Promising title that fails to fully deliver on that promise. Still a pretty good JRPG for the RPG-starved Xbox 360.
The basis for Lost Odyssey's story is about Kaim. He's a mercenary hired to fight for the nation of Uhra against the nation of Khent. During the battle, a meteor crashes onto the battlefield, killing everyone except for Kaim, who just so happens to be an immortal. When Kaim returns to Uhra, he finds out that he was not the only person to survive the battle, as another immortal, former pirate Seth, also survived. Together, along with womanizer (and black mage) Jansen, are tasked with a mission to investigate the construction of a magic engine called Grand Staff. This is where the story begins. Along the way we meet up with 4 other mortal characters and 2 other immortal characters to form your 9 person party. You are introduced, and get to know, each new party member before they officially join the group. Each of the 5 mortal characters fit a specific RPG mold (black mage, white mage, physical damage, melee attacker, green mage), while the 4 immortal characters are more of a blank slate, although two of them are better suited for physical damage while the other two are better casters. The mortals learn their abilities and spells as they level up (100 xp per level, same for all characters), but the immortals have to learn their skills from either accessories or by linking a skill from one of the mortal characters (like FF9 or Paper Mario).
The battle system is pure old school, give commands to all characters at start of turn, then the actions take place. Now the system is still functional, I liked it in Dragon Quest VIII, but in Lost Odyssey it just feels antiquated. LO is trying for that Final Fantasy feel, but the battle system does not. So what ends up happening is your party can get damaged for large amounts of HP, but it takes two turns to cast a heal spell that replenishes most of that HP. In terms of numbers, party gets damaged for, say, 400, your all party heal is for at most 150-175. Or in the case of the first boss fight of the game, the party can get damaged for 200+ and you have no way to heal that much that early in the game. Now this is just some ranting. Like I said, the system is still functional for the most part. Most of the battles you encounter are handled without too much trouble. You have your standard turn based battle commands (Attack, Skill, Spell, Item, Defend). You also gain access to the standard white, black, and spirit magic, not to mention eventually composite magic (like all-regen, or all-no petrify). The battles play out a little slower than, party due to how long magic can take to cast for the majority of the game, but also because of physical attacks. Each character can equip a ring which can deal more damage in general, or to specific enemies, or element damage, steal items, etc. To get this effect to take place, you hold down the right trigger as a ring shrinks on screen, when it is perfectly on top of another ring, you left go of the trigger, if its perfect, the ring's effect is full. If its only good, the ring's effect is lessened. Its an interesting system, but I felt it got old as the game wore on.
A bigger reason battles take long is because of the technical reasons I mentioned earlier. There is a lot of loading in LO. Most of it isn't that long, but there's enough of it to get really annoying, especially for battles. Battles are random encounters, so when one triggers, you get about a 15-20 second intro for each battle (3-4 shots of the battlefield, 1 shot of a character, shot of the party which pans to the enemies) before you finally get control of the party. Add in the slower turn based battle system and you have battles that even if you defeat the enemy quickly, still take longer than they should. Most of the other loading screens aren't that bad, but at the same time there are a lot of cutscenes, which leads me to my next point. The story is not paced very well, nor did I find it very good. It starts out promising, but as the game proceeds, not much character development occurs, and the story never really had an urgent feel to it particularly at the end. The best part about the game's story are the dreams that Kaim has when he encounters a situation eerily similar to one he had during his 1000 years journeying. These dream sequences are well written, but I noticed that in the grand scheme of the story, they don't mean much. They do help to give Kaim some needed personality, but you don't really get to know who he is or why he's here or where he came from. Speaking of that, there is a big plot point that was never fully addressed that really annoyed me, but I will not spoil that here in a review. Suffice to say, that plot point was not fully addressed.
As far as the other technical aspects of the game, the graphics were pretty good. In places they looked very nice, the character models are good, though they all have that Final Fantasy-ish look to them. They may not define the system, but they are fine nonetheless. The music is fantastic. The tracks have that Final Fantasy feel to them, but there is nothing wrong with Final Fantasy music. Its good. I had no issues with the voice acting. It was fine throughout.
There is quite a bit to LO. Near the end I was just tired of playing it, so I skipped doing a number of the side quests and hidden bosses, and I still logged over 50 hours in the game. Easily there is enough here to keep you busy for quite a while, especially when you take into account there's a new game plus feature.
Overall, I would say Lost Odyssey was disappointing. It had a lot of promise, but it didn't feel very original at all, and the story didn't live up to the early promise. Also the best part of the story, the dreams, don't have much impact on the story at all. So, Lost Odyssey was a pretty good RPG, easily taking the spot as recommended JRPG if you need one, but it could've been so much better.