Yesterday I finished up Omori. While there are other games that take inspiration from Mother/Earthbound, imo this game approaches that vibe the most. It also takes a lot after Yume Nikki. It's surreal and whimsical, atmospheric and dreamlike, full of weird characters and wacky situations, and just a dash of psychological horror. While also tackling some dark and/or mature subject matter like death, grief, guilt, depression, anxiety and suicide.
It's a pretty good game, tho I do have some nitpicks. First is the battle system. It works on a rock-paper-scissors system of applying the emotions Happy, Sad and Anger. With each buffing some stats while debuffing others, and being strong against one emotion and weak against another. Happy beats Anger, which beats Sad, which beats Happy. And these can be applied to both your party and enemies, through abilities or when reaching certain stages in the battle. It's not a bad system, but for most regular battles there is not much reason to exploit weaknesses. Boss battles make better use of it, but tend to strongly favor one emotion, so you can mostly shred them by setting your party to the emotion strong against the boss', and even if they change theirs up, you can relatively easily force them back into the one your want in most fights.
Second is that it quite often does that thing where the game takes control away and then pans over to whatever it wants to show you. Wouldn't be that bad if it weren't for the panning speed, slowly panning over, and when it's done, just as slowly panning back. It got kind of really annoying towards the end.
And lastly is the ending. I got what is apparently the good ending, and I'd be lying if isn't heartfelt, but it is also kinda fucked up. So the game is basically all about the main character, Sunny, overcoming his fears so that you can finally move on from the suicide of your older sister Mari (or not, depending on your route), and also save another character, Basil, from committing suicide (or not, again depending on your route. But Mari didn't actually commit suicide. Sunny got into a heated argument with her and pushed her, which led to her falling down the stairs and dying. It was accidental, so, you know, bad but forgivable.
But here comes the messed up part. Basil saw wath Sunny did, and convinced him to make it look like a suicide, so they dragged Mari's corpse into the back yard and used a rope to hang her from a tree, so it looked like she hung herself. So while it is indeed about Sunny and Basil coming to terms with Mari's death, and forgiving themselves for what they did, and thus being able to move on, they are the only ones who do. Everyone else still believes Mari committed suicide. This includes Sunny's parents, who are strongly implied to have divorced over the grief from their daughter killing herself without any clue as to why. Like, that's kinda fucked up, right?
