Odama is a goofy concept wrapped in a veneer of high seriousness, which serves mostly to make the goofiness seem even goofier. If you think video games should be realistic and true to life and that they should come bearing credible narrative and authentic physics, you will hate this one. You will hate it with all your heart. You will feel personally offended by its mere existence. Really, you have no idea how daft this game is.

The good news is that being daft is often a smart choice in video game design. (Witness the recent success of Katamari Damacy, a game so innovative that it spawned a genre of its own, which in turn allowed its makers to forget about being innovative and focus instead on cranking out repetitive sequels for multiple platforms.) The bad news is that when a game is not just daft but also fiendishly tough to learn and master, its sequel prospects are limited. Odama is hard, so it will probably be the last of its kind. Meantime, though, it is here, and it is goofy, and it is odd, and you really ought to seek it out and play it.

The game combines battlefield strategy with pinball, and is set in medieval Japan. Correct, pinball. We lead an army of devoted, selfless soldiers on a campaign of honour and glory and conquest. We have enemies to defeat and territories to capture. We also have a big giant ball at our disposal, which we can roll across the terrain to flatten enemy fortifications and crush enemy soldiers. At the edge of each battlefield, which from our point of view is the bottom of the screen, we have two big giant wooden gates, which work just like the flippers on a pinball table, and which we can use to knock the big giant ball around.

The big giant ball is called an "Odama." If you are a soldier, and if you get in its way, you will quickly become a smear. (In a shout-out to Katamari Damacy, you will briefly stick to and roll with the ball, screaming in a way that is partly alarming but mostly funny.) This is true for both our soldiers and those on the other side, so we quickly learn to be discriminating about where we aim the Odama, lest we decimate our own ranks.

The happy news is that our soldiers take direction. The game comes with a microphone, which we use for shouting orders. "Advance!" we shout. "March left!" "Fall Back!" "Press Forward!" The little men on the field do as they're told, wherever they can, because they are good and their jobs and they trust us as a general. So playing Odama is partly about having quick reflexes and a smooth touch with the flippers, and partly about seeing the big picture for how the fight is progressing, directing reinforcements to where they're needed and deploying new troops when the forces on the ground are under pressure. Yes, it is a goofy premise. It is deeply, disarmingly weird. But somehow it works. It is fun. It feels good under the fingers and, when we win a fight with minimal casualties, it feels good in the heart too.

There are twists. We win a battle by carrying an ancient and sacred bell to the top of the screen. (A dedicated team of bell-bearers tries, as the fight plays out, to find the route.) If we manage to hit this bell with the Odama, it rings loudly enough to stun any enemy soldiers nearby. If we have hit another special target first, the ring is powerful enough to tip the whole battle in our favour. If we manage to steer the Odama onto a little glowing green thing, the Odama itself will turn green, and will suddenly become a force for recruitment; it will not harm our men, and any enemy soldiers it touches will desert and rush over to fight for our side.

The whole enterprise has a bit of the stench of basement botany about it, true. There are unpolished edges, and graphics that don't look all that hot, and level after level is really, really tough. But Odama crackles with originality. It is fun. It is weird. You will remember it in detail long after you have forgotten the latest Rainbow Six. Surely that counts for something.