Lost Odyssey Review (X360) PG1

Gameplay

The gameplay is, for the most part, just like every other turn based J-RPG you have played. You can attack, use magic, use items, use skills, or defend. Things are a bit different here in a couple of ways, however. First off is that you can’t just level grind and become more powerful than the enemies. Each area has a level cap, and once you reach that you can’t go higher until you move on. This is an interesting concept, except for the fact that you are still forced to grind up to the area level cap in order to beat pretty much every boss in the game. It goes back to the skill system. In order to beat bosses, you have to have certain spells, and in order to have certain spells, your humans have to be at a certain level so they earn that spell and then they have to teach it to your immortals. Honestly, it is kind of a P-I-T-A. If you try to tackle a boss without the right skills, you will get annihilated. One of my few real complaints with LO is that the boss battles are just stupidly difficult. The very first boss battle you face is easily the hardest first boss in RPG history. Once you learn how the skill system and all of that works, it isn’t so difficult moving forward, but if you aren’t prepared when you meet a boss, get ready for a bumpy ride. Another complaint I have is that the game uses random battles, but unlike most games where there is a battle every few steps, there are surprisingly few battles in LO. When you are looking to fight in order to level up, wandering around to trigger battles is rather tiresome.

Graphics and Sound

From a presentation standpoint, Lost Odyssey is kind of hit-or-miss. The cutscenes are beautiful, and the characters are nicely detailed, but the menus are archaic and there are some annoying performance issues. One thing that immediately catches your eye is that metal just looks really great in this game. From gold and silver armor to steel weapons, everything looks really realistic and not too shiny like how most next-gen games look. Also the characters are nicely detailed and look great. On the other hand, the environments you explore sometimes don’t look so good, and there is almost always framerate jittering during cutscenes and battle. It isn’t like this is an action game where framerate problems can ruin the gameplay, but it is very noticeable and annoying.

The sound is pretty good all around. The music is perfect and fits exactly what you expect from an RPG. It only makes sense since Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu did the music here as well. You have several different languages to choose from for the voice work, and you can’t really go wrong. Some people don’t like the English voices, but I don’t mind them.

There is one thing that needs to be cleared up, and that is the load times. Other reviews have stated horribly long load times that potentially ruin the game. That isn’t the case. They were playing debug versions and not the final retail version of the game. Have no worries. Even though there are a lot of cutscenes, load times only last a second or two.

Bottom Line

All in all, Lost Odyssey is an extremely solid game that will make J-RPG fans very happy. In some ways, like the core menu-based gameplay, it doesn’t try to break the mold too much. But in other ways, like in the storytelling and skill system, Lost Odyssey is very fresh and new and exciting. This is just a solid game all around that sets the benchmark for epic J-RPGs on the Xbox 360. It is absolutely worth playing for fans of the genre, and is highly recommended.