST* 2/3 into the game. I don't know how you'd specifically go about doing that but I think how you described it conceptually would be amazing. My only gripe being that I feel like you'd have to write and change a *lot* of potential stuff if everyone treats you differently if you choose to tell them about it. Only two other things I want to mention. Spoilers below: 1) This doesn't really register on a first playthrough and you have to look carefully at a few of the abstract scenes for it but the game implies at a few points that Sunny's parents are aware of the circumstances behind Mari's death and because they were affluent, they were able to keep things hush hush. It's why Sunny's dad is totally absent and his mom is distant. I looked at your playthrough and you missed a brief line in the endgame where his mom says "Mari was my only daughter. And you... you are my only son. I can't afford to lose you too." That alongside one of the nightmare sequences when you pick up the keys where you see Sunny's dad angrily chopping down the tree makes me think that. It's YMMV of course, but you might find that insight interesting. 2) The ending where you kill yourself is specifically if you lose to Omori in the final battle. If you try to go to the balcony after you've beaten Omori, Sunny will shake his head. Giving up at the finale basically means that Sunny decides he's in a no-win situation where he can't bear to tell his friends the truth because his will lost out to Omori's, but he has to explain what happened considering they're literally in the hospital over it. Rather than do that, he decides to (selfishly) avoid the pain of telling the truth by just offing himself. It's not just a Yume Nikki thing. Anyways, good review! Glad you liked it, even with its flaws.

Brethren Toons

Jello you cant just post a review of my favorite game at 3:50 EST and expect me not to lose sleep listening to it

Emma Watkins


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