AYN Odin 2 Review | Best Android Handheld So Far

[Music] hey everyone welcome or welcome back to englard gaming today I've got a review of the Ayn Odin 2 for you I know there are some questions on how to pronounce a YN whether it's the letters or just a but it's the letters because it's an acronym that stands for all you need you don't have to take my word for it it's on their Indiegogo page and a few other places anyway this portable Android gaming device has been out for a little while now and there have been lots of reviews on it and you may think this one will be exactly the same as all the others if you think that well you're wrong and no I'm not going to trash the Odin 2 but I will talk about a few things that I haven't seen in many if any other reviews up to this point my note of disclosure I bought the Odin 2 with my own money and Ayn doesn't even know who I am let alone that I'm doing review though as usual here with all my reviews the opinions are entirely my own which will become apparent pretty quickly first up real quick let's talk about the design and ergonomics of the Odin 2 the system comes in a variety of colors and storage configurations I've got trust the old black but let's take a look at some of the other colors here now this is a fairly large handheld with a 6-in 1080p LCD IPS touchcreen we've got the standard controls you'd expect couple of analog sticks a d-pad analog triggers bumpers face buttons start and select buttons in addition we have back and home buttons for Android navigation on the bottom of the unit on the back we have two paddle style buttons also we've got front firing speakers and there was much rejoicing the Odin 2 is probably just a smidge heavier than you'd expect but it's still pretty comfortable to hold it does have curved grips on the sides so you don't need to worry about it feeling too flat or cramping your hands I do have to admit however that the shape should have really jutted out more towards the bottom forming more of a trapezoidal likee design which would have felt more comfortable the angle on the left analog stick and d-pad just aren't quite as comfortable or as natural as I'd like and the analog sticks are a little bit on the small side and the face buttons are smidge smaller than I prefer also the PlayStation V style d-pad which is similar to what you find on retroid devices is pretty good but it still could have been a little bit better too there's definite room for improvement here in future Odin devices the screen is really nice even though it's an LCD and it gets plenty bright you wouldn't want to use it in direct sunlight or anything but indoors it's great the front firing speakers are nice and clear but there are a few minor issues here with sound in the older firmwares the volume is really quiet at levels one through three and then jumps super high at volume four and above there's been a firmware update that corrected this issue that was released just last week as I recorded this but now there's another small issue and that volume one is louder than it used to be or should be so I didn't quite get this right just yet there are a few extras and other things worth talking about that I'll touch on just briefly here you can control the LED lights on the analog sticks and the sides of the unit you can set the color and brightness level or toggle them off completely personally I always keep them off and you can swap your button set up from switch to Xbox style which reverses the XY and ab buttons in Xbox mode most emulators will autoassign the wrong buttons here according to the labels so you'll have to manually change them in the emulator settings yourself which is not a big deal it's just something to be aware of and I recommend switching to Xbox mode immediately and just leaving that on permanently for compatibility reasons now you can also set the Odin 2 to stop charging the battery after it reaches 100% while it's plugged in so that you're running off the charger without putting any wear and tear on the battery which is a huge plus there are a bunch of other tools you can also access from the settings uh menus on the device and there are thirdparty programs you can install to enable shortcuts on the drag down menu from the top of the screen you can also set the fan and performance mode of the system and I'm not going to talk about every feature here there are some great Guides Online and you can use them to learn how to do all that stuff said I want to move on and talk about system performance all right so the Odin 2 runs a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 system on a chip which is often found in phones around the ,000 range it's a really powerful arm chip that can handle almost any application you can throw at it almost what that means in pretty plain English is that you'll be able to emulate basically all the older systems that can work on any modern handheld meaning PlayStation and Below but in addition to those you can expect full speed emulation with no frame skipping and usually with a good degree of increased internal resolution on systems like Sega Saturn N64 4 GameCube Wii PlayStation 2 PSP 3DS and even the Nintendo switch yes many switch games run at or very near full speed on the Odin 2 here's a look at bloodstained ritual of the night running on a system whose name I just can't seem to remember at the moment anyway first things first when it comes to switch emulation obviously Yuzu is gone and the recent Fork suyu is also gone now you can still use those emulators but there won't be any new versions of either another thing about switch emulation that I'll point out here is that it's not exactly download and go you'll have to mess around with a lot of different configurations and settings within whichever switch emulator you choose to run and certain games require that you download different adreno Graphics drivers to show anything on the screen at all as long as you don't mind playing around and messing with and tweaking settings this is all fine but the Odin 2 is definitely no replacement for a real switch so switch emulation while it can be awesome on the Odin 2 comes with a few major caveats first and I can't stress this enough don't pirate switch games if it's a game you want to play just buy it support the developers and Publishers putting out new games that you care enough to spend time playing second there is noticeable input lag while playing switch games on the Odin 2 no matter which settings you tweak you won't get rid of it entirely this is an Android issue not an Odin 2 issue now going down the line a bit we have 3DS emulation which is pretty fantastic on the Odin 2 but with Citra discontinued you'll have to find either the last version of it or a fork like lime 3DS itself recently discontinued or various other Forks of Citra once you get it going though 3DS is much simpler than the switch and most games work just fine and you can play play them at two three or sometimes even four times their normal resolution without any issues you can also assign the paddles on the back to toggle between various screen configurations but I will note that once again input lag can be a real noticeable issue with 3DS emulation in most games it's not hard to naturally adjust to that input lag but there are some games that require precise timing like Final Fantasy the Rhythm Curtain Call here and in this game many of the hardest songs are downright unplayable due to the lag and the speed and precision required to complete them I can blow through most of these songs just fine on a real actual 3DS but I don't even get close to finishing some of them on the Odin 2 again this is more of an Android problem not really an Odin 2 problem let's talk PlayStation 2 Aether sx2 the main PS2 emulator that was around recently was you guessed it discontinued there are a few modifi versions called nether sx2 that you can use instead one is based on an older version of ather sx2 and one is based on a more recent version you can only have one of these versions installed at a time and how do you get them well you can't get them from the Play Store you have to go to a GitHub page and download some tools to actually build the APK that you then install while not super complicated it's not the simplest process there is either you'll see that after getting things going performance is great on most games again you can run many games Ed without any performance hit at all oh and I have an old and a new version well there are a few games that actually perform better in the old version like Sly Cooper so you might want to check out which games run best in which version of nether sx2 before you decide which one to install thankfully things get a lot simpler for the rest of the emulator will talk about from this point on for Dolphin the Wii and Gamecube Emulator the Play Store version pretty much works fine you may have even heard other reviews say that it runs every GameCube and wi game just great but that's not quite the case I've seen some reviews that claimed even games like Rog leader notoriously difficult to run work just fine on Dolphin on the Odin 2 and well it does for the first two missions but then you hit Hoth and it runs like this now again this isn't the Odin 2's fault this is just how dolphin handles the games right now and lots of other games do work completely fine and are a joy to play on this handheld device here's wi Xenoblade Chronicles GameCube F0 and a few other games that are typically tough to get going at full speed on other devices they're just whizzing right along on the Odin 2 I will note that I couldn't get the Xeno Blade 60 frames per second patch to work on the Odin 2 but that might just be a me problem so I'm not holding that against it you can also install various other HD texture packs and stuff like that for a lot of these games and still run them at full speed now Saturn emulation you've got a few options here right now the best is probably the beetle Saturn core uh through retro Arch but there's also saturn. muu and yabas sanir of course you'll be able to run pretty much all Saturn games on the Odin 2 at full speed with no frame skip but again there's a bit of a caveat here in retro Arch we can enable run ahead or preemptive frames to greatly reduce the input lag on the systems in retro Arch that support safe States and in most cases this works beautifully but there are some Saturn games that require so much processing power and Beetle Saturn that enabling the input latency reduction options like run ahead or preemptive frames slows them down to unplayable frame rates ready go so you're left with the option of using a less accurate emulator like yava Sano using a more accurate emulator like fetal Saturn and just dealing with the input delay that comes without run ahead turned on now for Android I typically recommend drastic for standard DS emulation on the Odin 2 you can actually use melon DS in retroarch I tested several games and didn't encounter any speed problems on any the ones I tried but obviously I didn't try every single DS game that's out there so it's possible you might find games that have some issues here's the obligatory God of War chains of Olympus PSP footage in the native PPSSPP app showing that there's no problems running this game and high resolutions the Wipeout games used to have speed issues on older Hardware but they obviously run fine here too PSP isn't the toughest system to emulate even on load of medium powerered Android devices these days but it's great to basically be able to run anything at 4X resolution on the Odin 2 with no compromises here's a quick peek at some Vita emulation with v 3K which if you haven't been paying any attention to this emulator it's come quite a long way in the last year or so and it can run quite a lot of games now also I would be remiss if I didn't note here that that the battery life in the Odin 2 is absolutely astounding even running high-end emulators you'll get many hours of battery life with fairly heavy stuff like Wii or 3DS or certain other Nintendo systems you'll get a good solid 10 plus hours on a charge with screen brightness up just about all the way with easier to emulate systems that tax the Odin 2 Snapdragon processor less you get upwards of 20 hours I've had this thing for 3 weeks and have charged it a total of three times so far one note on charging the $300 unit does not come with an AC adapter uh so make make sure you've got something that's at least 65 Watts around for good quick charging all right so I've mentioned input lag quite a bit already I was really surprised when I noticed it immediately with my Odin 2 since I hadn't seen anyone really talking about it in other video reviews I hit up the old interwebs and saw that yes indeed other people were experiencing it as well it can be very noticeable and while not a fault of the Odin 2 exactly it's more of an Android thing it definitely might impact your enjoyment of some games on this system it really makes me wish there was an option to install a strip down version of Linux on the Odin 2 apparently some hobbyist developers have been working on porting a version of Linux to the Odin 2 for some time now and there are progress reports of a few Chinese websites but I haven't seen any publicly available releases yet if you yourself are working on that or have any specific details here that you have links to feel free to leave a comment and you may think that input lag isn't a problem for you and that you'd never notice it for some games you may not but look at this this is pretty horrendous at least in retro art you have run ahead or preemptive frames to compensate that's not an option for Standalone emulators also as I've had the Odin 2 for about 3 weeks as I record this the back right paddle does not feel as solid as it used to and it actually creaks most of the time when I press it now I'm hoping it doesn't develop any long-term problems but I'm not feeling too confident about this thing at the moment another issue I've run into is that if I connect the Odin 2 via USB to a PC after like 15 or 20 minutes the PC just stops recognizing both the internal storage and the micro SD card I got for mine when I turn off USB storage on the Oden 2 settings and then turn it back on it fixes the issue for another 15 or 20 minutes and then it does the same thing again creating an endless loop I try connecting the device to three different PCS and the same thing happened with all three of them and I even used different connection cables to connect the Odin 2 to each respective PC so definitely not a deal breaker but it is annoying it's worth noting in this section that Ayn sells three versions of the Odin 2 currently the underlying Hardware itself is the same in all three versions they only come with different amounts of RAM and Storage the cheapest option at $300 comes with 8 gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage space personally I don't think you need the more expensive versions I haven't even run into switch games that have Ram issues or anything I also bought a 512 GB micro SD card it like $28 now for a decent trustworthy brand also you can allocate 4 GB of your internal Odin 2 storage space to work as a swap file effectively kind of bumping up your RAM a little bit all right let me sum up a little bit of the competition for the Odin 2 here there are some devices that are cheaper running things like Android or Linux you have devices like the RG 556 from amernick or the retroid pocket 4 Pro these devices you know retail for about half or 23ds of what the Odin costs and can run about 80 to 90% of what it does but they each you know have different flaws at different points and then you have other devices that are little more expensive like the steam deck cheapest version of the steam deck is $50 more but can run a lot of your steam library in addition to emulators that are not available on the Odin 2 for things like the Wii U and PS3 and then finally you've got Windows handhelds that are available but you know for the cheap ones in the $300 to $500 range they're usually not very good you have to spend about 700 or more before you start getting ones that are worth it and at that point are they really worth it is the question so let's wrap things up here in the end who is the Odin 24 and how good is it now I would say that the Ayn Odin 2 is ideal for someone who wants to play slightly more modern systems on the go enjoys tweaking and experimenting with settings and wants top-of-the-line performance without having to worry about charging their device every few hours I've been getting 10 to 20 Plus hours on a charge depending on what systems I've been playing on it and as far as Android gaming devices go right now yes this is the King of the Hill as I record this review you can play games for more powerful more modern systems with ease in most cases despite a few hiccups that are primarily due to the in development status of the emulators themselves now I would say it is not for people who are primarily PC Gamers that have large steam libraries if you've got something like that you know steam deck is probably a better deal for you and you know the cheapest version is only $50 more even though it's got a lot of features stripped down compared to the Odin 2 and as good as the Odin 2 is as I've said a few times here it isn't perfect I don't consider any of its issues a total deal breaker but some of them are pretty annoying the worst being the input delay problem and to sum up my ergonomics complaints the angle on the sticks and d-pad especially could be better with a more comfortable shape to the device's grips I'd also like to see better analog sticks more like we'd see in full controllers and larger face buttons and I'm pretty sure that squeaky right paddle button I mentioned on the back is going to break off any day now when it comes to Value even though the Odin 2 might seem a smidge pricey at $300 for the base version you won't find a better Android device right now personally I don't think the more expensive versions are worth it but if you want more internal space and RAM don't worry about what I say just knock yourself out get that more expensive version so for the overall experience it provides I'm giving the Ayn Odin 2 a 9 out of 10 I was really leaning towards eight because the flaws here I pointed out are real and can really hamper your experience but you can do so much with the Odin 2 and it has so many positive points that I feel like dropping it to an eight would have been a disservice if you're especially bothered by input delay that maybe subtract a point from my total score now otherwise you'll have a great time with the Odin 2 I've used this thing a lot during the last few weeks and I expect I will keep using it for a long time to come despite my quibbles with it so hopefully you've learned a few things here that you haven't seen before in other reviews honestly it's kind of hard not to love the Odin 2 despite its flaws this is a premium device and it looks and feels like it if Ayn can get things together for the eventual successor device and fix the ergonomic issues and maybe make that next device dual boot Linux and Android it'll be a force to be reckoned with but for what we have right now in the Odin 2 we've got a great but flawed device that I think any retro gamer would love to own so anyway what do you all think do you have an Odin 2 did this review convince you to either get one or to pass on the system entirely are you Furious that I didn't mention some specific feature that's very important to you tell me all about it in the comments that'll do it for this video my Retro Gaming friends if you enjoyed it please like it and share it online somewhere if you haven't yet subscribed to the channel and hit that notification Bell so you won't miss any of my videos if you want to support the work I do here you can do that on patreon or Kofi or right here through YouTube channel memberships and things like thanks with that I'll say thanks for watching and see me later [Music] n [Music]

Channel: Inglebard Gaming

Views: 5,110

Keywords: retrogaming, video games, ayn, odin 2, gamecube, wii, 3ds, playstation2

Id: 19SirX0pv4c

Length: 17min 43sec (1063 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2024