Lost Odyssey impressions

I didn't have high hopes going into Lost Odyssey. I had played the Blue Dragon demo and while there where aspects that I liked (such as the crazy heavy metal boss song as sung by Deep Purple's Ian Gillan), nothing that I saw was particularly spectacular or new.

Still, I have hope for Mistwalker and Sakaguchi, because other than them and Square Enix, who's going to be making Japanese RPGs for the current consoles? Namco is supposed to be making a current gen Tales game, but I don't know if it's the good Tales team working on it (Symphonia, Abyss) or the lesser team (Legendia).

Like everyone else, I am fervently awaiting Final Fantasy XIII and the VII Remake (cross your fingers!), but other JRPG offerings are slim. I would have thought that White Knight Story would be out by now, but I haven't heard anything on it since the Tokyo Game Show a couple years ago. Then of course, there was the major news a while back about the next Dragon Quest game being made for the DS, so you have to wonder if other companies are moving that way as well.

In general, I just don't know if Japan has it in them anymore. I don't even know if they care. Look at the current console situation; it's the American console that is leading in terms of innovation and game output whereas the Japanese apparently think it's "rude" to have modern necessities such as voice chat and a friends list in your games.

So maybe they're all just concerned with their cell phones, I don't know. What I can tell you is that Lost Odyssey is decidedly "meh." It's a lot like Final Fantasy X, but everything is just turned down and more generic. For example, imagine the battle system from FFX. It's fun and fast and has a little Rock Paper Scissors to it. Now just take out all those little unique things and turn it into any other turn-based battle system that you've played a dozen times. That's basically the entire philosophy behind Lost Odyssey.

OK, now think about this: Blue Dragon does not have random battles. You can, for the most part, choose your battles just as you could in Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy XII. It's a good thing. Now, why does Lost Odyssey suddenly have them again? Really, I think it's time we moved on from that. You don't have to have the battles on the same screen as you do in Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy XII (although I would prefer it), you can have a single monster running around that represents an encounter as is the case with Dragon Quest VIII's unique monsters.

Now, the random battle thing has been discussed a lot. But Lost Odyssey does a ton of other things that are quite annoying in JRPGs. For a list of them, I would suggest this article on Games Radar. Lost Odyssey has almost all of these things in it.

One thing that is somewhat unusual though are these text-only dream sequences. They can be likened to a codex or a journal from any other game, but these are short stories that are accompanied by Nobuo Uematsu's music. At first, I thought they where a nice way to take a breather, but then they kept coming up at intervals where I just wanted to get to the action. Then there's the actual story which is just the same. There's hardly any back story or motivation to the main quest and that's probably why I find it so hard to give a damn when anything story related is going on. I just feel so detached from it all and so do the characters themselves.

Now, to be fair, Lost Odyssey is not a bad game at all. It's just nothing we haven't seen before. I just made it to the second disc today, and if I can complete it before GTA IV comes out, that's fine. But if not, it's no big loss either.