While it certainly won't amaze all, Lost Odyssey offers much to the Final Fantasy era JRPG style aficionados.
Let me be the first to say that this game is NOT FOR EVERYONE! If you hated Final Fantasy or hated other games like it, you will hate this game. IGN hit it right on the head when they called this game a "blast from the past." This game mimicks many of the things that the FF series did. Many people cannot stand these types of games. I, on the other hand, love them!
The premise of the game, as you probably already know, is that Kaim, a 1000+ year old immortal, loses his memories after a really cool and visually stunning cinematic war. Kaim finds that other immortals have also lost their memories and so begins his journey to not only recall past memories, but to save an empire. Yep, we've heard it before...but never read it like this. Throughout the game, Kaim "remembers" dreams or memories that he experienced. While these aren't shown on screen with characters, but rather displayed as text. In the background, noises play based on the type of story. I thought that I would be skipping through these like crazy to get to the action, but I find that I read them more than ever. They are extremely well written and really pain a nice picture in your head of what is going on. The first couple are brutal (especially the one with the little girl and her "journey"), but not all of them are sad. These stories really give Kaim a more sensitive side that you definitely cannot determine from his cool and stoic demeanor.
The difficulty isn't bad until you read the first boss. Don't even attempt to take him on until you are level 14 (at least...15 helps!). You will find yourself visiting past played through levels to grind on enemies for XP just to stay ahead of the curve. Don't worry though, it's not too bad.
Another cool feature in LO is their use of rings. As you progress through the game, you will either find or make a number of rings that give you certain special abilities in battle. One for example, is a ring that imbues your weapon with flames. During battle, you have to hold in the RT and try to match it 2 circles together. It's hard to explain, but pretty easy to get the hang of. If you get a good rating, you do additional damage, perfect rating nets you some more additional damage. Typical RP element we see in a bunch of games. This is a necessity in RP games of this nature since everything is strictly turn bases. Hitting A a bunch of times just won't cut it anymore.
I'm only a couple hours into a game that is over 50 hours long. These are just my first impressions of a game that I have been anticipating for months. Like I said before, if you didn't like the Final Fantasy games, you will not like this game. It is extremely similar. If you are like me and beat the FF games into the ground, then you may have found the perfect game to hold you over for the next month or two.