Lost Odyssey

Lost Odyssey

Kaim, Lost Odyssey’s protagonist is an immortal amnesiac. He’s lived for a thousand years but, for some reason, has lost most of his memories. While most people would die to live forever, Kaim has a different message. You see, for all life’s joy and happiness there is equal sadness and pain. Over a thousand years, the loss of countless wives and children takes its toll.

So when Kaim’s memories do filter back into his consciousness (by way of exquisitely written stories penned by famous Japanese novelist Kiyoshi Shigematsu) they are filled with a yearning for life to end. Lost Odyssey is then, a celebration of finite life in a genre obsessed with living forever.

It’s the second Xbox 360 JRPG from Hirnobu Sakaguchi, the man who practically invented the genre with his seminal Final Fantasy games. Like its unrelated precursor, Blue Dragon, this is a relentlessly traditional game, albeit one wrapped up in some extraordinary visuals.

The game flow, for anyone unfamiliar with this type of gaming, consists of exploring environments, clicking on pots and bins and treasure chests in search of items and equipment while intermittently fighting monsters in random battles. Clearing battles nets experience point that level-up your characters. Eventually you stumble across a boss creature, which once felled, triggers the next narrative interlude by way of a cut-scene.

These cut-scenes are as frequent as they are impressive. The game opens in stunning fashion on a dark and grim battlefield and from there spirals up into the very highest ranks of government as the story plots the tussle of three nations for control of the world.

Sprinkled through the action are literally hours of film sequences which detail the plot’s machinations in such a way that will have you hanging on their every camera move. The storyline is compelling and moving, with some affecting moments lightened by a script that is both weighty and humourous. This is helped by the game’s graphical flair, cut-scenes slipping into interactive fights seamlessly, memorable visual scenes and backdrops modernizing the ageing internal mechanics.

The battle system is where most of the games strategy comes into play. While it’s turn-based – your characters facing off against the enemies and taking turns to hit each other – there are enough neat touches to make it interesting over the game’s four discs and forty hours of play. The formation of your team is important, those in the front row proving a barrier of protection (with its own HP bar) for those in the rear, and a timing-based challenge makes every single hit an interesting interactive moment where you can take bonus damage from your opponents.

Lost Odyssey doesn’t reinvent the RPG wheel in the same way that Final Fantasy XII sought to. But it’s a traditional game that has been polished to a brilliant sheen. There are gamers for whom this style of gaming is too stuttering, too awkward and too idiosyncratic to pay much attention to. But for those looking for a fantastic story and the chance to take a ragtag group of characters through it, Lost Odyssey is the best the Xbox 360 has to offer.

4 out of 5