Dawn breaks on the morning of the great battle, a cool breeze flowing through the dim light and swirling in the desolate ravine between the two massive armies. Lined up in rank and file, the Gohtze soldiers (who are the pope) brace themselves for the impending charge. Across the gap the noble knights of Uhra (who are also the pope) shift their weapons. Then, as if responding to a single, unseen cue, both armies surge forward, wild, screaming, and bent on one another’s destruction. Through this chaos our hero, Kaim (like dime, and while he does occasionally shine, he’s far from freshly minted) dances lithely into the fight in a fetching midriff top and matching leather boots combo, leaving a trail of armor clad bodies behind him. Suddenly, with only several moments of warning and ponderous clanking, a large toothbrush axe tank emerges from the crowd to confront our hero. Rather than briskly walking away, Kaim stands to confront the machine, seemingly outgunned. Fortunately, it just so happens that Kaim is immortal, which has apparently made him strong enough to dismantle a large toothbrush axe tank with nothing more than a small sword. In hardly ten minutes, the tank clatters to the ground in a smoking heap, our hero victorious. Then a big hole opens up in midair and spews lava all over all creation. Or something. Supposedly it’s a meteor. Either way, everybody dies and that’s the end of the introductory sequence for Lost Odyssey, the new RPG from Mistwalker studios, a game that, while not terrible by any stretch of the imagination, ultimately acts, looks, and feels far too much like a game from three years ago to rate anything higher than average.
Lost Odyssey won’t compel you to claw your eyes out, but there’s really not much else to say about the visuals. The backgrounds range from slightly below average (the dull, muddy browns and grays of the early game) to significantly better than average (the more vibrant and colorful later game), and while the character designs are a touch odd and off-putting in some cases, they’re reasonably well executed. Similarly, the quality of the audio in the game is thoroughly adequate and not much more. In most RPGs these days, the music is really designed to fade into the background and serve as a basic audio landscape to keep your ears from feeling left out of the experience, and in that respect, Lost Odyssey’s music is successful. I certainly won’t be buying the soundtrack, but I didn’t feel compelled to pull up my own music.
Unfortunately, Lost Odyssey really abandons any mainstream appeal it might have with its basic game play. You spend most of your time outside of combat searching desperately for something to poke your arm into to see what falls out. You see, in their infinite wisdom, the citizens of the magnificent empires of this universe hide their valuables in unlocked urns, behind posters, and inside REALLY humongous grapes, none of which are obvious points of interaction. Making matters worse, the game represents the obligatory action button prompt with a tiny wad of text in the bottom right corner of the screen. Given that the game doesn’t have any animation faster than a jog, getting around is pretty slow and boring, at least until you engage Keystone Kops mode (X button) and start cartoonishly shuffling to and fro at double time. Combat should be familiar to anybody who has played….well, almost any turn-based role playing game, since it resembles any Final Fantasy game prior to the 10th entry in the series, or, even more closely, the Shadow Hearts series. The basic fight breaks down like this: there’s a thirty second montage of a bunch of empty, useless landscape shots showing you all the background that you don’t care about, your dudes line up on one side, the other dudes line up on the other side, and you take turns whomping one another. If you equip a special ring (which you have to build from materials you scavenge), you also get to play a short rhythm game every time you attack to apply a special effect. The system basically works, but it’s burdened by several unnecessary mistakes and errors in design approach. For example, while there’s an established turn order along the bottom of your screen, the only time you get to see it is when the characters take their actions, or, to put it differently, when you’ve already chosen your actions and the knowledge is useless. Combat typically boils down to figuring out what vulnerability you need to exploit to win and then doing that. Unfortunately, if you fail to identify that vulnerability in the first or second turn, you stand a reasonable chance of losing even some random encounters. Given the occasionally ridiculous distance between save points, exploring areas where you don’t already know what enemies to expect and what strategies to employ can be a frustrating proposition.
Character advancement in the game should also be familiar to anybody who has played a Final Fantasy game featuring learned skills. Immortal characters learn all of their skills from items and their fellow party members while mortals spontaneously learn skills as they level up. That would all be fine were it not for the fact that only characters in your combat party gain significant numbers of advancement points. Hassling the player to constantly shuffle around his party structure, rather than simply letting him pick the characters he wants to play with and having the rest level up and learn abilities in step, does little more than slow down game play and force the player to “grind” skills and levels for characters he can’t fit into the combat party. I could forgive all of the issues that I’ve covered so far if only the game’s writing was up to the standard that I’ve come to expect from the genre, but that’s just not the case. The dialogue in the game is, for the most part, stilted and formalistic, and the much-vaunted short story dream segments barely rise above the level of B-grade fan fiction. Fan fiction is good in its place, but as the centerpiece of a video game, it just doesn’t cut muster. Compare any of the short stories in Lost Odyssey to “Bartleby the Scrivener”, or even about 2/3 of Stephen King’s output, and the deficiencies become immediately obvious. It’s entirely possible that in the original Japanese these stories are at the height of science fiction and fantasy, but the English translations are distressingly less-than-stellar.
I’ve been looking forward to this game for two years (since back when GameStop’s release calendar accidentally listed it as a January 2006 release), and while I’m certainly satisfied with what I’ve got as an avid RPG fan, I’m not in any way impressed with this effort. While many of the problems that I have with the game recede around the middle of the second disc, at that point you’ve already suffered through fifteen hours of below average role playing game, which makes recommending this game to anybody that wouldn’t be interested in it to begin with a lot like suggesting that unanesthetized bowel surgery doesn’t hurt so much after the first six hours. If you’re a fan of classic-style RPGs looking for a fix, you could do worse than Lost Odyssey, but there’s no reason for anybody who wouldn’t otherwise be interested in the genre to spend any time at all with this game.
"Lost Odyssey (X360)" is on sale January 31, 2008 and is rated T. RPG.
