So I'm onto the 4th disc now and thinking I've played enough to give an opinion, so here it is.
Lost Odyssey as far as I'm concerned is brilliant, it's not perfectbut it's solid and thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish IF you get into it. There are as promised a lot of movie scenes which people either enjoy sitting through or don't. I'm not usually a fan of overly long cutscenes but in LO it never got annoying nor did they ever lull me to sleep like I came very close to doing a few times during the Eternal Sonata cutscenes which basically took half an hour of 2 people talking in circles to get to the point and say "I wanna go that way". The cutscenes are interesting and serve to flesh out the story, rather than just being there to wank over like some other RPGs.
Also serving to flesh out the back story of the main character are the short text stories, which in my opinion are one of the highlights of the game. They are all accompanied by music and basic art in the backgrounds which really set the mood as you are reading. However, these "dreams" come quite often at times, and people might not enjoy reading a slab of text for half an hour. The good news is they can be skipped and come back to later, but I read them as I went along. I'd also recommend not ignoring them completely, as, thematically at least, a lot of similar things from the stories happen tothe charactersduring the game. The stories themselves are extremely well written and they are quite beautiful, which I hope carries over to the translation into English.
The music in the game is of the high standard expected and has a nice variety of styles. I don't think anything in LO will be as badly received as the famous boss fight music from Blue Dragon (which I rather liked personally but there you go). Voicework is fantastic, they actually found some people with charisma for this game and it pays off. None of the characters sound out of place or mismatched or irritating.Kaimmay sound deadpan sometimes but this is due to that being part of his character rather than amistake in casting.
Graphics are mostly excellent, and framerate issues are minor. Load times can be slow for combat at times but there is never anything as bad as the load screens from Oblivion for example. It's not that slow. By now you've all seen the vids.
Combat is turn-based, one of my favourite styles, and bosses require strategy or they will beat you down, which makes a nice change from the walk in the park that was Blue Dragon's boss fights. Note however that this does not mean you have to level grind. In fact I have almost finished the game without grinding once, although I'm the type of guy who likes to explore every nook and cranny so I probably see more combat than people just running through from A to B. Even if you do level grind it usually won't help you for the boss fights anyway as they are usually taken down by a combination of spells/items/tactics as opposed to brute force and outranking them. One thing I do miss from Blue Dragon though is that they went with random encounters for this game. I despise random encounters in general but thankfully 2 things were included in this game to make them tolerable, first is the ability to sprint, second is the fact that the encounters have been turned down so they don't come so often anyway. This is the first time in an RPG with random encounters that I've actually wanted to be attacked. Usually I'm so sick of them I just want to teleport to the other side of the dungeon and be done with it.
In addition to the typical RPG gameplay fare Mistwalker has attempted to mix things up a bit with Lost Odyssey as they did with Blue Dragon with the mechat shooting stages and button mashing sequences, although admittedly not as often. Thankfully Lost Odyssey didn't go down this path of wrist and finger bleedingagony but rather struck out in new directions. You'll just have to play the game to see where though as I don't want to inadvertently spoil anything.
I can't think of one thing I'd say is "ugly" in the game. There are a few areas that could have been better but the flaws are still heavily outweighed by the plusses. They got a lot of things right in this game and any fan of JRPG should love this game. It's a great follow up to Blue Dragon, left behind is the light-hearted fun and cartoon feel of Blue Dragon, here we are presented with a more realistic art style which more people are likely to relate to, and a story so full of sorrow that without Jansen would probably be so dreary only goths or suicidal people would enjoy it, up until the bits promoting hope come along of course. The story is very deep, very well developed, and very touching, if you can immerse yourself in this world it's like playing a work of art. Unlike a lot of games that attempt to convey emotions such as love, sorrow, even humour, this game really pulls it off.
Any fan of JRPG or story-driven games will love Lost Odyssey. It's not likely to draw many new fans but people already hooked and knowing what to expect should really look forward to getting their hands on this one.
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