Oh My God! (Arcade) review "You may be wondering what kind of game could be called “Oh My God!”. I never thought that they could actually make a game called “Oh My God!” but Atlus seemed to have next to no problem with it. It is an arcade game that didn’t reach western shores for reasons unknown reasons but it seemed to go well in Japan, but they don’t care what they release do they? Atlus aren’t too popular in the gaming world but they made some red hot RPGS and DoDonPachi, the greatest shooter to grace any arcade. "

You may be wondering what kind of game could be called “Oh My God!”. I never thought that they could actually make a game called “Oh My God!” but Atlus seemed to have next to no problem with it. It is an arcade game that didn’t reach western shores for reasons unknown reasons but it seemed to go well in Japan, but they don’t care what they release do they? Atlus aren’t too popular in the gaming world but they made some red hot RPGS and DoDonPachi, the greatest shooter to grace any arcade.

“Oh my God!” is a puzzle game following the concept of Puyo Puyo but with a few distinguishing features that made separated it from PP. The story (puzzle games tend to have stupid and extravagant storylines) is shrouded in mystery mainly because it was all in Japanese when I played it. It involves God sitting down on this throne talking to you. Perhaps you have to prevent the apocalypse by dropping blobs of the same colour on top of each other, most likely. Since there seems to be no English translation of the game this will remain a mystery to us but it’s not overly important.

The game starts looking like any other stacking puzzling game except that the connection of coloured baubles is some kind of Snake like creature made from four balls of mixed colours. You can control it in certain directions, moving it up or down, left or right although your thing will be slowly getting dragged down. When it hits the bottom all of the four balls will split up into four separate faces. Your mission is to gather enough points by connecting up as many matches as you can and as you pick up the listed amount of points then you’ll go to a new level where the process will be repeated.

One of the games qualities is the fact that is quite funny to play, mainly due to the funny and well-timed sounds and the nice and smooth graphics. First of all the music is quite limited but the in game jingle sounds great and is a tune that is hard to forget after listening to it. It’s wacky and original, as are the sound effects that make really funny Japanese noises when you select the options, although they get annoying after a while. The game has lot of speech elements although the majority of it is people making silly and annoying noises when you select your game mode. Although some of the sounds are quite funny, when you lose around it makes a falling noise occurs followed by a crowd shouting “Oh my God!”. It’s worth playing the game just for that because it sounds so funny.

Graphically the game is very bright, the faces look pretty good and have decent enough animation, especially when they die. The expressions on the faces look funny enough even though they just have blank expressions most of the time, then they get scared when they are going to be matched up and make a funny face that’s full of fear. The graphics are from the 16-bit era and look like that they could be on the Mega Drive or the SNES. Some areas are quite nice such as the title screen and opening cut scenes that have lovely colour and animation.

The problems of the game are it’s repetitive nature, it’s difficulty and the fact that it’s unoriginal in some aspects. Of course it is a puzzle game so every level is pretty much the same, with a few colour changes and maybe a picture in the back. After playing two levels of the game it will get a bit tiring doing the same thing over and over again. One bugging concept was the fact that at the end of the level you don’t get a clear field but you start off with what you ended up with previously. In other words if you finish the level with the entire field full of balls then the chances of you getting far on level two are quite small. The inspiration that was used for Oh My God probably came from Puyo Puyo, the multi-coloured faces were a dead give away and the gameplay is almost the same.

Oh My God! isn’t too bad but it’s far from being great. Playing it once or twice is quite amusing to say the least because it is pretty funny. Unfortunately it does get old fast and the humour dies down after playing it a few times. It’s not a classic like PP and it’s not as fun but playing it once or twice in long gaps is recommended as playing it for a long time really ruins any replay value. If you like puzzling games then give Oh My God! a try but it isn’t for the gamers who like a little more oomph while they play.

Community review by goldenvortex (September 13, 2004) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.