Lost Odyssey is a solid JRPG, which combats frustrating issues with some truly wonderful moments seldom seen in gaming.
I really liked this game!
If you're a blindsighted JRPG fan, you can stop right there, and just go buy it. It's worth the money. However, there are some faults in the game that are hard to ignore, and demand attention since they affected my enjoyment of the game. I just wanted to get my overall feeling of the game off my chest, so people know I like it before I start raking over the coals, so to speak.
First, the story. Honestly, it's a pretty pedestrain tale. Bad guy manipulating government for blah blah blah so he can rise to power and blah blah blah. Nothing new here, and honestly, fairly predictable. Even the plot twists to the major story arc, a resonably intelligent person could see coming from a mile away. If nothing else, the story serves to give you an excuse to start a journey.
It is the journey, however, that is truly magical! And, I mean really wonderful! As the character, Kaim, starts his journey, he is a man of few words. Which, would make things boring, except for two things. The solid cast around him, most notably the wise cracking Jensen, who had me laughing out loud many times, and the memories Kaim remembers along the way, which are presented in the form of prose with a soundtrack. And the stories are wonderful! Not only do they serve to give Kaim the depth needed to understand Kaim's melancholy demeaner, they also happen to be exceptionally moving, and genuinely beautiful. And, I don't mean 'for a video game', I mean some of the most emotionally lovely stories I have ever read, that are beautiful even when they're heartbreaking.
I mentioned that Kaim remembers these. You see, Kaim has no memory. Which is odd, because he's lived for a thousand years, and has no memory of his life. He meets other immortals, who feel a mutual connection to eachother, and share the same dilemma.
The journey in this game serves as the vessel to explore the characters, which is where this game finds it's greatest strength. There are moments, either in memories, or along the main story, where something is revealed about a character, and it moved me to tears. And, I don't mean mushy 'disney tears,' I mean tears that come from truly connecting emotionally to an identifiable emotion. Through the story, the game does not pull punches when it comes to life, love, and loss. Quite the contrary, when this game finds it's most beautiful moments, they are often mixed with a great sadness or an irreconcilable loss, yet blends them together to reflect something most people experience in life.
It's on that journey of discovery, that this game shows flashes of true greatness.
Sadly, where the game finds it's greatest faults, are in the gameplay.
The combat, is solid. Nothing groundbreaking, but it does have some interesting twists that keep it both entertaining and thoughtful. The ring attack system does well to keep players engaged in combat, and the immortal's skill slot system keeps the player thinking of the best skills to fill those slots with for a particular fight.
Fights, also, are done very well. They're not so much 'hard' or 'easy', but rather, there is definitely a 'right' and a 'wrong' way to fight certain enemies. And, if you fight highly armored or magic resistant enemies incorrectly, you will find yourself rediscovering your last save point only to get it right the second, or thrid, time around. Boss fights, often, don't feel much harder that stardard fights, they just last longer and have certain twists you pick up as you fight. This isn't a game where you're going to be thrashing through random enounters. They require thought, and proper stradegy, to get through in one piece.
The gameplay, however, shows some flaws. Load times, both in combat, and in map exploration, are long, but worse, slow down the pace of the game noticably. This becomes most evident when exploring a map leading to a boss. For completionists, like myself, maps can take a sometimes unbearable amount of time to explore, because combat feels like it takes forever to load, and each new map panel takes just as long, and like any other random spawn battle system, it happens alot. It just feels a lot longer in this game, than most.
Honestly, that wasn't game breaking for me, but the overall pace in the game feels uneven. At times, it feels like alot happens very fast, and alot of relevant information is revealed. Then, at others, it feels like forever and a day goes by before you see any significant headway made in the major plot. It is in these slower points of pacing, where the faults of gameplay become most evident. Don't let anyone tell you different, this game sometimes just feels slow.
What really saves this game, is the journey of the characters, and the revelations and memories they uncover along the way. If the gameplay matched the greatness of the character development, this game would be a perfect 10. Also, the contrary is true, that if the characters weren't so wonderful, I don't feel the faults in the pacing would be as evident, simply because I wouldn't feel so eager to find out more about them.
I also understand that many people, mostly JRPG fans, have taken offense to KVO's score of this game in his review (odd, because being deemed a 'good' game is hardly a trashing in my book). Honestly, I read his review, both before and after I played the game, and while the final score is a thing always up for debate, his review, at least for me, pretty accurately matches my feeling about this game. There are faults, and it requires patience, but I truly feel that at it's best, Lost Odyssey has some emotional moments that are so pwoerful, that I am hard pressed to think of a game that made me feel so strongly about the characters I was playing with, and the stories they had to tell.
I said it early on, and I'll say it again here. I really liked this game. I didn't like it enough to overlook it's faults, and sometimes, I feel it was because of how much I liked it that made these faults so apparent. But, what I loved about it was strong enough to get me to keep playing to the very end, and enjoy it immensely along the way.
This game really is about 'the journey.' And, along that journey, this game shows levels of emotional maturity, and poetic beauty that are, at times, without par in gaming today.