Lost Odyssey

My favorite RPG games of all time are Final Fantasy X and Shadow Hearts Covenant. Both were 50+ hour games and the stories were great. I preferred the combat in Shadow Hearts though. They had a ring with a clock hand that spun around and you had to hit a button when the hand was on a certain portion of the ring. There were many different ring configurations. In my opinion this added a bit of ‘twitch factor’ to an otherwise turn based game. I felt the story in Final Fantasy X was a little better and the graphics were of higher quality.

Now that I have a Xbox 360 again I was looking into what sort of RPGs are available. Since I already completed Oblivion prior to giving up my 360 that wasn’t in the running. I know that a Japanese RPG is a lot different than Oblivion (which I guess is an American RPG?) but lets pretend they are both in the same category (I think they are). So I was looking at Blue Dragon, Eternal Sonata and Lost Odyssey.

Okay Blue Dragon was just too cute for me and it starred kids. I really don’t like playing kids (yes I know the star of Final Fantasy X was a kid – well a teenager more like it). It also got very luke warm reviews. With regard to Eternal Sonata – I just wasn’t interested in the story what-so-ever. Finally I came to Lost Odyssey – which also had luke warm reviews but it had something…special?The team behind Shadow Hearts Covenant and the writer of Final Fantasy were the ones who put Lost Odyssey together. For me, a match made in heaven. So I dug into the reviews – what were people saying? Well for the most part they didn’t like the random battles and folks felt it didn’t break new ground. More of the same – of my favorite games – sign me up! I did like the random battles of Shadow Hearts so that was no big deal. Okay what about the story?A world where there was an industrial+magic revolution results in steampunk technology. Two countries go to war and have a massive battle that is interrupted by a meteor strike! Everyone is killed except our hero who has lost his memory – this is where the story starts. The introduction movie is really nice and you get introduced to combat right away.

My only complaint about the game is the dynamic texture system is little wonky. Sometime the characters are really blurred and the high resolution textures don’t load unless you zoom in using the left trigger.

All in all I recommend the game.