Man, the RPG club should be more popular. WHAT HAPPENED TO RPGS?
I saw Lost Odyssey second-hand for cheap today, so I decided to pick it up.
I've played about an hour and a half of it, and so far I don't know what to think of it.
First of all, it really takes me back to the old days of RPGs, and that brings up some Nostalgia in me. The game's style seems to be a cross between Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII with less colour, and with some ridiculous machinery thrown in.
The ridiculous machinery is really ridiculous.
The opening cutscene was simultaneously badass, and hilarious. You've got your opening scene of Fellowship of the Ring, but the bad guys throw giant swords instead of spears, and everyone's wearing these crazy outfits that remind me of Solt and Peppor from Chrono Cross. And then after a little while, these crazy steam-powered robots come hulking in and just awkwardly swing all over the place. I couldn't help but laugh out loud at the craziness of it all.
Then Kain comes in and does some serious kickassery.
The battles are really basic traditional, but I like the cinematic way in which they're presented. Instead of just showing the character running up and slashing at the enemy, the camera goes through five different camera angles while the character slashes like he's competing for gold in the Olympic ribbon event.
The voice acting seems fine.
What I find really intriguing is the Thousand Years of Dreams that have popped up a couple of times. They're tiny short stories written by Kiyoshi Shigematsu, an award winning Japanese writer who I hadn't heard of until playing this game. Although they could definitely have benefited from a better translation, they still managed to inspire some emotion inside the dark, dank, dead, depths of the vile rotting husk that I call a soul.
Usually I would say that I could just read a novel if I wanted to read a novel, but by virtue of playing as Kain, I inherently feel attached to him as a character. Because I am playing as him, I want to find out more about why he's such a distant prick, and because I find out about his past in some decently written, but poorly translated, stories I want to play as him more. It works pretty well.
I really don't like the character designs, especially the design of what I expect will become the villain of the game. He's got blond hair, shaved around the back and sides and leaving only the top intact. And he has a terrible black goatee, and the biggest eyebrows I've seen since that character on FLCL.
I'll have to play more of it to see how it goes, but it's looking up right now.
