An epic journey in a world worth getting lost in.

Lost Odyssey tells the story of a thousand year old immortal named Kaim Argonar. Lo and behold, at some point, Kaim lost his memory and has been aimlessly touring around as a mercenary for an undetermined amount of time. After returning home his last battle, a fight that ended in the mass destruction on both sides of the conflict, Kaim has a dream (nightmare, perhaps) that is so real to him he believes it was a lost memory.

Being immortal and having been the sole survivor of the recent conflict, Kaim is tasked by government officials to find out who, or what, had caused such devastation on the battlefield. From here things snowball rather quickly; you're introduced to your core party members almost immediately, you set off on a journey for answers (which unveils an eviler plot), and Kaim does his best to regain his lost memory (which affects the story in various ways.)

When it comes to the story you're going to have to deal with some 'lost in translation' issues. Not necessarily 'engrish', just lapses in story development that probably wouldn't have happened had the game been created, from the ground up, as an English title by a western developer. Certain conclusions are jumped to, some parts are predictable, and other story elements come out of nowhere to ultimately solve an otherwise unsolvable story thread. It sounds worse than it is simply because a lot of it has to do with the fact that the main characters in the game have memory issues, often remembering important details that haven't been so much as alluded to previously. So while it may work, it definitely breaks storytelling conventions (in a bad way) and still doesn't get around the fact that at times story progression just isn't articulated all that well. On the other hand, when comparing stories to a lot of other jRPGs (any of the ones I've played, anyway) Lost Odyssey is, generally speaking, better than what you're used to.

Power-ups come in the form of different amulets and jewelry. These power-ups can be learned so that you can take off items for other party members to use and learn from, but when you remove the power-up you need to assign the associated skill to one of your characters skill slots. Fortunately, while you only start out with three, each character is given an upgradable amount of skill slots that the new skill can be assigned to. You can also learn skills from other party members using 'skill link', which is incredibly important for maximizing your characters.

It's a cool way of making the random battles more relevant and worthwhile; the trick to the power-ups and skills is to stack/stagger them so you obtain the most SP per character, per encounter. It might be common sense, but learning both skills and power-ups is something you should absolutely stay on top of from the beginning of the game as it makes encounters throughout so much easier. The difficultly with LO (and the reason I'm emphasizing it here) is that new characters are introduced to your party (each of which is constantly evolving), and different skills take longer to learn than others. Because of this, it can quickly become difficult to organize who gets what earrings or who skill links what from whom and when. It may be typical RPG fare, but if you've been playing games like Oblivion or Mass Effect, it's easy to forget just how deep this kind of structure goes.

Powered by UE3.0, Lost Odyssey is definitely a feast for the eye balls and somewhat of a departure from what we've seen with the engine thus for (but that could just be because of the genre). Both Character and Level design are better than average and performance is amicable as well. The palette used for the game is vivid and diverse with the color tones of different cities matching that city's strength (Gohtza's a mechanical looking city with a grayish/orange hue; Numara is a magic looking city with a blue/white tinge, etc.)

Enemies look great, too. In particular the giant dinosaur/dragon-like creatures you come across later in the game are as fun to watch as they are to kill. Of course battles wouldn't be nearly as visually pleasing if it wasn't for the awesome lighting and particle effects that shoot out from everywhere. It's not the best looking game this generation, but it can definitely hold its own against other heavy-weight titles (definitely other UE3.0 engine based games).

Normally talking about the packaging isn't necessary. And although it doesn't affect the quality of the game, it's worth mentioning in this case if only to prevent Mistwalker/MS from packaging another multi-disc game so atrociously. Lost Odyssey spans four DVDs ('Lol systemwarz') and to say that the North American packaging is asinine would be an understatement of massive proportions. What they've done is, rather than have two double-disc trays (like the European and Japanese versions of the game), they've stacked three DVDs on a single spindle of a DVD case and put the fourth disc in its own disc envelope, throwing it in with the manual. It's disgusting.

Despite all of this positive criticism, Lost Odyssey's biggest strength lies in the game's ability to keep you engaged while lasting over 40 hours (admittedly, I tried giving up a number of times, but was pulled right back in). It's a jRPG with Random Battles and Turn-Based combat, something that a lot of us have grown out of, but its pace and constant character/skill organizing will probably manage to keep most people playing. Oddly enough, at a time when shorter games are becoming more and more common, Lost Odyssey is a bit of proof that there's still a place for long, epic journeys.