GAF: Lost Odyssey Review

GAF writes: It’s been quite a long time in coming, but the Xbox brand has its very own challenger to the famed Final Fantasy franchise, and it’s a debut of epic proportions. What you’ll get with Lost Odyssey is a Japanese-style RPG with high production values, a good story, and a cast of memorable, dynamic characters. What the game does not do is break new ground in the genre; while a game like Mass Effect gets lauded for reinventing what and how an RPG is and plays, Lost Odyssey’s accolades are for its superbly polished and integrated gameplay mechanics that don’t deviate from the way they originated 20 years ago. In other words, what Lost Odyssey does, it does extremely well.

Lost Odyssey proves that both Uematsu and Sakaguchi are still on top of their game. The dungeon design is clever without being too tedious, the story is actually somewhat original, and the writing in the Thousand Years of Dreams is superb. While the game is linear up until the very end (where it then opens up to plenty of sidequests and other fun activities) and the world never really seems to take on a life of its own, the character variety and interaction more than make up for it. It may be as close to a Square Enix epic as Xbox owners will get, but in some regards it outclasses them, and that’s something that should not be missed.