In 2012, Hironobu Sakaguchi’s studio Mistwalker entered an eight years break from developing large-scale games in order to explore the possibilities of a blooming mobile gaming market, which the director took an interest in with the arrival of Puzzle & Dragons. But for some people, the idea of such a talented team focusing their efforts on free to play games with generally questionable business models was disappointing. While we can’t speak for the quality of Party Wave or Terra Battle, we can totally get behind the appreciation of Mistwalker’s other works, such as Lost Odyssey and The Last Story.
Lost Odyssey was released exclusively for the Xbox 360 as a result from a collaboration with Microsoft with the objective of growing the Xbox’s user base in Japan, a challenge they still face to this day. Despite this game being super underground and barely ever making it to content covering hidden gems, it is surprisingly unique and deserving of a sit beside more popular and noteworthy JRPGs.
The game has the player coordinate a group of four amnesiac immortals and their mortal allies in order to find out more about their origins and what is leading magic energy to damage the world they find themselves in. As the immortals recover their memories, players are presented to a series of enthralling novels written by Kiyoshi Shigematsu and respectfully translated by Jay Rubin — a Harvard University translator who almost skipped the opportunity in fear of contributing to “add to the world’s supply of senseless violence”, only to end up immediately accepting it after reading its strong life messages firsthand.
Through intimate writing and atmospheric audiovisual, the novels bring out the characters’ backgrounds and allow for better understanding of their decisions and personalities. In case the player doesn’t feel like going through each of these novels when exploring or progressing through the story, they can choose to check them out later at an inn. They contain very important pieces of the game’s storytelling and we advise you to always read them as soon as you can, though.
Said novels are, most of the time, painful recollections on everything they had to endure having lived for over a thousand years. Such a never-ending journey has rendered their actions redundant and meaningless for them — except for their relations with mortals, which they are painfully destined to outlive or lose to tragedies either way. Novels aside, Lost Odyssey’s cutscenes are very well directed and the characters quickly grow on you, in no small measure due to their interactions and differences leading to funny situations or emotional moments. Almost all dialog in the game is voiced, English being the main audio language on top of that.
You may have noticed the character and world designs have an exotic tone to them. They creatively mix Meso-American aesthetics with early Japanese cultures and some degree of science fiction. But in reality, there’s no defined theme and you’ll constantly find yourself surprised. Nobuo Uematsu, who once again teamed up with Sakaguchi as a composer, has masterfully created a soundtrack that fits this feeling, including tracks with vocals sung by Sheena Easton to make sure the important moments are burned into your mind.
We haven’t detailed the gameplay yet, so you might be thinking that’s where things fall apart. But no — Lost Odyssey’s gameplay makes the right decisions and features a great amount of strategic freedom, such as cancelling a spell’s casting halfway through or changing equipment without spending a turn. Its skill-learning system is quite similar to FINAL FANTASY VI‘s Esper magicites (allowing party members to teach each other skills and spells), and its active time battle will remind some of FINAL FANTASY X. Random encounters are challenging, but leveling is quick and you simply stop receiving experience once you hit the chapter’s recommended level, meaning you’re usually neither under nor over leveled.
Speaking of the boss fights, they feature great variety without leaning on artificially long battles where you have to wait for a said amount of turns to pass until you can start attacking. Understanding the mechanics is the main requirement to beat them, so it’s not necessary to overthink your character’s skills throughout the main story. But some combinations will improve your survivability and certain chapters encourage you to play around with them.
Sakaguchi being an old timer of the industry and the creator of the FINAL FANTASY series, one could assume him to be attached to his original game design choices. But as it turns out, Mistwalker’s projects play like massive steps towards refining the genre into its best form, while many modern JRPGs still suffer from old cons. Leaving behind fillers and grinding, for example, both Lost Odyssey and The Last Story are refreshing approaches that respect your time without insultingly holding your hands. Judging by its Dimengeon mechanic, FANTASIAN seems to maintain this characteristic of Mistwalker’s games.
Once you hit Lost Odyssey’s final stretch, when you’re allowed to revisit previous destinations, loads of powerful new skills become available. Many of these skills are fairly overkill and not exactly necessary for beating the game. However, if you take them as necessary and over-prepare your party for the final boss fight, it may end up backfiring and making you experience a sluggish pacing unfitting the rest of the game. It takes each Immortal up to 50 points to learn some of these endgame skills, with no reliable way of farming more than six points per encounter. In the process, you end up finding other pet peeves such as power leveling unused party members being limited to one level per encounter, skill menus getting unpleasantly crowded, balancing going awry and long charging spells becoming nigh useless.
Again, these are not things you have to force yourself intoto if all you want to do is beat the game. And fortunately, your dedication is given more value by a surprising amount of optional content to engage on, which is why completing the game may take more than double the time required to beat it.
It’s a shame to think that such a memorable and high production value JRPG may end up never getting a re-release, especially as it could be taken to even greater heights with quality of life features, better loading times, and 60 FPS support (currently only achievable through emulators with varying degrees of success). According to Sakaguchi, however, he’d rather dedicate efforts on creating a new game. It may not seem like it, but Lost Odyssey’s development went through all sorts of difficulties, such as overstaffing, early adoption of Unreal Engine 3 with no Japanese documentation, and poor resource management. In fact, by the time development started, the Xbox 360 hardware wasn’t even finished yet.
We had a great time progressing through Lost Odyssey’s story and thus highly recommend you give it a try, whether it ever gets a re-release or not. Beyond Lost Odyssey, the Xbox 360 is still a powerhouse of interesting games that have yet to reach a broader audience — Ninety-Nine Nights and Magna Carta 2 to name a few. Which is to say, this is surely not the last on 360 games you’re going to hear from us.
