April 6, 2009

• Lost Odyssey Initial Review

  I've been playing Lost Odyssey lately. It's a bit of an old game now but it's the style of game I love. It's a classic RPG, non of that weird real-time stuff messing up the play. It's a simple story telling game with brilliant music and lots of level building to keep you busy.

  The game was developed by Mistwalker studios, a company lead by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy franchise and which employs Nobuo Uematsu who composed the music for most of those same games. If that isn't a dynamic duo in the world of RPGs I can't imagine what would be? Mistwalker is also responsible for other RPGs, most notably Blue Dragon which I've also played but not beaten.

  In addition, clearly a lot of effort was placed into making Lost Odyssey have a good story.  Sakaguchi himself wrote the main story for the game and the substory of "1000 Years of Dreaming"  which builds the back story of Kaim, the main character of the story, were written by the award winning Japanese story writer Kiyoshi Shigematsu.

  Even with all this effort though so far the game still has a lot of flaws. I'm only just starting the third disc but already there's enough annoying problems for me to give voice to. The game is good. So far. But with a little bit of playtesting and extra work it could have been soooo much better. The games fails to deliver on the little details that provide for a smooth playing experience. The result leaves most players feeling a little annoyed by the game without even necessarily being able to put their finger on what is the problem. Some end up blaming slow load times, others so called "outdated" gameplay but neither is quite right.

  Slow loading speeds were a problem but a more engaging game could have made you forget about the load speeds or not notice them. They weren't intolerably slow in my copy and once I could install to my hard drive on my xbox360 the slow loading times disappeared but that didn't really *fix* my game.

  "Outdated" gameplay isn't it either. Certainly the RPG industry survived through eleven versions of Final Fantasy with so called "outdated" game play. The reality is MOST RPGs have always had this type of gameplay. Most still do. That's an excuse, not an explanation.

  The real problems lie in the little details. Tiny bity annoyances that make the game go slower and be more annoying.

  The biggest little annoyance, besides loading speeds, is the way the game integrates the 1000 Years of Dreaming sequences. These are little short stories inserted into the game to reveal Kaim and other character's backstories. The problem is.... the stories are shown to you in JUST text. There's a few little text effects but that's it. The problem with this approach is that it breaks up the action of the game and slows the game down by an immense amount if you choose to stop and read them every time you get one. The stories take a LONG time to read and even though they are pretty good stories in and of themselves, it can be BORING to read them when you are in the middle of the main story of the game. While it's true you CAN skip them, the problem with that is that you end up having a hard time finding a good time TO read them.  And if you don't you might come to a point of the story where an event that happens in a dream has relevance. At tht point you will be bewildered and confused if you didn't read the dreams. That's bad.

  It would have been better if the Dreams were shorter or more interactive. If you could play and control the characters invovled in the dreams and see things as they unfold visually you'd be more engaged in the story.  a single dream need not all be revealed at one point but different parts of a dream could insert themselves into your game play at several points in a dungeon or area as you reach different areas that have relevance to the dream, like flashbacks.

  Dreams that have important thematic and plot relevance should have been incorporated that way. Other dreams should have been clearly separated out into another section so you can read them at your leisure and know that by not doing so you aren't missing anything particularly important to the story.  You'll understand the characters a bit better for reading them, but the core character development you would not be missing.

  That's the big one. The other problems are numerous so let me just list a few here:

  1. you have a button to run AND a button to walk creating 3 different speeds. Why?
  2. there are some areas where save points are hard to come by and you can't autosave
  3. your experience gain decreases radically the longer you stay in an area making grinding nearly impossible and mostly useless
  4. the game makes you too dependent on magic to defeat most major random encounters making your melee users nothing more than meat shields most of the time, and mana point management the most important aspect of the game
  5. rings are too essential in order to get your melee user's damage up, meaning if you suck at hitting perfects or end up equipping the wrong rings your melee damage with be *particularly* bad.
  6. Magic user weapons don't effect their ability to do magic, or any of their stats but physical attacks, amking it basically pointless to ever upgrade a magic user's weapons.
  7. most melee weapons don't add anything but additional attack power again making upgrading a rather uninteresting process.
  8. the menu system is counterintuitive at times. I found myself looking at the wrong part of the screen when trying to cast a healing spell for my player's hp, or looking for the enemy's stats when using an item that reveals their stats.
  9. you can't sort items by "unlearned" which is the most important, instead you have to notice the three stars on items that tells you you've already learned it (i only just recently figured this out).
  10. the filter abilities and the remove items commands are counterintuitive and hard to see. I only recently realized how to do both.
  11. you can't rearrange your spells or abilities to make them easier to use
  12. there are "hidden" advantages that are never described in game, like the fact that your immortals will get up automatically after two turns and you don't have to waste items on them.
  13. most status ailements are devastating to you but utterly useless to even bother trying on the enemy in classic RPG style making you wonder why you bother getting all those spells and items
  14. a lot of the boss battles can be frustrating, sometimes because they pop up in unexpected circumstances (like when you are exploring a peaceful seeming city), and because often there's a specific trick to defeat the boss that if you don't use the faq you won't know how to use.
  15. you have a weird partial camera control that is unnecessary. either full rotational camera control or no camera control would have been better.
  16. you can't change the character you walk around as, nor can you bring up full character portraits in game in ANY way.
  17. during loading panels it displays relative character stats scored from S through F. But if the game loads too fast you can't read these and there's no other way to bring them up in game.
  18. if you don't know the significance of seeds you'll wonder for a longtime why you are finding them all over the place and miss out on a lot of really good items
  19. in disc one the weapon shops are all hidden. why?
  20. slow spells and metamagic are very often far too slow to effect the outcome of battle. these need to be rebalanced to have bigger effects or go faster, or else battles need to be slowed down

  That's just 20. There are probably many more. The thing is all of these are little things that could easily be revealed with just a little pre-release playtesting and asking the players hard questions about what bothers them about the game and what might be improved and what they might liek to see. I'm not saying the game makers need to have imporved ALL of these things, but just making a number of the easier changes would radically enhance gameplay and make the game feel less generally "annoying" all the way through.

  Still, it's a testament to how incredibly GOOD the music, characters, and story is in this game that I am sticking to it in spite of all these things. And it's not just loyalty to the Final Fantasy or RPG genre's that keeps me with it. I consider this game to be far better than what I consider to be the wrongly acclaimed Final Fantasy XII. No. Lost Odyssey holds its own by having an engrossing story and fascinating characters and basically decent gameplay.

  I have to withhold final judgment on this game until I've completely but so far it gets my strong recommendation with only the smallest reservations. Just keep in mind that there will be little things that annoy you throughout the game, but if you're like me you'll love the game anyway.

  • 6:00 pm
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