PRE-WARNING: THIS IS A TENATIVE REVIEW BASED UPON THE FIRST SEVERAL HOURS OF GAMEPLAY.
Hello once again, my eager audience. Today I'm reviewing a slightly...less popular game than previously, seeing as how mentioning Halo 3 gets me a three page topic of sheer madness.
So, Lost Odyssey is the second game to be shipped out to our wonderful shores by the only Japanese people who seem to like the Xbox 360--Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobuo Uemetsu. Anybody who gives three hoots about RPGs nowadays is probably well-acquainted with these two and their crazy antics--Mistwalker has been sort of heralded as the "rebellious" younger brother/arch rival of the much larger Square-Enix, and as such is expected to fill in the star-studded, zipper-lined shoes of the highly successful Final Fantasy series, except better.
It's a bit of an unfair expectation, but the spirit of optimism is always appreciated. Blue Dragon was Mistwalker's flagship title and, in the opinions of most everyone in the business, it stank to high heaven of discarded and deteriorated sheep offal, which is never a good way to start, even IF the game sold more 360's then anything else in Japan. In the wake of the disasterous Blue Dragon, though, American RPG fans have been looking for something a little meatier from Mistwalker, and Lost Odyssey has been offered as our entree.
LO (because I find spelling Odyssey an immense pain in the ass) is the story of Kaim, a 1000+ year vacant block who wanders from place to place for no better reason than to spend the time. Kaim, like most RPG protagonists, suffers from a rather acute form of amnesia that seems to only clear up at important plot points, leaving almost all of his 1000 years of memories to be rediscovered via fun-filled little short stories that were penned by some famous Japanese author that nobody has heard about. And, as far as the plot has progressed, that's about bloody it.
Oh, sure, there's some semblance of political intrigue, but the actual main plot of the game--the one that you're actually in the process of driving forward--seems sadly tacked on, which is quite sad considering that you watch this game more than you play it. It basically has revolved around one dickhead in one country trying to become more powerful than another dickhead in another country, and there's a lot of the word "magic" being thrown around and all sorts of other nonsense. Look, it's a little disappointing, but the main plot takes a lot of time to start grinding forward, and since I have not beaten this behemoth of game, I can't tell you how it ends, but so far it's failed to terrifically impress.
That being said, it's not all bad. First of all, the characters themselves are actually quite interesting. There's a lot of comical joy to be had out of Jansen, the cynical, unenthusiastic womanizer who has to fill in the gaping voids of dialogue between the almost completely silent Kaim and the relatively silent Seth, both of whom are angsty Immortals. They have some very good chemistry together, and even while you forget why it is they are doing all the things that they are, at least they are doing it in an interesting way. Jansen has some very, very funny lines, and so keeps you interested in the story, however distantly.
The main problem is actually not a problem at all, and it revolves around the Thousand Years of Memories aspect of the game--they are these nifty little short stories that are, while unvoiced, accompanied by some music, sound-effects and shifting backgrounds. These backgrounds have a bad habit of turning white and thus making the teeny tiny text very difficult to read, but it also helps give you some extra visual stimuli to go with your reading. And let me emphasize this right now: these vignettes are REALLY good. I mean, they're actually quite profound little short stories--emotional, gripping, some of them are even real tear-jerkers and others dance around powerful imagery and philosophy. They're the best part of the game, which is the problem--If I wanted to stare at unvoiced text and use my imagination to fill in the unprovided details, I would READ A FUCKING BOOK.
Seriously, when the best part of your game is the part that you aren't actually playing, that's a major problem! I mean, the gameplay itself isn't bad--far from it, really, the battles are not too common, but they're usually fun, there's a simple but effective skill-collection system and, best of all, the boss battles are fantastic. They're like puzzles with only one solution that doesn't result in nasty, painful, bum-rape filled death, and they're actually really quite HARD, which is somewhat jarring. I mean, I love a challenge, but it is a little disheartening when I fight the first real boss of the game and die five times before I can kill it. Really, people complain that the game is linear and turn-based, but I mean, it's a fucking JRPG, right? It is by its own nature designed to be linear and turn-based, and if you buy JRPG expecting anything but that then you are making a highly ill-informed decision.
One final gripe, and this is a surprising one--the graphics. The game isn't visually BAD--the environments are great, there are awesome battle effects and water effects and special effects and lighting effects, but nothing we haven't seen before. What's actually bad about the graphics is the character animation. The character animation sucks a whole fat steaming bucket of balls, and it takes only about five minutes of watching one of the characters (Gongora comes to mind) doing one of their epic monologues to realize how laughably bad these people have animate. Seriously, Mistwalker should seek out whatever Koreans they outsourced their character design to and fire them.
And by fire them, I do not mean terminate their employment. I mean, they should set them on fire. The characters animate like ugly little meat puppets, their arms jerking about in unrealistic robot movements and their mouths and eyes stretching and spinning about quite grotesquely. I mean, just look at Jansen's character model--he's got a woman's eyes grafted onto a man's face and neither of them work in conjunction with one another, making actually WATCHING the characters speak rather dismal affair.
So there's a lot of text here now, so let me sum up: Lost Odyssey is not a bad game. Hell, it's not even particularly generic--this is one of the few JRPGs that actually give me character interaction I can start to believe, and there's some truly very funny and snappish dialogue. The battles themselves are fun if you like turn-based combat, and especially fun when you get to fight a boss, even if they are really, really fucking hard.
However, since I have so far had to watch the game more than I have had to play it, I have no choice but to base the game on its story, and that's a mixed coin, because there's a very GOOD story--nay, a great story that's being told, but that's not the main story of the game. The best part of the game's plot has nothing to do with pretty much any part of it--worse yet, they are almost no different from regular old books, which means I bought a game in order to read about things that aren't happening in the game.
Lost Odyssey: Not bad, not great, not generic. It's a grab bag of a bunch of different things all trying their best to accomplish something and each one falling short. Once I get deeper into it, I may have changed my opinion, but...well...don't hold your breath.
Hello once again, my eager audience. Today I'm reviewing a slightly...less popular game than previously, seeing as how mentioning Halo 3 gets me a three page topic of sheer madness.
So, Lost Odyssey is the second game to be shipped out to our wonderful shores by the only Japanese people who seem to like the Xbox 360--Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobuo Uemetsu. Anybody who gives three hoots about RPGs nowadays is probably well-acquainted with these two and their crazy antics--Mistwalker has been sort of heralded as the "rebellious" younger brother/arch rival of the much larger Square-Enix, and as such is expected to fill in the star-studded, zipper-lined shoes of the highly successful Final Fantasy series, except better.
It's a bit of an unfair expectation, but the spirit of optimism is always appreciated. Blue Dragon was Mistwalker's flagship title and, in the opinions of most everyone in the business, it stank to high heaven of discarded and deteriorated sheep offal, which is never a good way to start, even IF the game sold more 360's then anything else in Japan. In the wake of the disasterous Blue Dragon, though, American RPG fans have been looking for something a little meatier from Mistwalker, and Lost Odyssey has been offered as our entree.
LO (because I find spelling Odyssey an immense pain in the ass) is the story of Kaim, a 1000+ year vacant block who wanders from place to place for no better reason than to spend the time. Kaim, like most RPG protagonists, suffers from a rather acute form of amnesia that seems to only clear up at important plot points, leaving almost all of his 1000 years of memories to be rediscovered via fun-filled little short stories that were penned by some famous Japanese author that nobody has heard about. And, as far as the plot has progressed, that's about bloody it.
Oh, sure, there's some semblance of political intrigue, but the actual main plot of the game--the one that you're actually in the process of driving forward--seems sadly tacked on, which is quite sad considering that you watch this game more than you play it. It basically has revolved around one dickhead in one country trying to become more powerful than another dickhead in another country, and there's a lot of the word "magic" being thrown around and all sorts of other nonsense. Look, it's a little disappointing, but the main plot takes a lot of time to start grinding forward, and since I have not beaten this behemoth of game, I can't tell you how it ends, but so far it's failed to terrifically impress.
That being said, it's not all bad. First of all, the characters themselves are actually quite interesting. There's a lot of comical joy to be had out of Jansen, the cynical, unenthusiastic womanizer who has to fill in the gaping voids of dialogue between the almost completely silent Kaim and the relatively silent Seth, both of whom are angsty Immortals. They have some very good chemistry together, and even while you forget why it is they are doing all the things that they are, at least they are doing it in an interesting way. Jansen has some very, very funny lines, and so keeps you interested in the story, however distantly.
The main problem is actually not a problem at all, and it revolves around the Thousand Years of Memories aspect of the game--they are these nifty little short stories that are, while unvoiced, accompanied by some music, sound-effects and shifting backgrounds. These backgrounds have a bad habit of turning white and thus making the teeny tiny text very difficult to read, but it also helps give you some extra visual stimuli to go with your reading. And let me emphasize this right now: these vignettes are REALLY good. I mean, they're actually quite profound little short stories--emotional, gripping, some of them are even real tear-jerkers and others dance around powerful imagery and philosophy. They're the best part of the game, which is the problem--If I wanted to stare at unvoiced text and use my imagination to fill in the unprovided details, I would READ A FUCKING BOOK.
Seriously, when the best part of your game is the part that you aren't actually playing, that's a major problem! I mean, the gameplay itself isn't bad--far from it, really, the battles are not too common, but they're usually fun, there's a simple but effective skill-collection system and, best of all, the boss battles are fantastic. They're like puzzles with only one solution that doesn't result in nasty, painful, bum-rape filled death, and they're actually really quite HARD, which is somewhat jarring. I mean, I love a challenge, but it is a little disheartening when I fight the first real boss of the game and die five times before I can kill it. Really, people complain that the game is linear and turn-based, but I mean, it's a fucking JRPG, right? It is by its own nature designed to be linear and turn-based, and if you buy JRPG expecting anything but that then you are making a highly ill-informed decision.
One final gripe, and this is a surprising one--the graphics. The game isn't visually BAD--the environments are great, there are awesome battle effects and water effects and special effects and lighting effects, but nothing we haven't seen before. What's actually bad about the graphics is the character animation. The character animation sucks a whole fat steaming bucket of balls, and it takes only about five minutes of watching one of the characters (Gongora comes to mind) doing one of their epic monologues to realize how laughably bad these people have animate. Seriously, Mistwalker should seek out whatever Koreans they outsourced their character design to and fire them.
And by fire them, I do not mean terminate their employment. I mean, they should set them on fire. The characters animate like ugly little meat puppets, their arms jerking about in unrealistic robot movements and their mouths and eyes stretching and spinning about quite grotesquely. I mean, just look at Jansen's character model--he's got a woman's eyes grafted onto a man's face and neither of them work in conjunction with one another, making actually WATCHING the characters speak rather dismal affair.
So there's a lot of text here now, so let me sum up: Lost Odyssey is not a bad game. Hell, it's not even particularly generic--this is one of the few JRPGs that actually give me character interaction I can start to believe, and there's some truly very funny and snappish dialogue. The battles themselves are fun if you like turn-based combat, and especially fun when you get to fight a boss, even if they are really, really fucking hard.
However, since I have so far had to watch the game more than I have had to play it, I have no choice but to base the game on its story, and that's a mixed coin, because there's a very GOOD story--nay, a great story that's being told, but that's not the main story of the game. The best part of the game's plot has nothing to do with pretty much any part of it--worse yet, they are almost no different from regular old books, which means I bought a game in order to read about things that aren't happening in the game.
Lost Odyssey: Not bad, not great, not generic. It's a grab bag of a bunch of different things all trying their best to accomplish something and each one falling short. Once I get deeper into it, I may have changed my opinion, but...well...don't hold your breath.
