While the shift is simple, it has me completely engaged in battles, making them welcome interruptions from dungeon crawling, rather minor nuisances. J RPGs had reached the point where most battles involved holding down the “A” button and watching the characters dominate, until the boss battle, which would require about as much effort to get Alex to play Apollo Justice. Additionally, it has made for every battle to actually mean something. This allows players to move the story along, but not allow them to become demi-gods prior to the end of the Prologue. Lost Odyssey, however, utilizes a system which only allows players to reach a certain level before cutting off the ability to gain experience. However, RPGs in the past decade have been about as tough as Glass Joe. In a game like Dragon Warrior, a player could easily die at a moments notice. Unfortunately, this caused the problem of “overleveling,” where players would grind in an effort to make future battles virtually impossible to lose. In an effort to move gameplay along, games like Final Fantasy IV devised a system where as long as the player engaged in every random encounter, their player levels would be in perfect shape to move on to the next area. One of the biggest problems for early console RPGs was that a player had to spend hours upon hours battling random enemies, raising experience levels, just to be able to survive in the next part of the game. This made what was about 10 hours of true gameplay stretch into 20 or 30 hours.
Experience Points, eight levels of spells, random encounters and turn-based combat, all standards of the JRPG, are all prevalent in the game, but work as well as they ever did.Īs for new wrinkles, Lost Odyssey has done something that had become the Achilles Heel for JRPG gameplay, overleveling. The game taking the look of the well made, but melodramatic (even for a JRPG) Final Fantasy X, implants the familiar, but somewhat antiquated game mechanics of the RPGs Sakaguchi popularized in the US. Final Fantasy is by far my favorite game series, and despite its flaws (namely everything involving Final Fantasy VIII), it is truly a legendary video game series.Īccordingly, when Mistwalker, headed up by former Final Fantasy executive producer Hironobu Sakaguchi announced Lost Odyssey, I put a giant anime circle on my calendar.įrom the opening moments, it’s clear that Lost Odyssey is not only in the line with the other JRPGs that have made their way to the US, but truly a spiritual successor to the Final Fantasy franchise that Sakaguchi left behind when he started Mistwalker. One role I’ve embraced during my MCP tenure is that of resident Final Fantasy Apologist.
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