Lost Odyssey (360) Review

The first thing that caught my eye about this game came long before I even had the disc loaded into the tray, as soon as the box was handed to me a dark sense of forboding came over me as I felt it - like being handed a bag of potatoes, this box was heavy. Upon opening the box my fears became reality as Four Discs came into my field of view. I was in for a long road, and I knew it.

Lost Odyssey is what I consider to be the first good RPG for the 360, sure I haven't played Blue Dragon, but frankly that game looks like shit anyway so who cares.

This game added to my usual thoroughness resulted in the loss of 86.5 hours of my life. Granted about 5.5 hours of it was 'Lost Time' due to a bad incident with the checkpointing system not saving much on disc 4 (God did that piss me off). You dont even notice the time you spend playing, but all those little animations and flavor shit they add in combat really does take up alot of time. Average random fights last about 5 minutes, just due to the amount of time it takes to do animations - of course you dont notice it at the time, largly in part to you staring at Ming Numaras breasts and having to pay attention to the ring system.

On many review sites they rip this game apart because of its unoriginal and bland combat system, sure its basic Final Fantasy 1 - Turn based /w commands and you pick targets for everything. Its unoriginal but does that make it bad? its tried and true - and I saw it as a breath of fresh air, classic enough to be new again.. kinda. Recently all the rpg's that ive played go out of their way to try some sort of original new combat system, in some sort of attempt to push the envelope, but often times these attempts to be new and original backfire and ruin a game. Sure Final Fantasy 12 was a good step in a new direction, but how many bad games are only bad because of chances they take on combat? Eternal Sonata didnt have a bad combat system, but it sure as shit wasnt good. No Risk No Reward might be true, but if it isnt broken why fix it?

The Storyline is believable, makes sense, keeps momentum up throughout and doesn't really disappoint, although there isnt very many twists and turns, no 'hidden twists' at all actually, but it is still pretty good, it isnt fantastic, but this game already lost its chances to get a perfect 10, so..

You play as Kaim Argonar, and they basically dont give you much more than that at the beginning of the game, you are the sole survivor of an amazing catastrophe during a battle (video on that later) and everybody starts asking why, Turns out you actually are a 1000 year old immortal, but you cant remember your lifetime, hence the title "Lost Odyssey"

Over the next couple weeks of your life you regain Kaims memories, meet up with other immortals (who also dont remember anything), and fuck all kinds of shit up. About halfway through the story you get your memories back, the main antagonist is exposed, and you start on a semi-political course to fix the world, blahblahblah, then you kill the dude and you see the credits, and rejoice.

My favorite feature of Lost Odyssey is what they call the "Thousand Years of Dreams", these are actually so good that they even put a link to it on the main menu before you load your game. Over the course of Kaim's 1000 years he had met and experienced alot of things, 1kYoD is a collection of Short written stories that are the lore of the game, the backstory even, and the best part of it is that these stories are usually all really goddamn good. some of them even had me choking up, almost all of them are about death (life for 1k years and see how much death you experience, go for it) and about some sort of general feature of humanity or life lesson.

Graphics: Honestly the graphics are pretty top notch, the walking around the world animations and quality is damn near realism. Another neat feature is having the camera constantly focused on you, so items in the foreground and background are blurry and out of focus until you go to the same distance as them (away from the camera). The in-battle graphics are the same as story or travel, and the smell animations are pretty, i cant fault this game on graphics at all. The movies are just awesome, especially the opening movie (below).





Sound: I never caught any direct problems in the V/O, all the characters are voiced by a person whom matches their look and personality, so A+ there. Other than that, the one-liners on certain skills and spells could use some variations or alternate sayings instead of the same thing over and over. The music sets the tone of the game, and its a fantastic musical score on par with any final fantasy.

Gameplay: "Classic" combat interface with a timing-based ring system attached to the 'attack' command that allows you to do additional damage. (2 rings, one growing and shrinking and you let go of the trigger when it matches the other ring). Like I said before I think the old-fashioned combat system is a relief in times where everyone is trying to do something fresh and new. The status effects and spell-types are standard Final Fantasy, but with different names so they dont get sued. A "Composite Magic" type is something i havent seen before, with hybrid spells "Shadow(ae shadow dmg)+Flara(fire2)=All-Flara(fire that hits all)" So you have to have both of the parent spells before you can use the composite spell.

The skill aquisition system is pretty much stolen from other final fantasy games, Where you get skill points in addition to experience and other people and accessories teach you skills, then your people have those skills but there is only X slots for skills on each person. This sounds ok, but considering that only Immortals can learn skills from others, and that they get (at the end of the game) 30 skill slots - This makes the Mortal characters you can have pretty much fuckin useless in comparison, since they only have MAYBE 12 skills, max. My kaim was utterly immune to magic, and had like 8 different 'chance on getting hit' things that would either; counter, dodge, or guard. in addition to the 9999 hp he had, whereas the 2 'melee' mortals had.. 3k? hp at most and no good defensive skills, and not half the damage output. So by the end of the game you realise that its entirely about the immortals, and the 5 or 6 mortals you get are just there to feed skills to your immortals.

The Damage: I spent fucking EIGHTY SIX hours on this game, and i got 800 Achievement Points. All 1000 of the Achievement points are able to be gotten on a single playthrough, but you have to be terribly thorough (even more than me) - 99 'seeds' are hidden totally randomly throughout the game, and all 99 are required for an achievement for collecting all treasure, and the reward for getting all 99 is an item with a skill the immortals can learn, and if you dont get that you cant get any of the 'all skills' achievements on the 4 immortals, at 20gp each.

Final Score: I give Lost Odyssey a 8.25, its a bit drawn out, and honestly the best part of the game is the dreams, and i dont like text shit really. Kaim is a pretty awesome main character, but some of the situations you get put into are pretty.. dumb, and you can tell it in the lines he says. The story doesnt make any waves and the combat system does hurt sometimes, having immortals fighting eachother in boss fights seems kinda like beating your face into the wall. There was a good chunk of features throughout the game that i noticed werent finished but were too small to warrant more attention. I do think its the first good RPG for the 360, but not for anybody not willing to invest 80 hours