These past two weeks I have been back at school I have started my venture into the game Lost Odyssey. It was made by the studio Mistwalker which is headed by Hironobu Sakaguchi. This amazing man birthed the first Final Fantasy game in 1987 and the rest is history from there. Mistwalker even has Nobuo Uematsu on board to score the games. Not only does this line-up have the father of Final Fantasy games but the creator of all the memorable tunes as well working on this game Lost Odyssey. Despite all these ties to groundbreaking, in my opinion, titles I had mostly missed their progress these past few years. Part of it was most likely due to my not having a 360 until last summer so I tended to not pay attention to news regarding consoles I don't own.
Over winter break I noted that I had listened to a lot of Destructoid's podcasts, mainly RetroForceGo! They had constantly referenced Lost Odyssey as a recent RPG that really echoed the feelings that they experienced when playing some of the older RPGs from the 90s such as FF4 or FF6. This peaked my interest since up until purchasing Lost Odyssey I didn't own any JRPGs for my 360, and that is one of the primary food groups in my gaming diet. After refreshing my memory about Mistwalker studio, big news years ago but I didn't own a 360 at the time, I decided it was time to try the JRPG offerings on my Microsoft console. Going into this I have relatively high expectations, something I try to not do but honestly how can you not if you're a huge fan of the FF series.
The game comes on 4 dual layered DVDs. Noticing this reminded me of the ridiculous arguments I would see on blogs regarding PS3 or Xbox superiority. It also made me realize that multiple disc games, while cumbersome, is an aspect that I really fucking love about games. It's like having multiple books in a series that are later released in a complete collection that's about the same size as a single book due to something new and awesome. In my mind either one is cool, but having multiple books each with differing cover art and that sense of progression when you finish one and get ready to dive into another is something that I dig. So when I was about 18 hours into Lost Odyssey and it was disc swap time, I had flashbacks to good old FF7 (that new sense of purpose after losing a team member and it's time to pop in that next disc and hunt this ass-clown down). So yeah, obviously if it was on one disc I'd be cool with that too. Something about that "inconvenience" of swapping discs filled me with some great nostalgia.
Ok now the characters, story, and graphics. Looking at the cover I don't really dig the character design. Yes it IS very cliche, but honestly you're playing a JRPG so I have lenience for them in that department. The story is shaping up to be similar to classic FF tales from the SNES era. One thing that I do enjoy though is that FOR ONCE there is a reason for the main character to be so "emo" or bored with life. Kaim is an immortal, he has lived for thousands of years and has witnessed most everything. If having loved ones and losing them through the ages numerous times wouldn't desensitize you to the world, I wouldn't know what would. Also the almighty power of amnesia strikes again on the hero, but what I think is the reason not a cop-out at all and works well. Also the Thousand Years of Dreams sequences are freaking AMAZING. Granted this will probably only appeal to some, basically as you play the game certain areas or events will trigger a lost memory (from the amnesia) from the recesses of Kaim's memory and fills you in more on what he's been through and are just good stories. While the overarching story is shaping up to be pretty derivative, I feel that the Thousand Years of Dream sequences along with the backgrounds of some of the characters is making it such a fleshed out experience that I am loving it.
The characters are interesting, Jansen is shaping up to be one of my favorite videogame characters EVER. There are Cooke and Mack who are kinda clones of Palom and Parom from FF4 but much more developed. One thing that helps a lot with the game is the amazing voice acting. Initially I thought Kaim's voice was sort of boring and not that great. Over time though I have grown to be quite fond of it, especially since you start out just after an exhausting and depressing battle which obviously would leave him sounding deflated and tired. I laughed a good amount at dialogue and the voice actors from games such as Persona 3 & 4 as well as Digital Devil Saga or Shadow Hearts. This being said, Jansen's voice actor had me collapsing on the ground dying of laughter with some of the stuff he says. The graphics are beautiful, there are a lot of cut-scenes at the beginning as you are hammered with story setup but once you get into the rhythms then it isn't really an overload. One thing to note, upon starting up a new game when that opening cut scene began I honestly felt the same blown away experience of seeing that cut-scene of the mechanical spider chasing Squall from 8. That whole "being floored" magic of the video I honestly hadn't felt in a while. This isn't to say the opening cinematic is the best thing I've seen to it, for some reason it struck a chord with me. Definitely more so than the unexciting (in my opinion) trailer of FF XIII that was released yesterday or so.
Now we have the mechanics. The combat returns to good old turn based with a twist. It has a system I would say is similar to the rings from Shadow Hearts for attacking. This and a front/back row system which reduces damage to the back row as long as the guard meter has something in it. The guard meter starts at a value the same as the total hp of the members in the front row and is not refreshed when you heal your members. You do eventually learn skills which assist in refilling the guard meter. This and the immortal/mortal skill system allows a method of character customization for equipping skills which I find enjoyable.
So yeah, I am currently on Disc 2 and loving Lost Odyssey. I understand completely what the RetroForceGo! crew meant by saying the game is an older RPG with current-gen-trappings. There is some sense of purity in the feeling that I get when playing it, the same as when I played Dragon Quest 8. It has gone back to the barebones of what an RPG is for me. I think whatever this "feeling" happens to be is what is missing from my experiences with Final Fantasy games (the last one I felt amazed with was 9 but I hope to give FF10 a second chance this semester at some point, and maybe finally get around to playing 12 since I never did and have no opinion of it yet... except that I think Vaan is a stupid character). So yeah this game rocks, I can't wait to see it unravel and I also can't wait to try my hand at Blue Dragon as well. The lukewarm reception of both of Mistwalker's RPG titles on the 360 has caused them to cancel their third RPG project that was slated for the 360. This fact has me in tears, oh well.
I have also began playing Crackdown recently. I had never understood the appeal of GTA games despite acknowledging them being solid games, I wonder if Crackdown will be a good way to ease me into this weird sandbox genre that I am so foreign to. I just never got the desire to want to just walk around in a game and goof off I guess? Not to say that is what you do in them but that is one of the appeals. I am enjoying in Crackdown my crazy jumping and scaling buildings and picking up cars and being a complete bio-engineered badass while cleaning up the city. Partially why Prototype is looking interesting to me. Also I would like to say that I own GTA4 and hope to finish playing through it at some point so I can have a solid opinion on the game & it's series, but I get bored so quickly.
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