Despite a generally cliché main story/ antagonist, it still comes out as a pretty good game.
The games main character is a man named Kaim, an immortal man who has lived for 1,000 year and has lost all memory of his past. Throughout the game Kaim occasionally remembers some events from his past through encounters he has in the present world usually brought upon by similar situations. These memories of the past are played out in the game as "dreams" in which you read on screen text telling the story with interactive audio synced to it to further the experience.
The main story line of the game itself deals with a conflict of power between countries aggravated further by the rise of the "magic industrial revolution". The main goal of Kaim and the other characters that come along with him is to take down the main initiator of this conflict and bring the world once again to peace. Aside from this, Kaim and the others also have a more personal reason to pursue this goal, to learn more of their pasts that have seemingly been forgotten.
Bottom line: In my opinion the dreams Kaim has throughout the game are better than the games true story line by a good margin. That's not to say the main story is terrible, it's not, the dreams are just really good. I would have never thought reading something with no visuals could be so emotional.
Score: 8/10 (the dreams helped the score a bit)
Weighted Score: 40/50*
Graphics
The graphics in Lost Odyssey are pretty much the best I've ever seen, though to be fair I haven't played or seen many games from this generation. The game has great detail. Even the backgrounds and random NPC's look just as detailed as your main group. Sometimes you'd almost think you were looking at a live action movie instead of a computer rendered console game. Great detail aside the game world is somewhat dull, most cities look alike with a bunch of gray buildings and sidewalks with very little color variation to brighten things up.
Bottom line: The graphics style is amazing, but the sometimes lack of variation might get a little boring to the eyes.
Score: 9.5/10
Weighted Score: 14.25/15*
Game play
First up is the battle system. Lost Odyssey uses a variation of the turn based battle system seen in many classic RPGs. This type of battle system is about as extinct to the genre as new PS2 game are to the game market at this point. This fact is sad in my opinion as I believe the turn based battle system is far superior to the active battle systems used almost exclusively today. The game adds even a little more strategy to the mix by letting you have a front and back row of characters in battle. The front row will take most of the damage and as long as their HP's are high will also shield the back row to an extent. This system allows you to protect characters of lower levels or just down right low defense by putting them in the back row. Lost Odyssey also employs the use of random battle as seen in the Final Fantasy series from FFX on back. This can be kind of irritating at times, but normal battles don't take long to get through most of the time so it's just a minor inconvenience in my opinion.
Next up is the games controls. What can I say? Everything works like it should for the most part. The game has a nice camera letting you look in many directions if you please. The only gripe I have is that sometimes it can be a little hard to get in the right spot for the game to let you climb a ladder or open a box or whatever.
Bottom line: Great battle system and controls.
Score: 9.5/10
Weighted Score: 23.75/25
Sound
The game has good voice acting for the most part. Though I think the voice actor for Kaim couldn't really convey the feeling of sorrow for the character all that well making it hard at times to really get into what was going on.
The music served its purpose, it gave something in the background to help set the mood. There wasn't a song in the game that seemed out of place. Despite that there wasn't any song in the game that made me think "Wow that was awesome".
Bottom line: The voice acting was good and the music played its part as it should. Nothing great nothing bad.
Score: 8.5/10
Weighted Score: 8.5/10
WEIGHTED FINAL SCORE: 86.5/100 (86.5% B )
*Weighted Score refers to the amount of weight that each section has on the overall possible score of 100 for the game. Instead of letting sound be exactly as important to the overall score as the story or graphics for example they all have a different amount of importance based on how important I believe they actually are to the game as a whole.