RUN ITS A GAY NINJA!!!!!!
he will stealth you from behind...

Read that entire thing sepiroth good job :)

thanks for posting that persons impressions, sepiroth6.

Anyway, Feb can't come soon enough. The latest video by DJ was hilarious. Jansen reminds me a lot of Miroku from Inuyasha.

Thanx Optimusv2,kenshin2418 and ManThatYouFear(il try to make a summary next time).I hope as well the game sells well cause im in gaming because of games the Mistwalker(and squaresoft in the ps1 days) team makes.I will try to spread the word around as much as i can,so at least a dozen people that i know buy the game.I did the same with BD,so it shouldnt be too difficult...I hope all the people from here that like the game,will try something similiar.

I'm not expecting this game to get good reivew scores. I loved Blue Dragon despite its bad reviews. But personally LO looks like its going to be better than BD. I was worried about the graphics before but after seeing the videos I think my worries were baseless.

While I am not expecting this game to sell like pancakes immediately, in the long run I think it will pick-up. Despite having no multiplayer, JRPGs are quite timeless since what matters more is the execution and the story and I think LO has that covered quite well.

This game is destined to fail on 360, no matter how fantastic it is, it shares the same fate as blue dragon and viva pinata, wrong console, majority of 360 player are just into mindless violence with guns, not emtionly driven storys


It will be a fantastic game that only a few (600k) will play, and they will be final fantasy players who are needing a fix until FF13

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/840/840035p1.html


In the six hours that I've played so far, Lost Odyssey has been a technical mess, with framerate problems in just about every cinema and on most maps, an animation system that looks like it was ported straight from a PS2 engine, and frequent, inconsistent load times accompanied by visual stuttering as new data loads in.

I'm about 9 hours down the road - yes, it all I have done today - and am enjoying it. Did it shatter the very earth upon which I stand? Not at all, but such a highly polished experience with obviously massive production values doesn't come along every day, and that's something to remember.

So, the bare bones. The lip sync issue sucks, the cutscenes look odd in Japanese but I tried the English voices briefly and then quickly switched back. If I go through again (fingers crossed for a New Game + that doesn't have to be downloaded) then I'll play with English voices second time. This isn't a concern for those of you who only want to play the game in English, anyway, and it will be nice for you guys to have it lip synced properly.

Super story heavy, too. You start the game at level 10, and after all day played I am now only level 18 (although more on that below). Often you simply move across a room or enter a new location and another cutscene starts. It took three hours before I even really got to see the battle system properly, and it is only really now that I'm starting to the potential in it. I've still only got three characters. Story and Japanese script and voice acting are top notch, however, (and whatever you think of the story of BD, the second two of these were fantastic in BD, so here's hoping you get a decent translation of them).

The short stories scattered throughout are simply put, amazing. Really, really nicely written. No exposition, no events that we will come back to later, just a total of 30 (I've seen about 8 so far) incidents in the life of a man who has lived for 1000 years. It feels kind of cheap creating such a rich character in Kaim through these (his in-game persona is little more than cool, quiet, moody ROG stereotype A) but the stories are beautifully done. The text appears in interesting ways, floating onto the screen, with key words appearing and key phrases remaining after the other text fades, and they have music and backgrounds that change according to what is happening. I wasn't sure if I would enjoy these (and each is quite long) but they are wonderful. My wife asks to be called into the room when I reach a new one ^-^

Combat appears super-by-the-book to start with, but there are some nice twists. The circle which appears on the screen is all about performing special attacks. First you need to find items (generally either picked up or got from monsters in battle) to make "Rings" which can then be equipped in addition to your weapon. These Rings give your attacks abilities like "Poision" etc. When your character attacks you hold down the right trigger and the second larger ring starts to shrink in around the smaller one. Let go of the trigger when the two rings meet and the effect of whatever Ring you have equipped is triggered.

Seeing as you are free to change your Rings when your turn comes around, you essentially have a stock of special attacks that you can pick and choose from depending on the next enemy you want to attack.

The wall system seems nice too - characters in the back are basically dead if attacked once the wall is gone - and the Skill Linking system (rather than getting skills from leveling up, Immortal characters have to link with a non-immortal to learn their skills) is nice too, although right now the points required to learn each skill are so low it is easy to just have them all.

Fixed skills for the human characters and severe variance in player stats also mean something lacking in most recent RPGS - truely unique characters. Rather than the "jack of trades" bunch games like BD and more recent FF games have seen, in which toward the end of the game everyone can do everything and all be exactly the same if you like, here (non-Immortal, at least) is walking a set path, and from their fixed pool of skills you then pick and choose which to give to your Immortals. I'm looking forward to this system flowering once I get more characters.

Also, EXP seems to be tightly controlled. You always seem to need only 100 for the next level, but I quickly noticed that after a couple of battles in the same place the enemies basically stop giving you EXP altogether, or only 1 or 2 points. Doing 50 battles to get one more level is pointless, and this "level cap" system means bosses should retain their difficulty.

Indeed, overall, the game is quite tough, the bosses in pariticular. As the game progresses this may loosen, but seeing as power / unintentionally over levelling due to exploring does not seem possible this time out hopefully bosses will prove a challenge right up until the end. Regular monsters have done for me a few times because of the classic "I don't need to heal my half dead characters until they are nearly dead" RPG mentality - the strength of the Wall is determined by total HP of the front rank characters when the battle starts, so the closer to max HP you keep your party at all times, the better.

So, to sum up - and for those who skipped to the end - quality around every corner, lovely music, lovely visuals, and a very adult, serious story with a seemingly simple but actually nice and deep combat system to play around with. I've cleared my schedule to enjoy this one in a concentrated burst so I'm sure I'll be back around here soon ^-^



















It is a hardcore Fantasy / Sci-Fi story with adult characters. The story is only really starting to get going (and whom I presume is the the main villian is super easily telegraphed from the start, although it is all built around that), and I was worried it would suffer under the weight of four (count them) characters who has all lost their memories (most beaten to death cliche in gaming, esp RPGS - and I've been thrown in a jail cell already, before you ask) but the novel sections alone are worth the price of admission story wise. They do a fantastic job of using both events and metaphor to describe what it would be like to live for 1000 years and, though they feel a little like cheating as I said before, give Kaim dimentions impossible in any RPG not using this technique.

One of my faves is one in which Kaim returns every year to a village in which a tragedy occured long ago, seeing how the memorial for that day (which also holds a special meaning for him) changes from one of sorrow for the dead to one of celebration of recovery over a hundred or more years.

Yeah, the Ring Recipes appear in your list as soon as you find the key ingrediant and can be made on the spot. And yes, you can make multiple ones to have equipped on more than one character at once, but once you have made one you never lose it unless you use it in a recipe for another ring. You can't even sell or delete them.


One thing about the second boss - no spoilers but there is a big OMG moment halfway through the battle. I can't think of many RPGs that go so hardcore so quickly and then asks you to do it with no power levelling.














First disc ended at 12:49. That was with reading all the novel extracts I found, talking to most of the towns people and searching every area for items ect (I want the All Chests achievement). However bosses killing me (happens a lot) and reloaded rather than continuing would have boosted the actual play time a little more than this.

My Xbox is two + years old and takes a real beating, especially in light of the recent slew of games, and so recently I've noticed the drive is taking slightly longer to load things than it did before. Still, the load times here are long - when a battle starts you are treated to magical cogs revolving, then the scenery you are going to be fighting in, then one of your characters saying something, then a full shot of your party getting ready to fight and then the camera spins to show your enemies and combat begins. It hasn't really started to annoy me yet though ^-^

What is annoying is when a boss kills you and you have to sit through mulitple "load-and-multi-part-skip" cutscenes to get back there. Anyone who failed the first shooting section in BD will know what I mean by this.

The split in the character types is really fantastic. The human characters are much weaker than the Immortals, and obviously run a fixed path. At some points they feel like nothing more than cattle for the Immortals to rob skills from ^-^ Not that they aren't useful in battle, but when one of them learns a new skill or you find a new accessory you have four characters (I have three of them now) who can then take that skill and mix it with every other skill there is. So you bascially get old school and totally customizable characters together.

The level cap system also means no one character can walk over every enemy that shows up. You know how after a while your Melee characters start to kill everything in one hit? (I'm looking at you Shu) Not happening here. Everyone is useful and the dyanmic with five characters in combat is just fanastic. Once I have all four Immortals I think my head might explode.

There is no limit on the number of skills a character can learn, but there are limits on how many they can have equipped. You need slots to equip them, and items called "Slot Nut" increase the number of slots. You can choose who to give these too and just find them in chests etc. so not sure if there is a maximum number of slots yet. Maybe but it looks high (I have 7 slots each for Kaim and Seth already.) The overall concept of having to raise the human characters to make your Immortals better is fantastic, too - when they learn a new skill it isn't just great for them, it opens up a whole new load of possibilities.

Anyway, I'm off to get back to it!

It is a hardcore Fantasy / Sci-Fi story with adult characters.

They don't seem to have much confidence in the games