First Impressions: Lost Odyssey
posted:
2/17/2008 2:17:00 AM
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Lost Odyssey
If Lost Odyssey took place on Earth today, our immortal 1,000-year-old hero, Kaim Argonar, would bear witness to a breathtaking string of events. He would see Murasaki Shikibu finish the world's first novel; march in all eight of the Crusades; answer to the Inquisition; outlive the Hundred Years' War; sail with the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria; nail up the 95 theses with Martin Luther; bring out his dead in the Black Plague; dress up as a Native in Boston harbor; invent practical electric light with Thomas Edison; and bear witness to Al Gore inventing both teh internets and global warming -- but Kaim would remember none of it...
What I certainly remember is a barbarous intro battle on a field mobbed with soldiers in dark armor, while magic and technology clashed and spilled like blood and bile on the ground. I remember Kaim facing off against self-propelled siege weaponry, driving his blade into its machine-driven brain, and then staring up into the sky as the moon (?) tore itself asunder, throwing up magma and porous rocks onto that field of armageddon, some Chernobyl-level event destroying every breathing creature on the battlefield that day.
Except Kaim. Kaim survived. But not his memories.
Despite having his mind go all tabula rasa on him, Kaim pulled himself out of that warground with a resigned, sluggish gait, moving like a man that still feels the weight of an Atlas on his shoulders, and reluctantly answering questions like a man that knows he has nothing good to tell.
Lost Odyssey is pieced together by some of the most venerable icons that Japanese role-playing games have ever bore witness to: Producer Hironobu Sakaguchi created the Final Fantasy series; award-winning Japanese novelist, Kiyoshi Shigematsu, is penning the heartbreaking script; the self-trained musician who wrote the notes for much of the Final Fantasy series, Nobuo Uematsu, has unearthed a contemporary soundtrack; while over three dozen former developers of the Shadow Hearts series worked to bring Sakaguchi's vision to bear. I am noteworthy in how much I personally under-appreciate the contributions made by the Land of the Rising Sun, but even I don't need to consult an apologist for JRPGs for me to know that great minds are at work here.
Beyond that initial battlefield, however -- after the mutated undead peeled themselves off the ground to swing their swords at me again, after I scoured the titan remains of magical siege weapons, after a platoon of Uhra soldiers shipped me off in a coffin-shaped armored car, and after I refused to speak with one other immortal survivor Kaim met, a round-eyed cutie named Seth -- after all that, Kaim has been traipsing about the capital city of the Republic of Uhra, being summoned by a newly-appointed, heavy-handed, and seemingly irrational council to lead an investigation on the inexplicable events that squashed the pitched battle between Uhra and their rival nation Khent. The pacing is now in slow motion like it's pushing itself along underwater ... but you can't tell me that you weren't getting a bit sleepy yourself in the Citadel during Mass Effect's overly-long introductory chapters. And reviewers should have restrained themselves from making too many Mass Effect comparisons in the first place, since BioWare's brainchild is an external journey in bi-polar morality, while Lost Odyssey is more of an internal journey in linear, romanticized gravitas.
The combat appetizer I tasted during the cinematically-measured intro was enough to quell my initial fears about JRPGs' infamously menu-driven combat systems. There's a welcome timed-attack twist thrown into the old-school turn-based mechanic, and the inclusion of character formations adds a clean layer of strategy when picking out your target. Enemies in the front row will absorb some damage for those shielded in the back row, so combat shies away from becoming completely iterative as you must assess the enemy formation as part of which target to acquire.
Reacquiring Kaim's memories, however, is a fractious process for him. Waking up from a dream about one of his past families (Kaim has had many wives and children over the past 1,000 years) triggers a story about an invalid girl he used to tell stories to, though he'd never tell her bad stories, and he lied when he said he'd see her again in the afterlife. Checking into a motel within the capital city triggers the memory of another motel he's stayed at multiple times, witnessing in that particular town -- over the course of several hundred years -- a town that turned a tragedy into a solemn remembrance, and a solemn remembrance into a celebration. All profound stuff, trust me, no matter how non sequitur the PowerPoint presentation memories come across.
I hope to have a review up within a couple of weeks, so that we can see if these first (promising) impressions become lasting ones.
Except Kaim. Kaim survived. But not his memories.
Despite having his mind go all tabula rasa on him, Kaim pulled himself out of that warground with a resigned, sluggish gait, moving like a man that still feels the weight of an Atlas on his shoulders, and reluctantly answering questions like a man that knows he has nothing good to tell.
Lost Odyssey is pieced together by some of the most venerable icons that Japanese role-playing games have ever bore witness to: Producer Hironobu Sakaguchi created the Final Fantasy series; award-winning Japanese novelist, Kiyoshi Shigematsu, is penning the heartbreaking script; the self-trained musician who wrote the notes for much of the Final Fantasy series, Nobuo Uematsu, has unearthed a contemporary soundtrack; while over three dozen former developers of the Shadow Hearts series worked to bring Sakaguchi's vision to bear. I am noteworthy in how much I personally under-appreciate the contributions made by the Land of the Rising Sun, but even I don't need to consult an apologist for JRPGs for me to know that great minds are at work here.
Beyond that initial battlefield, however -- after the mutated undead peeled themselves off the ground to swing their swords at me again, after I scoured the titan remains of magical siege weapons, after a platoon of Uhra soldiers shipped me off in a coffin-shaped armored car, and after I refused to speak with one other immortal survivor Kaim met, a round-eyed cutie named Seth -- after all that, Kaim has been traipsing about the capital city of the Republic of Uhra, being summoned by a newly-appointed, heavy-handed, and seemingly irrational council to lead an investigation on the inexplicable events that squashed the pitched battle between Uhra and their rival nation Khent. The pacing is now in slow motion like it's pushing itself along underwater ... but you can't tell me that you weren't getting a bit sleepy yourself in the Citadel during Mass Effect's overly-long introductory chapters. And reviewers should have restrained themselves from making too many Mass Effect comparisons in the first place, since BioWare's brainchild is an external journey in bi-polar morality, while Lost Odyssey is more of an internal journey in linear, romanticized gravitas.
The combat appetizer I tasted during the cinematically-measured intro was enough to quell my initial fears about JRPGs' infamously menu-driven combat systems. There's a welcome timed-attack twist thrown into the old-school turn-based mechanic, and the inclusion of character formations adds a clean layer of strategy when picking out your target. Enemies in the front row will absorb some damage for those shielded in the back row, so combat shies away from becoming completely iterative as you must assess the enemy formation as part of which target to acquire.
Reacquiring Kaim's memories, however, is a fractious process for him. Waking up from a dream about one of his past families (Kaim has had many wives and children over the past 1,000 years) triggers a story about an invalid girl he used to tell stories to, though he'd never tell her bad stories, and he lied when he said he'd see her again in the afterlife. Checking into a motel within the capital city triggers the memory of another motel he's stayed at multiple times, witnessing in that particular town -- over the course of several hundred years -- a town that turned a tragedy into a solemn remembrance, and a solemn remembrance into a celebration. All profound stuff, trust me, no matter how non sequitur the PowerPoint presentation memories come across.
I hope to have a review up within a couple of weeks, so that we can see if these first (promising) impressions become lasting ones.
