Lost Odyssey

[Kaden]

Its actually the director of the Final Fantasy games: Hironobu Sakaguchi. Should be said, though, he was also the director of Blue Dragon. He founded Mistwalker, the studio who made both RPGs.

I actually own the game, but haven't had a chance to get past the first hour or so (because of time constraints, not because I haven't wanted to).

Anyway, most of the reviews about this are incredibly consistent. Lost Odyssey is a wildly mediocre RPG. If you've played any FF game, then you've played Lost Odyssey. Its a pretty significant return to classic "JRPGs." Turn based combat, random encounters, heavily archetypal characters, and all of the usual plot "twists." One review actually talked about how they turned playing Lost Odyssey into a game of "which FF did that come from?"

Though that doesn't sound very good, it makes it very obvious what you're getting yourself into if you buy it: a very solid, though somewhat mundane RPG. If you've been looking for something similar to the gameplay of FF I~IX, then you'll get it from LO.

A couple of very positive things about the game include the ring system; this is a real-time mechanic where the player times a button press with a ring on the screen (think Legend of the Dragoon or Super Mario RPG) that can result in bonus damage or status effects. Rings can be changed on-the-fly (so you could have one ring of each element or status effect) and, supposedly, they can be fused to make more potent rings (I haven't gotten that far yet). The main character is an Immortal (not really a spoiler, its on the box) and you acquire several other immortals and several good ol' fashioned, killable humans. Humans acquire skills by equipping items and gaining enough skill points to "learn" the skill of the item. Nothing new here. Immortals, however, "link" to humans and learn skills from them. So on their own, Immortals don't learn skill (that was my understanding, at least). There are a couple other minor mechanics that help make combat more interesting as well.

Across the board, the best part of Lost Odyssey are the "A Thousand Years of Dreams." This is a collection of short stories, or novella, about the main character. They detail some of the things he's been through over the past thousand years and are, to my understanding, incredibly well-written and really help get you to care about the characters. And they're nothing more than text on the screen. I was surprised to see how unanimous everyone was in their praise for this part of it.

Unlike Blue Dragon (and your concerns were well founded), Lost Odyssey actually gets you to care about the characters. You don't trudge through 20 hours of gameplay, watch Kluke get kidnapped, and go "what that fuck... I don't even care."

Almost all of that, however, is based on reviews I've read. I'll be more than willing to share my personal opinion once I've gotten into the game, but for now there's a summary of what people are saying.