SFC Game 94 – Shinseiki Odysselia 2

Shinseiki Odysselia II (神聖紀オデッセリアII), released 10/16/1995, developed by Vic Tokai

This is the sequel to the original Odysselia, which I played earlier. It is a direct plot sequel as well as essentially the same system as the original. The story has the same time-travel and combining various myths. At the end of the previous game, the goddess Zion flooded the world to destroy the monsters but humanity was saved by a giant ark. As this game starts humanity seems to have recovered back to the original countries (Persia, Greece, etc.)

The game begins in Persia, where the Persian king tries to make peace with Greece, but is killed by one of his generals for being weak. A priest named Lahan seizes power as regent for Darius, and destroys Zion. The queen escapes and sacrifices her own life to save Erg, the prince, who goes to Sparta and is raised there.

This game uses the same high-res mode for text that Seiken Densetsu 3 did

The game takes place over 9 chapters. Chapter 1 is the above prologue. In Chapter 2, 14 years have passed and Erg is training under a space bounty hunter trainer named Samus. The final test is to prove your worth in a training cave.

Each character has weapon and magic levels. The magic level for each type of magic determines how powerful the spell is — as in the first game, most elements have an offensive and defensive version. The weapon levels are more mysterious; they may affect hit rate but they don’t seem to affect damage. The battles are typical RPG style.

In addition to innate spells, characters can equip talismans to use magic of that type. I never found these very useful. There’s also a weapon crafting system as in the first game but I also found this mostly useless; the game is pretty easy for the most part and I didn’t have much trouble except in a few places.

After the training ends, Erg uses Athenian allies to defeat the Persian ships, and then goes to Persia and forces Lahan to flee. It turns out that Erg is the son of Loos, one of the characters from the first game and the prince of Persia. But rather than becoming king of Persia himself, Erg leaves Darius in charge and goes after Lahan through a warp circle.

Chapter 3 switches to another character Iria, in South America. She is not human (for now we don’t know exactly what she is). She goes in search of a witch that she hopes can make her human, but they can’t, and then a cyclops drags her through another time portal. That bottom character is a Doppelganger, one of the Familiars (tsukaima) you can get in the game; I didn’t find this a very useful system either but I didn’t explore it a whole lot.

Chapter 4 switches to another character, Talkus. He’s a roman gladiator. The chapter has you go to a training tower, fight a coliseum battle, back to the tower, and repeat until you become the champion. Talkus asks Nero for freedom, but instead Nero frames him for the fire of Rome, supposedly as a secret Christian. Lahan is with Nero as well; the chapter ends with Lahan capturing a girl named Lauren and leaving as Talkus is ready to be executed.

Chapter 5 goes back to Erg, who finds himself in Australia. In the Great Barrier Reef he comes across Iria and the Cyclops; the Cyclops actually joins the party as a familiar. They follow a warp through to Rome, where they save Talkas from execution. They’re apparently 500 years in the future from where they started. They head to the palace to overthrow Nero, who is being controlled by Lahan. Lahan transforms Nero into a monster and then runs through another portal to the future, which is apparently Lahan’s original time.

Chapter 6 switches to Leila and Garuda, two of the earth gods. This takes place before Chapter 1 and Samus is also there as one of the gods, saying that he will train the descendants of the Drakken (this is from the first game; Loos is a reincarnation from a dragon-human people that inhabited the world before humans). They are trying to oppose the 冥界 (Underworld), and seem uncertain that the decision to flood the world was correct.

I found this part of the plot hard to follow — I also had a hard time following Odysselia 1’s plot. I found one review by a Japanese player who said they were confused also so maybe it’s not just me. I believe the situation is this: the gods now believe that the Underworld King tricked them into flooding the world to destroy the beasts, when it was actually the underworld forces controlling them. So now they need to revive the beasts and defeat the underworld king. But the king has the seeds necessary to revive the beasts, and (for some reason) they feel that they need to power of the Drakken descendants to do this. Zion joins Leila and Garuda but eventually goes to the underworld herself, hearing a voice calling for her.

Chapter 7 presents us with yet another character, the knight Meyer. He lives in 12th century Prussia, where an epidemic is devastating the country, and girls are disappearing. A priest from the castle named Bain sends Meyer to defeat a witch who is causing the illness, but it turns out that she has the cure and Bain doesn’t want it to be known. Meanwhile a dude named Gustav is experimenting on the captured girls to discover eternal life. Meyer loses his wife to these experiments; eventually they expose the plot but the Emperor refuses to believe that Bain is responsible. He sends Meyer out to the crusades as punishment, where his two companions are killed — one of the companions is the son of Lord Vandark. Vandark becomes so upset and grief-stricken that he curses God and decides to get revenge on everyone (this is Lahan’s origin).

Chapter 8 finally returns to Erg and companions, who have shown up in 12th century middle east and are the prisoners of Saladin, suspected to be spies from the Crusaders. Saladin eventually uses them to make peace with King Richard, and then they escape back to Prussia where Lahan is still controlling things. The gods Garuda and Leila show up and say that Lahan has gotten his power from the underworld, and is trying to destroy humanity by destroying the “core” (which for some reason is Erg’s dad Loos, I don’t remember if this is something from the first game).

Erg and friends have to defend four seals in the world from Lahan, but of course he manages to break them all, opening the way to the underworld. Lahan hopes to gain power through the blood of Lauren (the girl he captured earlier) but is unwilling to kill her for some reason, showing his remaining humanity — he breaks free of the underworld control but becomes a demon so we have to kill him. Then it’s into the underworld to find a way to sever the underworld from the surface forever.

In Chapter 9 we learn that Iria is the daughter of Zion (the god who went to the underworld many years ago) and Deus, the son of the Underworld King, who was bred to be the opposition to the gods. It’s not clear to me why they fell in love instead of Deus killing Zion. They sent Iria to the surface in secret to avoid the king finding out. Loos’ power to keep the core intact is weakening, and Iria has the power to sever the surface and underworld.

The final bosses are a series of demons we’ve never heard of, and then Iria manages to sever the worlds — but she has to stay behind. There’s a tearful ending, but then Iria suddenly reappears with Leila who says there’s actually still a way to travel between the worlds (why??) and the game ends.

Thank you

So I guess this game is OK; the system is underdeveloped at points and I don’t fully understand the story. But the historical periods are fun and the game plays relatively smoothly.

3 thoughts on “SFC Game 94 – Shinseiki Odysselia 2

  1. Morpheus Kitami

    I feel like the developers had a lot of ideas for various story settings they could use, but never agreed upon which one they should use, and had this as a compromise.
    Also, is it just me or does it look at times like they patched together the artwork from two different games? Some of these elements don’t quite look like they should be together.

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  2. João Guilherme

    This sounds really interesting actually, sadly no fan translation, but it might be promising, how long is this game btw?

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