Lost Odyssey Options

[Irysa]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3w1Ry4NbPcc

FEED YOUR HEAD



Microsoft really do great adverts.

This post has been edited by Irysa: Feb 5 2008, 06:25 AM

[Enzd]

I'm up to Disc 4 on Lost Odyssey, and so far it's been one of the most enjoyable RPG experiences I've had in a while.

» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «

The story is quite nice; Sad and depressing, but with the proper amount of lightheartedness. The characters are awesome, too.

The Thousand Years of Dreams are just great. They all carry a fragment of the emotional pain Kaim had to endure throughout his thousand years of immortality, and try to help you, the player, feel and understand that pain.

Very few of the ones I've gotten so far have had happy endings, and even those came off bittersweet. I had to tear up on a number of them :(

Dreams can pop up when you least expect it. Kaim might just overhear a conversation with a coupe and a dream is revealed, or even just talking to a normal fruit seller. You can watch dreams right as you get them, which I highly recommend everyone does.

Honestly, I was not expecting them to have such length: some seemed to go on for over ten minutes, which I enjoy very much.

The music is incredible. Towns, Cities, and explorable areas have nice, calming themes that fit great. Battles have awesome music that is faster paced. Sometime it's quite simple, other times, particularly in boss battles, it'll be heavy or jazzy and full of energy.

Battles are fun, and quite often get pretty difficult, which thanks to the way experience is calculated and rewarded, battles usually always have that edge of difficulty because of how much longer it will take your characters to get stronger than the area you're in.

The Wall System makes for interesting battle progression, sometimes forcing you to make difficult decisions on your skill use and targeting. The Ring System is interesting too, and you'll find that many players have different ways of scoring Perfects. Some watch the little timer at the top very closely, and find out what the average number is for a Perfect, while others do it how you're supposed to by looking at the ring and judging when to release based on that. However you do it, you'll get it down and notice how easy it is to get consistent Perfects.

Battles try to stay balanced with melee and magic, but your mages will do way more damage than your melee attackers will. Not to say that melee characters are weak and useless, they're quite useful for helping to clear out the enemy's front row, and without them your back row mages would be dead in just a couple of turns. It's just that, so long as you know the element of the enemies, mages can easily one-shot most normal enemies for most of the game.

There are four kinds of magic: White, Black, Spirit, and Composite. White is obvious enough, it has healing spells, physical and magical shield spells, some cures, and a weak AoE Light damage spell. Black is obvious too, it's loaded with strong elemental spells and status effects. Spirit has sort of a mix of types, with row-based healing and regenerate spells, Non-elemental AoE and random damage spells, Haste and Slow spells, other cures, and an elemental vulnerability spell.

Composite Magic is really cool, you learn spells in that line by getting other spells, and it fuses various spells together for one spell. For instance, you have the Shadow spell (AoE blank damage spell in Spirit Magic) and the Flare spell (single-target Fire element spell in Black Magic), with Composite Magic the caster can use extra MP and extra time to cast to cast an AoE Fire spell. You can get so many great spells in the Composite line simply by growing in the other spell lines. I know it's not new or anything, this is just the first turn-based game I've played with this kind of magic.

Both the Mortals and Immortals are awesome, and the way their skill systems work is great. It's not a very good idea to pick one Mortal and stick with them as much as you can through the game, because while you do get some accessories that can teach your Immortals skills that your other four Mortals have, each of those Mortals have many unique, useful skills that you will NOT get from accessories. So unless you want to miss out, you have to swap out your Mortal every now and then.

You don't get weapon upgrades terribly often, which I kind of like, but you get a lot of accessories instead. And while you can find rings, most of the time you just assemble them, using items dropped by monsters. Not too far into the game you'll find an NPC who will take three rings and turn them into one ring, meaning you'll have three different effects on your attack, like Fire Damage + Aerial Killer + Paralyze or something. Rings also add cool visual effects to weapons :|

Eh, there's too much to write about, and this has already taken so long. Lost Odyssey is awesome.

There, my long, pointless review of Lost Odyssey.

It's not even a review really.

And there really aren't any spoilers, I just used the tag because I wanted to.

And yeah, the packaging blows. But I do have my pre-order case, I put the fourth disc in that :/ Doesn't really help the whole stacking problem in the main case, though.

This post has been edited by Enzd: Feb 19 2008, 01:38 AM