Review

Lost Odyssey

Lost Odyssey is the second next-gen RPG from the guys who made Final Fantasy, which I know only because it’s all over the commercials, posters, cardboard standees and magazine ads for it.  Unfortunately, this reputation also comes with high expectations – remember the hype and tension as reviews for Final Fantasy X came in one-by-one?

In Lost Odyssey you play as Kaim, a 1,000-year-old amnesiac soldier trying to settle a war that’s broken out during the Industrial Revolution – that is, the Magic Industrial Revolution.  Yes, magic has recently been discovered and implemented into daily life in Lost Odyssey and all the characters – rich with countless stories, backgrounds and perspectives on this pivotal event in human history – cause conflict and cohesion throughout the game depending upon their views of magic and its uses.

Lost Odyssey plays like Final Fantasy 7, though not always quite as well.  Your party (represented by Kaim) roams around villages and fields talking to locals, completing side quests and encountering random battles in the field while the main story unfolds.  There are merchants who buy your goods and peddle them for five times what they paid you for them. There’s plenty of grieving and loss to fill the last thousand years of Kaim’s life. There’s even a mad-scientist-slash-diabolical-genius who’s managed to cozy up to the head of state and plans to subdue him to take over the world.

Since Kaim is over 1,000 years old, and his memory has been completely wiped, he slowly recalls things over the course of the game.  These are called Dreams and they’re a series of animated text pages telling the most depressing episodic stories I’ve seen since the movie Short Cuts.  Children die, old men’s eyes are burned in their sockets, families are torn apart, natural disasters wreak havoc on entire villages and through it all I start to wonder if Kaim really would want his memory back or if he’d hang himself halfway through the game – which spans four discs and 40 or 50 hours of gameplay depending on your affinity for side quests.

In combat, Kaim is your classic brawler – he gets his sword on like nobody’s business.  When you pick his attack in a fight, he’ll charge at an enemy and you have to time holding and releasing the right trigger according to a translucent ring (Focus Ring) that closes around the enemy in order to get extra damage points.  Besides the Focus Ring, any RPG player should know this combat system all too well.  Seth Balmore, another immortal, is your assist melee character.  Jansen Friedh is the most annoying character I’ve heard speak in years and you’re stuck with him casting spells for you until you can replace him with Queen Ming Numara.  All your characters can wear rings (the classic RPG accessory) to enhance their attack and defense attributes, and there are over a hundred rings to make from a crude alchemy system to give you a better chance against a barrage of enemies.

The World of Lost Odyssey is beautiful.  The characters are unique and memorable and remind me of the first time I played through Shenmue: they look great from afar and up close, both from the skin texture and the costuming.  The environments are a healthy mix of Final Fantasy’s realistic nature setting and exaggerated art deco monstrosities reminiscent of Bioshock.  Enemies look mischievous or terrifying or just plain fantastic, and the turn-based combat system employs plenty of great camera angles and special effects on the magic attacks.

Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu composes a triumphant score for Lost Odyssey.  Whether you’re immersed in a swooping orchestra or a curious little plucked string piece, Uematsu’s soundtrack blends seamlessly with the world around Kaim.  The voice acting isn’t quite memorable or Oscar-worthy, but it gets the job done delivering the dialogue to you.  The same goes for the sound effects – they’re nothing to write home about, but a sword slashing through a fire demon sounds like a sword slashing through a fire demon, so who’s to complain?

The one big grievance I have with Lost Odyssey is that it doesn’t bring a lot of unheard-of or unseen new ideas to the RPG table.  I haven’t played through every traditional RPG out there, but I’ve worked on enough of them to know that Lost Odyssey retreads some of the tried-and-true same ground of gathering each obligatory character for your party (melee, backup melee, offense magic, defense magic), picking your action from a menu for each character in your party with attributes to use against baddies and watching them play out.  Even still, Mistwalker still managed to take the few new aspects it brings in and incorporate them very fully, so you definitely won’t get bored.

Having said this, there are few unlockables to make Lost Odyssey worth a second playthrough to a lot of gamers.  If you’re like me and you’ll play through Super Castlevania IV eight times in one day just because it’s fun, you’ll want to enjoy Lost Odyssey’s sights, sounds and story again, but if you’re an unlockable/achievement addict, one Odyssey will be enough.

I’ll admit, despite a few complaints, I still had a blast playing through Lost Odyssey.  Sure, Jansen’s a pain in the butt and so are Kaim’s Dreams, but the game still looks, sounds and plays so well that those issues can’t kill the experience.  If you’re looking for an RPG that breaks the mold and really tests the waters with some new experiments, you may want to avoid Lost Odyssey.  However, if you haven’t played enough JRPG’s to get jaded to the entire genre or are new to it, it’s worth the $50 or $60 you’ll find it for.