Yumi’s Odd Odyssey is worth the wait, not the binge ⊟
I bought Yumi’s Odd Odyssey intending to review it here. But I’m not going to do that, because I want to write about it soon, while the game’s still new, and because if you had to wait until I finished it for a review, we’d all be waiting until the end of time.
I’ve done a few not-reviews here, and I hope you all don’t mind. You get my thoughts on the game at some reasonable stage of my experience with it, and I get to play a game at my own pace without the extreme stress of trying to marathon it in my very spare spare time.
Anyway, the reason I’m talking about not-reviewing in this not-review is that, for me, Yumi’s Odd Odyssey is a great game when played a bit at a time. When I tried to just get through it, I found myself not only squandering this rare game, but angry and frustrated. So yeah, not doing that.
Yumi’s Odd Odyssey feels mostly identical to its predecessors: the whole thing hinges on the really, really springy fishing line you can deploy, swinging from platform to platform, grabbing onto conveyer belts, and vaulting yourself upward. Even the controls are decidedly old school – you have to opt in to using the analog pad in a menu. Sometimes those controls are a bit finicky, especially when trying to throw your line diagonally or jump and throw, but they’re not unfair. I always feel like I have the ability to do the move I need to do.
Where it diverges from the original: there are new characters, who are, again, hidden behind a menu. I switched over to one who has the power to activate mid-level checkpoints and OH MY GOD THANK YOU. The bosses are also cleverly remixed: they’re the same bosses as before, but dispatched in different ways. I’d say more about it, but it was right around the first boss fight where I decided that I shouldn’t be cranking on this game too quickly.
Image: @hazelnoise via CeeCee
Two nights ago, I faced down this first boss, the series’ signature disgusting giant tadpole guy, 39 times. I know because the game keeps a running count of your successful and failed runs at each stage. The first couple dozen times, I didn’t know how I was supposed to defeat it. Then I knew and couldn’t execute it. Then I got really, extra angry. I got the kind of anger reserved only for me: for a person with a short fuse who has very little free time to play games, and a need to complete games quickly for review.
Yumi’s Odd Odyssey is difficult. It demands mastery of the line mechanics that sometimes the things you have to do feel like tricks speedrunners come up with or something. That first boss fight required me to jump straight up as my line was extending, in order to hook the ceiling – then retract the line and swing left to right, disengaging and reengaging my hook in order to scoot to the right little by little.
I want the time to replay levels, to spend a bit of each day trying to get to a secret exit or a hidden backpack item. I’m not saying it’s impossible to blow through it – I’m sure if you have nothing going on or just plain better dexterity than me, that you can do that. But for me, taking it slow is the difference between a deeply intriguing puzzle platformer and a 3DS snapped in half and thrown in the garbage.
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