Lost Oddysey - Page 2

I'm having fun with it, but fuck this game loads a lot.

I tried to like FFXII but from the boring story, to the non-memorable music, to forgettable characters. I just couldn't quite get into it. I tried...

For LO, I've started the 2nd dvd, first dvd too me about 13 hours to finish, now im about 16 hours into it. Some really great scenes near the end of the first dvd. This story really is amazing. Can't wait to continue on...

Keep diggin' that hole.

Except for Basch and Balthier, FFXII did nothing for me.

See you in Hell.

I can't tell where the story is headed right now. There's a war, a bunch of immortals who can't remember their past and a council where you just know someone is evil.

I keep screwing up on the rings (actually I've only fought 5 battles so far) so there's an achievement for that. It looks like that just beating the game gets you 500 achievement points (125 for beating each disc), and another 200 for max character's skills out.

As FF XII put off a bunch of JRPGers, this looks to be very inclusive.

Is that Kotaku article about one of the discs of the game being in a paper sleeve true?

The achievement is for 3 perfects in a row. After playing for a bit, you'll hit perfects all the time.

And yes Nachos, the first three discs are stacked on top of each other, the last is in a paper sleeve.

Are you telling me that Super Ninja S&M Bjork-Bunny did nothing for you?

So far this game is everything I've wanted from it. Surprisingly, the short stories "memories" have been my favorite parts. The stories are pretty excellent... though I've only unlocked about 5 of them.

Yeah! Who needs a story in an RPG that's not a cliche-ridden "save the world from an evi madman" plot? Why would anyone want something more mature and interesting, focusing on a much smaller scale and with actual thought put into the protagonists beyond "must kill villain because he's EEEEEVIL!".

FFXII was everything modern JRPGs should be striving towards. Refining the various aspects that define them, rather than simply continuing to pump out the same tired shit year after year.

That said, I'm loving Lost Odyssey despite the steps backwards that it has taken (namely, the fucking encounter system)

Shit, I got to finish up FF XII to figure out what's going on, because right now, it's fucking dynamite.

FFX2 makes FFXII look like Oblivion. It's like being in a talent show and going on right after the juggler with palsy.

I picked this one up too and I'm really digging it so far. I've said it before, and I'll probably fail again this time, but I'm going to try to stick with it and see it through to the end... of course I would like to get back to FF XII after having it mentioned here (and Eternal Sonata, and Blue Dragon...)

The graphics are pretty good but there are times that I think they're great and then there are times where something just seems a little 'off' about them. Is it just me? (Edit: Pulling the R trigger to zoom in on the environments helps to give an appreciation for the graphics a bit of a boost. Subtle movements in greenery etc. are easier to pick up on and appraciate a bit more that way. Overall the environments come off a lot better than the character models, but the enemies I've seen so far have had some pretty cool designs.) I've been playing it on and off since friday night, and I think I've managed to squeeze in about 5 hours or so so far. I made it out of the city of Uhra and into the mountains and I beat crap out of the boss up there after having the crap beat out of me a few times then I made my way down through what looked like a construction zone on the other side of the cliff. Once I got back to the world map on my way to Grand Staff I high tailed it back to Uhra to save again rather than push forward. I was starting to feel insecure about my status and supplies, but so far so good... and that's where I left off.

I'm having a bit of trouble getting 'perfect' on the attack ring, but I usually pull off 'good' with ease. The one time I got perfect felt like more of a mistake than anything. I'll probably try to work on that before moving further on too much. I think it's worth mentioning again how well the written dreams come off. They're well written and are actually presented with a reasonable amount of flair. They're very enjoyable.

Overall, it might as well be a Final Fantasy game because that's what it feels like... and that's perfectly fine by me. I hope Mistwalker keeps 'em coming.

So is this game worth a purchase? I'm still thinking of picking this up.

Well, by the sounds of it, I can add this to my stupidly long (in terms of playing hours) list of RPGs! Right after Mass Effect, FF XII and Oblivion (lord have mercy...)

If you like RPGs, and especially if you're a Final Fantasy fan curious to see what comes next from some of the guys who helped make Final Fantasy what it is, then it's definitely worth picking up. It's still relatively old school in soem of the design choices made (random encounters etc.) but you'll know what you make of that more than I would. For me, it's a great thing.

If anything, I'd say the environment graphics are the weakest aspects. I can't think of any areas so far that stand out in my mind as being anything more than generic fantasy settings.

The design of the creatures, and in many cases, the parts of the city you don't get to visit are pretty awesome. But the actual locations are kinda "meh", and definitely don't feel very impressive considering this is the same engine used for games like UT3 and GoW. I do find the character models (on the characters that matter, anyway) to be pretty kickass, although the age old process of making everyone else look like generic stock characters hurts the look a bit.

I haven't had as much time to tinker here with this as I would have liked over the past few days, but I played for a little bit last night and made my way to the boss at the Grand staff area. Partway through the fight I decided I went about it the wrong way and after having one of my characters get wiped out I figured I'd be better served to just try again, so I quit playing and will try again tonight. I think I'll have a bit more free time this evening so we'll see.

I'm still enjoying the game quite a bit but I was wondering if anybody knew what was up with the pipot or whatever it was called in the base area on the way to Grand staff. It's the little rabbit looking thing that you can give seeds and healing items to in a pot in one of the corners. I'm guessing they'll be scattered about the world in random pots here and there. Anyway, I gave the little guy all 14 of my seeds and then I gave it a healing item and cancelled out since I didn't want to give any more at that moment. It said he looked regretful and then gave it back to me... Oh well.

For every 20 seeds you get a special item (there are 99 in the game).

The seeds get you special items. You'll get items at 20, 40, 60, 80, and 99. (You must find all 99 to get the last item)

You can also give him the lowest level healing items, netting you an upgraded healing item if you give him 4. He also takes MP-restoring herbs, but I forget how many it takes for an upgraded one.

Later, you can also trade various status-removal items to get different ones, the various spell-stones to get upgraded ones, and a combination of low and mid-level HP/MP items to get more upgrades.

The last thing they'll take is a special item you get later on. You'll find a pipot who wants it and trades it for another item, then another pipot who wants that item and trades it for another, and so on (ultimately getting you something pretty cool, I forget what)

My 2 cents on Lost Odyssey (I'm 12 hours in and at the beginning of disc 2)

The Graphics:
It's almost as if they were designed for a PS2 except that they could ignore the hardware limits of a PS2. Let me explain. It seems like a PS2 game (same types of animations ect), except with far better textures, higher polygon character models, and in HD. I'm not saying that the graphics look bad (far from it, they look excellent in places), it's just that it really adds to the PS2 era RPG feel of the game.

The Gameplay:
Where FFXII really was an evolution of the gameplay set out in FFX (specifically the corridor like areas in FFX expanded into something that felt more like a world). Lost Odyssey strangely feels like the game that goes in between (like the FFXI that should have been). I do miss FFX's system of character swapping and manipulating the turn order though. Those aspects are still sort of in LO, but they aren't as elegant. Also there is a traditional world map, you just need to be in a vehicle to see it (and you don't get one until disc 2).

The Story:
It uses pretty much all of the traditional JRPG clichés, but the storytelling here is absolutely the refinement of the genre. The written story portion of the game would have absolutely fallen flat if they weren't excellently written (as in well enough written that the author would generally be too good to write pulpy genre novels), and the fact that the game has a 20 minute funeral sequence for a character that you only meet for about 1 minute and is somehow able to make it moving is impressive.

Random Thought:
It's kind of distracting that the demure Queen you meet about 6 hours in dresses like a whore. But the HD graphics mean you can see the blood vessels in her boobs.

(BTW Spike is absolutely right about FFXII's story. About 2/3rds of the story is in the first 15 hours of the game, and the game takes between 50-80 hours to beat).

First Impression: http://chud.com/articles/articles/13...SEY/Page1.html

Good stuff Jon! I'm still plugging away, just not as much as I'd like. I'll find more time for it when I can, but I'm still determined to complete this one. I'm in the middle of trying to track Mack down after the funeral scene. Made it through the Crimson Woods into. I probably could have made more forward progress but sometimes I don't have a lot of time so I'll run around and get into a few fights instead of pressing on since I don't want to get too wrapped up in it before having to turn it off. Getting SP is always good, even if the experience points take a hit eventually.

As an aside, one little thing I noticed is that the game seems to load a save with your characters at full hp/mp, even if you were beat up at the time you saved. Kind of helpful sometimes, I guess.

Yeah, the save glitch is odd, more because there is no other mechanism (ie House, Tent) to restore full HP?MP at save points.

Disc 1 ends right after finding Mack, I'm headed back to Namura.

I don't mind the glitch so much since it seems liek it will let you get into a boss fightat full power at times (like that Bogamoray encounter that took me a while to get through). Of course it may have helped if I had paid attention a bit more too... I didn't start crafting rings until after being in Numara for quite some time already. I felt a bit silly since I kept wondering when I'd get rings for my other characters. I'm thinking of going back to the city before I press on to talk to the guy who can combine rings into better ones to see what he can do for me. When I first talked to him I only had the ring Kaim has early on.

I watched my friend play a few hours of this, he was on disc 3.

At one point we sat through what felt like at least a half an hour of some of the worst cutscenes I have ever seen in a video game. Giant ornate ships crashing into things, unbearably long speeches about magic politics; it was the epitome of cliched "epic" anime movies, slowed down to a crawl. Following that was a series of extremely boring easy battles, and a long trip down a blank featureless poorly designed RPG town "main street".

You could not pay me to play this shit.

FFXII's story got pretty bad near the end, but nowhere near as bad as Lost Oddysey. FFXII was overall worth playing through for a forgiving RPG fan, but the broken battle system made the game worse as it went along. Without the trademark FF flow of battle, Black Magic became mostly useless. It was all about attacks and buffs. Combined with the grid system making every character identical, it nearly killed the game.

I haven't read the thread because I want to avoid spoilers, I'm only an hour into the first disk and and I'm hooked. That beginning battle was one of the best video gaming experiences I've had in a while.

And yes that fourth disk comes in a paper sleeve. I seems very last minute to me, but I didn't really care.

I have amend my praise of the leveling system. Only an hour into disc 2 there is a gaping loophole, while allows you to level-up to Lvl 47 (from a cap of Lvl 22) in about 2 hours.

What's the loophole? I still haven't had a lot of time to play but I could kill some time for leveling. Maybe it would help me actually get to the end of an RPG for a chang. I'm still off looking for Mack near the end of disc 1.

I'm never going to play this game so it doesn't immediately impact me but this: is fucking retarded. First the ridiculous case for Halo 3 and now this. Why can't Microsoft get their house in order regarding the proper packaging of software?

I'm still waiting for Eternal Sonata to not crash when you boot the game up....

And just to be clear, this is what the different packaging looks like:

So they had a viable alternative but didn't use it in the US? That's excellent.

It's been a while since I played a game like this, but I've got to say that I love the hell out of the boss battles. They've been fun an different each time. Without giving too much away, I just got to the sorceress in the mansion fight licked, and that was pretty badass.

I could do without the slapstick humor...

...and the boob veins.

Just bought it.

I'm only 2 hours in, but, far as I'm concerned, this is my Final Fantasy XIII. And this means we're back to basics and I'm loving it.

Surprisingly, I got fairly misty eyed during Hanna's Departure. If this is par for the course for those dream sequences, I'm going to be such a sopping bitch of a mess by the end of disc 1.

Don't worry, most are not as endearing. My fav is The Upstreamers.

As I'm almost to Disc 4, there is some very good (and some very disappointing) in the game. Disc 4 unlocks most of the side-quests so we'll see how that goes.

That was a pretty awesome little story.
Have any of you experienced any errors with the game? My 360 sounds like it's about to become airborne with all the noise the fan makes. Some disc read errors as well so who knows?

Same here. Mostly happens when I'm in one area for a long time.

The first disc of the game moves SLOW. Incredibly slow. Basically is to set up the backstory of Kaim and the relationships of the main characters. From Disc 2 on the game shifts into more "action."

Good. Because I just picked this up and while I'm only 48 minutes in, it's almost agonizing. I'm going to give it a chance because I'm not retarded, but I'm glad that I used a gift card to get it rather than hard-earned dolla dolla bills.

Those will go to Saints Row 2 and Fallout 3, thank you very much.

You're not retarded but you're willing to sink massive hours into a game in order to get to the good parts at the ass end?

Disc 2, the game does get better. That's far from the ass end.

And really, it's an RPG, a gameplay experience designed to give 60 hours of entertainment. Its only fair to give every RPG at least 5 hours to wow me.

Truth. I mean, I just got to the Great Wall with Jansen and Seth, and now I'm starting to enjoy it more. I just found the whole beginning narrative to be sort of awkward.

I guess it's just the last RPG I played on the 360 was Mass Effect, and that blew my dick off into tiny little hunklets of gore. I loved it from the very beginning, whereas this one seemed a little bit awkward from the start.


....And if all else fails, Fallout 3!