Printmaking! It’s a wonderful form of art, and in this world, it’s taken seriously. Alas, a bunch of thieves under the name of the CMYK have chosen to desecrate the craft of the school’s printmaking studio by stealing the studio’s resources – how dare they? The Monitor of the studio has a mission: he will head out with various friends to beat up these losers and get to the bottom of these heinous crimes. The craft must be respected.
Copper Odyssey is an RPG Maker game by Cam Collins, portraying the thrilling escapades of a Monitor trying to protect his craft. It interestingly has an open-ended structure, where you can go to the domains of each member of CMYK in any order. Besides hunting these bosses down, there’s some side things to do, like finding prints around the environment to trade in or books for experience boosts, meeting with the fabled Redman, etc..
Copper Odyssey has a pretty interesting art style. The overworld is a mix of sprites drawn in the style of the creator and edits of default RPG Maker tiles. Enemy designs are more complex with colorful looks with plain shading that I find stylish. As for cutscene art, the art style dabbles from drawings to stuff looking like watercolor paintings. All together, Copper Odyssey is a mix of styles that gives a collage feel that’s unique and nice to look at. I feel that RPG Maker oldheads would feel reminded of OFF and Space Funeral playing this game: it’s simple yet evocative and messy yet cohesive.
But even if you don’t like RPGs, there’s a lot to dig into beyond Copper Odyssey the game. Cam Collins is actually a pretty accomplished artist outside of the game, and RPG Maker was just another canvas for his craft (gotta respect it). It actually made me finally bite the bullet and make an Instagram account so I could look through some of his stuff, and I really recommend checking out his work if you like the art in this game.
Going back to comparisons, Copper Odyssey reminds me of Space Funeral in that the plot feels like a more standard RPG being told through a bizarre lens. CMYK are the lieutenants of a big bad, and recovering the materials they stole may as well be finding four big elemental crystals. Instead, it’s all about the four aspects of printmaking, and everyone involved in the adventure is just kinda weird. It’s all very goofy, yet there’s a layer of sincerity in that everyone is passionate enough about their crafts that they’re willing to beat people to death over it.
Speaking of beating people to death, let’s talk combat! Copper Odyssey’s combat has the player party acting first, with enemies not taking a move until you use up the party’s actions. Almost all moves run on crafting points, this game’s version of the resource that builds up when you give and receive hits. The Monitor and Ms. Gun have the ability to damage their own allies to give them a whole bunch of crafting points, so playing optimally means living on the edge. There’s also traditional MP but there’s barely any moves that actually use it, so honestly it could have just been excised.
While healing items are plentiful and easy to get, healing somebody that died mid-battle demands you to use up two character actions (unless you want to risk someone living on 1 HP for a turn), preventing you from using those valuable actions to set up or debuff. Really, the main resource you have to worry about in the game are your usable actions. You have to be making the most of your turn real estate. To be honest, when I started playing the game, I thought that it’d be something like OFF: all style, completely arbitrary gameplay, but when the difficulty’s firing on all cylinders, I can see the flow going through fights.
Speaking of difficulty though, it feels weird in that it only exists in two extremes: combat is either easy or hard, depending on the encounter. With the right setup, you can blitz the entire team in one turn. But enemies that survive that blitz? They’ll definitely drag at least one party member down with them when they actually get to use their own actions. This disparity in difficulty is likely a result of Copper Odyssey’s open ended design. There isn’t a linear power scale for enemy encounters, just a mix of easy and hard fights distributed evenly throughout the game, with the bosses and the last dungeon being the only definitive hard encounters.
As somebody that’s also made a bit of an open-ended RPG, I feel that the game could have taken a different approach to difficulty. One option would have been to have enemy stats scale with the player’s, though that would mean that the game should have more buyable equipment so that the player’s stats would be able to outpace enemy scaling. Alternatively, scale enemy stats on the number of bosses beaten; like, on turn 0 put a conditional branch that gives enemies states that multiplies their stats based on whatever you want, maybe also update enemy movesets with switches to give them new moves. I dunno, I think it’d be easier and more interesting than just just making arbitrary mixes of enemy formations.
Overall? Combat’s not super deep, but it definitely has more heat to it than a lot of contemporaries. You might say it’s for the best for people that want to play Copper Odyssey for the vibes, but also, those kinds of players will absolutely get suckerpunched by harder encounters. But for a freak like me that likes vibes and likes getting punched? Copper Odyssey’s pretty good. If you’re into the RPG Maker scene, I definitely recommend checking this out. After all, playing around with RPG Maker is a craft, and much like the crafts in this game, you gotta respect it.
On a side note for this site, I decided to take a different approach for picking things to cover while clearing through my backlog of stuff. Based on my friend’s idea, I’ve ordered a bunch of things on a bingo card and will be randomly deciding things through a wheel. Nothing new will be added until a line is crossed off to force myself to focus on the stuff I’ve built up. And so, see you guys next time for Misericorde.
Indie Hell Zone 