Lost Odyssey

[Riggswolfe]

This comes out next week. Is anyone looking forward to it? I'm considering picking it up but I'm also kind of leery after the disappointment of Blue Dragon. Still, the previews sound really intriguing.

[schild]

Yes. But next week rocks my ass. This might be the first thing I play though.

[Phildo]

It's the only game I plan to buy this month =)

[Rasix]

Gamestop shows week after next.

Day 1 purchase for me.  I'll likely drop everything I'm playing for it.

[Moaner]

I'm really looking forward to it but I probably won't have the time to play it until next month.  The art style killed all interest I had in Blue Dragon, but I'm a sucker for classic JRPG gameplay.

This is a shitty month to be taking classes.  Not playing this and DMC4 might kill me, not to mention Sins of a Solar Empire.

[caladein]

Still plowing through Mass Effect, but as soon as that's put to bed (and I actually get to use the living room again!) I'll be picking it up.

[Velorath]

From the sound of it, half the game is cutscenes.  That kinda dulls my interest in the game a bit, since the average game doesn't have good enough writing to justify devoting that much of the game to telling the story.

[schild]

Delayed til 2/12. Which is good, won't compete with Sins, DMC4 or Culdcept. Which all DO have to compete against eachother.

[Phildo]

Fuck.

[Velorath]

Just a heads up, there seems to be a bonus to preordering.  Oddly I don't see any mention of it on EB's website, but both Amazon and Best Buy's websites advertise some extra content.  From amazon:

Pre-order today and receive an additional playable dream as well as an in-game weapon. Xbox Live Access code quantities are limited. While supplies last. Codes will be emailed just before the release of the game.

[schild]

EB has them in store.

[Phildo]

I brought this home today and tore through the rapper like a kid at Christmas.  Got through the first cut-scene when suddenly my 360 dies.  Completely bricked, 3 red rings and all.

[sidereal]

tore through the rapper

[Rasix]

The game is absolutely gorgeous.  Not surprisingly for jRPG, the first couple hours are freedom-lite and cutscene heavy.

Too early to get a complete feel for the game.  It's interesting, for once a Japanese produced game has a majority of characters looking Japanese.

Will play more, perhaps a BiiF is in it's future.  I can already say though, unless you like jRPGs, don't bother.

[Mazakiel]

I fully intend to jump into the game later and enjoy it and all, but the first thought that entered my mind when I first opened the case up....

For $60, could they have come up with a better solution for getting all four discs into the case besides stacking three in the case tray and the just throwing the fourth into a sleeve and tucking it in there?  The damn thing practically spilt out when I opened it. 

[Phildo]

Agreed.  I thought the fourth disc was a soundtrack at first.

Played up to the first real boss last night at a friend's place and I'm mostly optimistic about it, although it looks like they didn't learn much of the pixel hunting lesson from Blue Dragon.  I still feel compelled to click on everything, just in case.

Would do a BiiF, but I don't think I got the full experience considering there were many distractions.

[schild]

This game is fantastic.

[Rasix]

That first major boss was a pain.  Took me a few tries.  Doesn't help that the guy could hit for over 50% of someone's health and had an AOE that did more than that.

At least they don't push you back to your last save after a death.  That was a nice touch.

Didn't play any tonight (V-Day and I'd like to devote 2hr + chunks to this one), but the characters/dialog alone will propel me through this.  Just really well done in that department.

[Tebonas]

Ordered it and can't wait to get it. Since you people mentioned Blue Dragon and I ignored that in the past. Is it worth getting as well?

[Phildo]

Yeah, that boss was a motherfucker.  I saved and quit after I finally beat him.

[schild]

This game has the best music Nobuo Uematsu has done since FF6. Period. Fucking amazing. The main theme is just.... fuck, it's perfect.

[Riggswolfe]

I haven't played it yet but will soon. My fiance got this, the strat guide and fire emblem for Wii for me for Valentine's!

[Murgos]

My fiance got this, the strat guide and fire emblem for Wii for me for Valentine's!

That's a keeper right there that is.

[Riggswolfe]

My fiance got this, the strat guide and fire emblem for Wii for me for Valentine's!

That's a keeper right there that is.

Hence why we're engaged.

[Yegolev]

Ordered it and can't wait to get it. Since you people mentioned Blue Dragon and I ignored that in the past. Is it worth getting as well?

You have to be able to tolerate Toriyama to deal with Blue Dragon, in my opinion, as well as like twentieth-century Final Fantasy.  All three of his character designs appear in that game.  Also the protagonists are kids, some people (my wife) don't like that.  As for the music, I had high hopes for Uematsu-san's score in Blue Dragon but it left me wanting; it's good but the quality is uneven.  Also the boss fight theme is one of the worst examples of Japanese music that I can think of.  Still, I enjoy it.  It looks great, technically speaking, not in a design way unless you have a chubby dick for Toriyama.  At the core, it's very much like the old Final Fantasy games.

[Riggswolfe]

Ordered it and can't wait to get it. Since you people mentioned Blue Dragon and I ignored that in the past. Is it worth getting as well?

You have to be able to tolerate Toriyama to deal with Blue Dragon, in my opinion, as well as like twentieth-century Final Fantasy.  All three of his character designs appear in that game.  Also the protagonists are kids, some people (my wife) don't like that.  As for the music, I had high hopes for Uematsu-san's score in Blue Dragon but it left me wanting; it's good but the quality is uneven.  Also the boss fight theme is one of the worst examples of Japanese music that I can think of.  Still, I enjoy it.  It looks great, technically speaking, not in a design way unless you have a chubby dick for Toriyama.  At the core, it's very much like the old Final Fantasy games.

I played the demo. The gameplay was kind of fun. But that weird high-voiced monster character totally turned me off of the game. It was about as annoying as the lisping walking stereotype from Enchant Arms. To me at least.

[Phildo]

I loved the combat system in Blue Dragon, but absolutely loathed the characters.  You can see rants on the subject elsewhere.  Still, it's not a bad game at the core, and bad music by Uematsu is still better than 95% of everything else out there.

[Tairnyn]

Blue Dragon was a decent game but I disliked the fact that each character was inherently exactly the same and were defined solely by their classes. Towards the end when everyone had decent level in every class there really wasn't anything that discerned the characters from each other other than their avatar and gear. In addition, I began to loathe the extra time dedicated to attack animations since you had to see them a billion times through the course of the game.

The overall story wasn't too bad, but some of the writing and spoken dialog was subpar. Not as bad as Eternal Sonata, which subjected me to hideously painful conversations and had almost no semblance of motivation for character actions, but I never really felt like I cared one way or another what happened to the main characters in BD.

I ordered Lost Odyssey today and I'm looking forward to a solid RPG for the 360.

[LK]

http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages2/928334.asp

I wanted to make sure I had some back-up before I said I looked at a sample of their combat and didn't want to deal with another game where it took a fucking day and a half to resolve combat.

I stopped caring about JRPGs when I realized I was spending 50% of those 60 hours just waiting for my characters to act in a battle.

[Phildo]

I don't mind the length of the combat animations nearly as much as I hate the ring system obstructing my view of said animations.  It's like they took the gunblade mechanism from FFVIII and added a tacky graphical element to it.

[schild]

You know, these dreams are really, really, REALLY well-written.

[schild]

Holy shit, this game.

[Yegolev]

Yeah, holy shit.  I smell lots of FFXII on this but that's not bad; it's more like I'm playing Cloud in Dalmasca with Midgar music, than Van in wherever Yuna lived with shit-ass music, meaning it's the good bits rather than the bad.

And what's up with that first boss being such a bitch?  That was kinda old OLD Final Fantasy shit, the tough shit.  It didn't help that I didn't bother to read the manual and later figured out that Earth isn't strong against Wind... keke me!

The dreams, wacky.  My wife was into them until the fifth one was also incredibly depressing, but yea they are well-written.

Jury's still out on the ring system.  Combat in general, including items, is good.

I was afraid of dull characters until Jensen showed up.  Localization team gets an A.

The pixel-hunting isn't as bad as Blue Dragon.  So far I have not found anything that contained an item that didn't also have an icon in the lower right to go with it.

Lost Odyssey is going down in my personal history book for one reason: it made my wife want to buy a new TV.

[schild]

Also, it's probably the most well-written and well-localized games in the history of JRPGs.

FeelPlus+ (Shadowhearts) + ITPlanning (Takehiko Inoue) + Mistwalker (Sakaguchi) + Uematsu = Fucking GOLD. GOLD, JERRY, GOLD.

[Rasix]

Holy shit, this game.

Yah, I just got through the Holy Shit part schild is referencing.  Goddamn.  Games don't really ever bring emotion like this.


A save point during all of that would have been nice though, it's past my bedtime.