Lost Odyssey

When Lost Odyssey was released, it felt like christmas morning. And, for the first time in quite some time, a game actually lived up to my expectations… well, at least some portions of the game did.

The graphics are at times quite great and at other times quite bad. Some textures applied to large surfaces look pixelated. However, the game makes up for this with great art direction.

On to the gameplay. The combat has the same turn-based gameplay that we’ve seen in other JRPGs, but Mistwalker decided to complicate things by introducing a letter and number value for each spell or skill. I still have no idea how it works, but it comes off as pretty intuitive. You want to cast a huge spell that’ll deal massive amounts of damage? Then chances are it’ll take two or three turns before the character actually casts it.

The Ring system, where you can create rings that grant you a bonus to a regular attack if you hold and release the right trigger at the right time, is pretty good. Creating the rings can be quite teadious though. Each ring has a number of levels, and each level is upgradable. I felt like I had 200 rings toward the end of the game.

The story is awesome. The protagonist, Kaim, an immortal that’s been around for a thousand years, is great. He’s got a real personality and he’s deeply troubled by the memories that emerge during his journey. The memories are presented as short stories with some ambience music and a few sound effects. The writing is top notch and I actually shed a tear during one of the better ones.

There are a lot of side-quests and it took me somewhere around 70 hours to finish the game. The story really takes you on a journey and, even though it has a few low points, ends with all kinds of epic moments.

I set a goal to do everything in the game, but I ended up doing ~90% of it. The only thing that still irks me is how the lip-syncing follows the English voices, even if you change it to Japanese voice-over. This makes all characters look semi-retarded when they’re speaking. Thankfully, the English voice acting is bareable.