Leveling Down

Lost Odyssey is arguably the best Japanese RPG out right now on the 360 & PS3 – until perhaps Final Fantasy XIII.

I finished Lost Odyssey over this past weekend, clocking in a time of about 60 hours. I thought it was a fantastic Japanese RPG, but it of course had certain annoying elements – most notably one Achievement that required me to investigate and find every possible hidden item in the world (looking in pots, trees, rocks, etc.). Other than that, I would say this game is a Japanese RPG masterpiece. It still isn’t as good as Oblivion in terms of general RPGs, but I certainly haven’t played a Japanese RPG this good in a long time.

Good:
- Pinnacle of classic Japanese RPG gameplay design
- Top notch presentation of graphics and sound
- Enjoyable storyline and characters

Bad:
- Lack of innovation for a Japanese RPG
- Random battles
- Not enough end-game challenge

Intro
Lost Odyssey is the second 360 exclusive Japanese RPG from Mistwalker, bringing together Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu. The last game that brought the two of them together was Blue Dragon, where they worked with the Dragonball artist, Akira Toriyama. While that Japanese RPG was more childish, Lost Odyssey was meant to be a more epic and adult oriented RPG. Sakaguchi worked with Takehiko Inoue, the Japanese manga artist behind Slam Dunk and Vagabond.

The switch over to a more epic-themed RPG made the game have more of a Final Fantasy feel, and American audiences took notice. While only 100,000 copies of Lost Odyssey were sold in Japan, 380,000 copies have been sold in the U.S. Compare that with Sakaguchi’s first Japanese RPG on the 360, Blue Dragon, where both regions sold 210,000 copies.

The game itself is perhaps the largest 360 game to be released so far, releasing on 4 Dual-Layer DVDs. There were plenty of cutscenes (which probably took up a lot of the space), and most notably, both Japanese and English voice tracks were kept intact as options for all versions of release. However, there was annoyance from American and European audiences over the packaging of the game’s release, as the box the game came in was only fit 3 discs on its spindle. The fourth disc was simply kept in a paper sleeve and slid in on the side with the instruction booklet. Western fans were even more outraged after discovering that in the Asian release for the game, the Lost Odyssey case was enlarged to individually fit all four discs. Luckily, no reports were found of that fourth disc being scratched up for the Westerners.

Gongora, the main villain in the game. Too bad he’s not as cool as Final Fantasy 6′s Kefka or 7′s Sephiroth though.

Storyline and Premise
Even though I believe gameplay is most important in video games, the storyline and premise for an RPG game is nearly as important. After all, playing through an RPG is quite a commitment with time and if you don’t feel invested in the storyline and its characters, the gameplay itself can’t save you from the inevitable boredom of what would feel like mindless grinding. Fortunately, Lost Odyssey features quite an interesting premise for an RPG, as the idea of immortal beings living amongst humans hasn’t quite been tackled yet.

Kaim, the main character of the game, has lived over 1000 years without aging. He and four other Immortals came from another world to integrate with and study the human world. While each of these Immortals has taken on different ways to live their thousand years among mortals, one of the five Immortals has manipulated not only the other Immortals, but the humans themselves in such a way to allow him to rule the world. Gongora, the main antagonist in the game, is able to seal away the memories of the four other Immortals, so they have forgotten why they are there and who they are. They are merely blank slates being controlled by their governments for warfare and the like.

As Kaim journeys towards discovering Gongora’s true intent and stopping him, he stumbles upon things that trigger locked away memories. There are over thirty of these memories throughout the course of the game, and when he stumbles upon a conversation or item that triggers a memory, the player is prompted about whether or not to go through the memory. Each of these memories is presented on screen as several pages of text (about 10 or so pages of half full or full screen text) which serve to add more depth to Kaim’s character. From these memories we learn what he has gone through over the last thousand years, but it’s unfortunate that they are presented in text format only.

In Japan, there was a novel released that contained all of the memories, which is something that I wouldn’t have minded checking out here in the States. Reading through hundreds of pages of text on my TV isn’t exactly why I’m playing video games – no matter how good these stories are. Fortunately, they are skippable and are not required for understanding the actual storyline of the game. Supposedly the writing in many of these stories is excellent and quite emotional. I just didn’t have the patience to read through them all.

In the game itself, we learn that some of the Immortals have children, but the children are mortal themselves. Thus, the full party ends up being Immortals and humans, with several of the humans related to the Immortals in some fashion or another and want to tag along for the ride to save the world.

Holding the right trigger during an attack sequence allows you to line up two circles to do greater damage if you time it right.

Gameplay Mechanics

Combat
The combat system is similar to many other Japanese RPGs. Battles are random encounters, and they are turn-based affairs. If you’ve played any Final Fantasy games, you know what to expect. The only thing that Lost Odyssey adds to the mix is a ring circle “mini game” so that when you attack, you hold the right trigger down and releasing it at the right time when you swing potentially gives you a damage boost. It’s awkward at first, but once you get used to it I can say that it makes battles more enjoyable since there’s a small element of skill added to the turn-based fighting. It’s just unfortunate when you’re fighting a boss and can’t land the “Perfect” attacks.

Party members in the back room take reduced damage until the enemy does damage to the front row equal to the health of the front row’s members. After that members in the back row take full damage.

Leveling
The interesting thing about having both Immortals and humans in your party is that they level differently. Humans level pretty normally – they simply require experience points to level up and as they hit certain levels, they learn new skills and abilities like Black Magic level 1, level 2, etc. The Immortals are different though – they gain both Experience Points and Special Points (SP) from the enemy. SP is a different leveling “currency” than experience points and only used by Immortals.

Unlike the humans, the Immortals don’t learn skills automatically as they level up – they have to learn skills from the humans or items by equipping them. Each enemy provides a couple of SP, and an Immortal has to pick the skill he or she wants to learn from a human. As long as both the human and the Immortal learning the human’s skill are in battle, the Immortal will make progress towards learning the human’s skill. Similarly, equipping an item that teaches a skill functions in the same way. As each Immortal learns various skills, (there are perhaps over 50 skills to learn from in all), the Immortal can equip whatever skills the player wants. It reminds me of the skill learning system from Final Fantasy IX (which is actually a good thing – I enjoyed that game a lot). This adds a lot of flexibility into how your Immortals fight. In the beginning of the game, each Immortal only starts with a couple of slots to equip learned skills, but by the end of the game, each Immortal has 30 skill slots available to fill.

Lost Odyssey allows at most five in your party at once.

In Lost Odyssey, you are allowed to have a total of five party members on the field at once, with others sitting on the bench and are able to swap in anytime you go to the menu screen. The ones on the bench do not gain any experience points or SP points so it is best to rotate your team members in and out of the battles to level them equally. However, by end game, the Immortals are far superior to the humans, due to their ability to equip 30 skills each (the human characters have about 15 skills each after learning all their skills).

In Lost Odyssey, there aren’t summons like in other J-RPGs but some of the party members’ skills do enough damage to rival summoning a monster.

Equipment
In terms of equipment, there are only three equipment slots for a character: a weapon, a ring, and an accessory. However, there are skills later that when equipped allow a character to have two or three accessories equipped at once. Accessories not only have a property such as “Nullify Fire Damage”, but they teach that ability to the Immortal wearing it through SP points. While humans can’t learn the skill from the piece of equipment, they can still make use of the ability of the accessory by equipping it.

There isn’t anything special about the weapon slot in the game – each character can buy or find weapons to equip. The weapons are useless for caster classes, as weapons only contain physical attack power with no buffs. Rings in this game are what give the special buffs for weapons such as life leech, elemental damage, etc. You find new rings throughout the game to equip, but it is also possible to create your own rings based on raw item materials that are dropped by monsters. In the end game I had characters equipped with rings that gave Massive Life Leech, Massive Mana Leech, and Rare Item Stealer, so when they would attack they would drain health, magic, and steal potentially rare items.

Lost Odyssey has several optional end game bosses, but unfortunately, they are not very challenging.

Achievement System
The Achievements are actually pretty well balanced out in this game, save for one 20-point Achievement that I mentioned at the beginning of the review. That Achievement is pretty much the bane of many who wanted to get the full 1000 points in the game, as it was the most difficult one. People liken it to the Orbs in Crackdown, which totaled 800 in all throughout the entire city. There aren’t quite 800 items to look for in world of Lost Odyssey, but having to backtrack and look for items that you missed somewhere becomes even more annoying due to the random battles that interrupt you as you recheck each location.

I even went through a checklist of each item for the Achievement and even with that I missed some when I thought I finished the list. Fortunately, the items I missed were in one of the earlier dungeons, so I didn’t have to waste too much time. There were people that played through the game a second time, rushing through it for this 20 point Achievement alone and spending 40 hours. That’s just ridiculous. It’s not even a really skillful Achievement either – it’s not like defeating powerful optional bosses or finding the best gear in the game, so it was totally annoying.

I actually wish there more end-game Achievements for optional things though, as it’s odd that you can level up to 99 but you finish gaining all of your skills at around level 50 (and consequently, there’s no Achievement to go past your early 50s). Even all of the optional bosses can pretty much be taken down at level 50, save for one. This one boss was in an optional dungeon where the enemies were in their 70s, meaning you basically leveled each time you took down an enemy, making your entire party hit the 70s by the time you actually finished the dungeon. It was somewhat of a strange balance for the end game content, and it wasn’t very satisfying.

Towns in Lost Odyssey are no different than they were in classic Japanese RPG games on the PS1 & PS2 – fixed camera angles but now with an HD coat of paint.

Final Thoughts
This felt like a short review for such a lengthy game, but I guess when I think about it, you probably spend about half the time in dungeons and combat, a quarter of the the time in towns, and a quarter of the time watching cutscenes. There’s not much more I can really say, except that on the whole, I really enjoyed the game.

If you don’t care too much about Achievements, Lost Odyssey is perhaps the best Japanese RPG released on the 360 so far, but considering there have only been three others (Enchanted Arms, Blue Dragon, and Eternal Sonata), that might not be saying much. But when I started playing this game, it honestly had a Final Fantasy-like feel for me. I’m not talking Final Fantasy XII, but Final Fantasy X, IX, and VII. If you were fans of those games and are itching to play a game like that on the 360, Lost Odyssey is a great choice.

I give the game a B+. It’s an excellent game for fans of the genre, but if you don’t really like Japanese RPGs with random battles this game isn’t going to exactly change your mind. The game pretty much does everything right for a Japanese RPG, and my minor issue with the one annoying Achievement aside, I was only a little sad that after 60 hours of gameplay, I didn’t think there was enough end game content! I guess that means it’s a great game – that after 60 hours, I still wanted more. That’s pretty rare in an RPG for me. Sometimes I just want to be done with them, but such was not the case with Lost Odyssey.