Lost Odyssey - First Impressions

Due to the beige trickle of variation in new games for the 360 recently, I've been left reviewing a constant stream of samey shooters, while trying to avoid Turok. As a result I've been driven to trying out the latest JRPG for the 360. Blame it on laziness or my embarrassing bout of chicken pox that I'm currently suffering from, but this week's review is just going to be first impressions. If you read my Circle of Doom or Kane and Lynch reviews, you'll find it rather odd for me to bother mentioning that this is a first impressions, but in my defence any game with four discs is going to be long for the time it comes out. Enough talking about the size of Lost Odyssey (and therefore no longer contradicting my recent post on the size of modern games), and let's get down to the good stuff.

Actually, for no apparent reason I feel like teasing a bit more, in a similar manner to a hired stripper getting caught in traffic - although not exactly the same because I'll be really concerned should you imagine me in a latex police uniform. What the hell, it's something we have to get out of the way early as to not break flow later, and to bulk up my word count, but I'll start by outlining the story for you all, in my best understanding.

God knows what year it is, but Lost Odyssey is set in a parallel universe where instead of discovering fire, the human race is descended from David Blaine, and therefore had no industrial revolution, but instead a - seriously, this is the exact term - magical revolution. Rather than causing a civilisation of sharply-dressed men with interesting facial hair and top hats, using magic as a form of fuel seems to work a lot like nuclear power. Which, come to think of it, begs the question, why didn't they do that instead? That way attacking enemies with magic would be more interesting. The magic works like nuclear power in the way that it creates lots of power, some people are opposed to it and when something goes wrong at one of the power stations, a lot of very weird looking things show up and start attacking people without warning; only because it's magic, they're completely invisible until they start attacking you. The story starts with a lot of promise, with an awesome opening cutscene with lots of lovely violence and action. Enter Kaim, your ugly, broody character, who kills lots of soldiers very quickly, then hands the reigns over to you till kill a tank thing with just a sword.

Kaim's story is that he's supposedly immortal (supported by the fact he survives a meteor to the face) and has lost all his memory (probably something to do with surviving a meteor to the face too) aside from his name and awesome fighting technique. After you've wondered around enough, you're ordered to go to the council named by the space marines from the Alien movies (Urah... Hoo-rah... really? Nothing?) and told to investigate a power station with an equally silly name, because the local Greenpeace blame the meteor crash on it.

Finally, we get onto the gameplay itself! Some of you will be happy to know it's "from the creator of Final Fantasy", and had I noticed that on the cover beforehand, I wouldn't have bothered to pick it up. You see, there are only 3 games I believe turn based combat ever worked on and they are Worms games, Risk and Super Mario RPG - because it was simple and more interactive than anything else I've seen to date. The thing is, turn based combat became very redundant when games consoles started growing extra control ports and that's why I always have, and always will, have a problem with turn based combat.

Official Xbox Magazine describes it as having "one of the deepest stories we've seen on the Xbox 360", which is probably true, if it could keep on track of the damned thing with some form of consistency. Every 5 or so seconds of running around in the field causes you to trip over a group of angry, and previously invisible enemies, with no way to avoid them or even leg it like the true coward you are, this gets annoying very quickly. So, even though you get dragged as far away from the story as possible every few seconds, the effort to compensate is downright dull. You see, Kaim gradually recovers his memories in dreams, but not the fun kind of dreams where you jump off a cliff, take to the air and land in a lap dancing college. No, Kaim dreams in very, very long passages of very dull text. After reading the first five pages of the first dream, I realised there was no need to do so, and after skipping through the next 20 I was allowed to carry on with the game again. And the unavoidable fights every few seconds.

I'm pretty sure that if they'd decided to just display the message saying "Kaim recovered some more of his memory", rather than going into every last detail of how he made toast with David Cameron for the entire conservative party before their weekly game of polo, they could have quite easily cut the game down to one disc rather than four. Maybe Mr Final Fantasy really likes silly numbers of discs? Who knows? All I know on that matter is I don't much care.

Anyway, the Greenpeace council decided to send you on your merry way with another supposed immortal person and the worst attempt at a comic relief since soaps tried developing a sense of humour. And that neatly brings me down to my next issue with the game. By playing as an immortal, surely there is no need for a health meter, and as such running teeth first into a very large, very pissed off Griffin would bear even fewer consequences than running around Rapture on Bioshock blindfolded occasionally firing your shotgun. With the story being broken up the way it is, this would cause Lost Odyssey to be completely uninteresting, and briefly tempted me to go out and buy a pack of Ryvitas in protest. Instead, Mr Final Fantasy decided that your character is immortal and can never die, only he isn't and he can. But only if it's your mistake. While being able to survive a meteor dental, a few slaps by a big blue worm will leave Kaim twitching in a pool of his own blood before leaving this world for something with bigger guns, presumably.

I'm sorry, but if you're going to let a character take damage until the point when he DIES, then don't bother saying he's IMMORTAL. Make up something better, like he has the potential to live forever, as long as he doesn't push his look, otherwise God will get pissed and exact painful revenge in the form of death.

To Lost Odyssey's credit, everything generally looks rather good, with clever transitions between FMVs and the game engine which confuse you enough to think everything looks better than it does for a few seconds at least. There's also the interesting fact that rather than using the conventional "search" action when looting something like a pot on the floor, someone down the line decided to shove in the word "probe", which gave me a giggle every time writing came up saying "probe" and was followed by Kaim getting shoulder deep in the thing being searched. You can call me immature, but it's always funny watching someone who's pissed you off artificially inseminating a cow because you know just by looking that it's unpleasant. Yeah, that's what I got from "probe".

What else can I say about Lost Odyssey? It's a JRPG, so it's going to be really long, ramble on for a long time while frequently soiling itself with annoying turn based fights every few seconds. I could mention the fact that the level up / experience system makes about as much sense as wanting to jump off a giant waterfall in a barrel, but people enjoy that little mystery too.