Lost Odyssey

Another one from my, ‘played for five minutes and stopped’ collection, however Lost Odyssey is a Role Playing Game (JRPG) which means five minutes translates to about five hours of game time. This made it incredibly hard to drum up the energy to start playing it again. So much so that I had to use the girlfriend selection method to even consider playing it again. But it worked and Hey Presto! , 76 hours of gameplay later and I get to write a review.

Lost Odyssey is a JRPG from the creators of the Final Fantasy series. It has nine playable characters and follows the story of Kaim Argonar, an Immortal guy, who goes on a quest to find out why a giant meteor struck a battlefield. Of course, during the course of said mission, he gets caught up in a quest to save the world, from an evil guy with a bad haircut, with some help from his eight ‘friends.’

Graphically the game is what it is. There are lots of intricately designed monsters to battle against, however they do become quite repetitive in design after a while. The environments are the standard semi open-world with random battle encounters (which don’t happen in towns and cities) typical of the JRPG genre and they are quite good visually, however, you never really notice because you are too busy trying to get to the next safe place while fighting random battles and managing your inventory. It does make me wonder how normal in-game people can get anywhere though, if the moment you walk outside the city, you can be attacked by an ill-tempered, mutated tree or something.

Now the soundtrack is obviously going to play a big part for two reasons. Number one focuses on the background music. You are going to be playing the game for seventy plus hours (which according to many walkthroughs is an average time) so the music has to be either really good or not noticeable. Unfortunately it was neither of these things. It several places, the music is stupidly dreary, repetitive and annoying. It actually got to the point where I couldn’t play the game with other people in the room.

Number two concentrates on the voiceovers for the characters. Now, as the game is an original Japanese release and the voices are English it doesn’t quite sound right. Kaim sounds like he has eaten a ton of gravel for breakfast and one of the other characters, Ming, I couldn’t quite work out. She was meant to be quite posh but I swear some of her lines came out as almost Scottish. To be fair the voices where quite funny in places, however as the main point of the game is the storyline, I would have expected a lot of effort to have to gone into the development of this area, even if they are doing a western translation.

Gameplay... so you basically have a split between characters that use physical attacks and characters that use magic and you have to build a party of five that has a balance between the two. The game is spread out over four discs and this method can be used from disc two onwards, however disc one is the most unforgiving RPG experience I’ve ever had and this makes the gameplay unbalanced.

Another element that differs from most RPGs I’ve played is that it is impossible to over-level to make the game easier. You have to gain 100 experience to gain each level and how quickly you gain experience points depends on the area you are fighting in. It’s an interesting concept but kind of defeats the point of RPGs in that it is meant to be your choice over how you play – taking the long patient approach or trying to smash through the game as quickly as possible.

Walking around the environments was a pain from time to time. I lost count of the amount of times I got caught up on various bits of scenery or debris. Also, they aren’t very varied or attractive and the whole game had a very grey feel to it. It almost took away from the magic and fantasy elements. Don’t get me wrong, there were some bits that were colourful and lively but for the most part it was horribly depressing.

Achievements – 42 Achievements – 1,100 Points

Role playing games tend to be long drawn out affairs and I was quite impressed with my 76 hour finish time (including DLC) only to find that was bang on the average. I was horrendously disappointed. But enough about me, let’s talk about the 42 achievements that resulted in my play time.

Firstly, let’s go through the missable ones. There are five achievements of this nature and for a while I couldn’t figure out why. You have four immortals that need to learn all of their available skills. The reason they are missable is because you can sell one-of-a-kind accessories that will prevent you from being able to learn them all. I couldn’t find this detailed anywhere and considering that money is possibly the easiest thing in the world to obtain during game play, I don’t see why anyone would sell accessories but it could easily happen by accident.

The other missable one is for obtaining all the spells in the game and there are two spells that can only be obtained for a limited amount of time and are unobtainable thereafter. How annoying would it have been had I got in excess of 30 hours into the game, missed this and had to replay the game again? Very. Which brings me on to the last achievement worth talking about... the Treasure Trove Achievement.

The Treasure Trove Achievement requires you to collect every single item you can pick up from the in-game fields. I had to a lot of pre work in order to ensure I got this one which included turning an internet list into a checking off spreadsheet. It was a lot of work but it nailed me the achievement without losing too much gaming experience. However, it was a major slog and I hated having to have my laptop open every time I wanted to play the game.

The other achievements are not missable and can be obtained at the player’s leisure which is how RPG achievements should be. Once I had mastered the battle tactics which made every battle simple, I smashed all of the optional hidden bosses to pieces.

Downloadable Content

There are an additional 100 points under the Seeker of the Deep DLC which gives you a few new accessories to make the game easier and presents 6 new achievements. All you have to do is descend through 25 floors of monsters and kill the boss at the end.

Now, I had done everything above bar completing the final storyline element and this additional dungeon took me around 2 hours to complete. A lot of guides stated that you need to obtain special accessories to give you the ability to beat the final dude in this area but it’s not true. I even messed up my character set up so only 4 were able to do any real damage to him and still won comfortably.

So after 76 hours, I had done everything there is to do and won all the achievements. I did get a sense of satisfaction out of it but it was a hell of slog and I certainly won’t be going back to Final Fantasy XII any time soon. I am in definite need of an RPG break.