So due to inability to sleep I read this whole thread. I've been watching a lets play but honestly I got bored and then watched the Nitro Rad review instead.
I may be speaking out of my ass, but Omori looks absolutely boring. The areas are uninteresting and the combat system has a problem I recall describing elsewhere where it tries to add depth but in reality its just another thing you need to remember to do in between picking "fight" each round. It's not quite Chrono Cross autistic but still, it gives me the vibes of being more effort than its worth to fuck with all the emotions.
So I have my own little problem with the dream world:
It is so GENERIC.
I hate it when media does this. I know they can't make direct references to real media (though one wonders why they can't make obvious stand-ins... like call it "Teenage Samurai Slugs" instead of "Teenage Ninja Turtles") but the idealized childhood of the dream world is like the TV Tropes version of happy memories, full of just the most abstract and generic concepts. Here's a picnic. Here's some bunnies. Here's a bear. Here's a dragon that kinda looks like the Lollipop Dragon although I'm sure that's a coincidence because that would require Omocat to know about something that isn't anime.... and the only media we ever hear about is a comic book (yay, the Codename Kids Next Door thing of kids in the 1990s reading comics) called "Space Boyfriend" and there's a magical girl called Junko Enoshima "Sweetheart."
Why not, at the very least, call him "Flash Ramsay" and call Sweetheart..... I dunno.... "Demashita! Flower Fluff Girl Z!" or something? That would, at the very least, sound like it wasn't a complete afterthought.
And I hate the Wizard of Oz thing where aspects of the dream world have a 1:1 correlation to things in real life, like Sweetheart being the candy store girl.
Mostly I think I would just agree with existing complaints though. I've mentioned in the past I hate "horror game where the big twist is main character did A Bad Thing" before, but part of the problem here is that the game makes it incredibly obvious that's what's going on early on, and so the rest of the game is just you waiting for the game to stop being coy and come out and say it. As others have said, its maybe a one-hour story that is for some reason taking twenty.
And "game about depression" just isn't an interesting angle in the first place. Sorry Nitro Rad, but a problem is.... a character with emotional issues can be interesting if they're part of a larger story, but if that IS the story, then you might as well be reading some teenage girl's blog. If Evangelion was literally just Shinji being a whiner, nobody would like it. It's that he's a whiner being forced into events that will continue to exist no matter what he thinks or feels that make that series work. Omori is literally just navel-gazing.
