![]() Blue Dragon has elements which come together way better, unfortunately it's a bit too easy. I enjoyed it well enough, but it's not even Mistwalker's better Xbox360 JRPG. Lost Odyssey is a downgrade that was propped up by having big names like Sakaguchi, Uematsu, and Inoue. Cutscene direction was universally poor, especially serious character interactionsĪs far as being a big unique JRPG with adult quirky characters, great art direction, and a kickass soundtrack goes, most of the same team made a way better one called Shadow Hearts 2. The game scenario just isn't very good, motivations are poor and there's a lot of bad melodrama The supporting cast had terrible character designs The battle system is inferior to Shadow Hearts 2, which many team members worked no Some of the bosses had really fun battle mechanics and patterns Thousand Years of Dreams is outstanding 13) 'The Portraitist of the Dead'-After the funeral head back to Canal Street and stand. 12) 'Evening Bell'-After the funeral head back to Numara to unlock this dream. Strong world setting design with great art direction Head down the path and talk to the man on a boat twice, head back to the lady on a boat in southern Main Street and you will complete this side quest givng you access to dream 11. ![]() A Thousand Years of Dreams is a heartbreaking collection of short stories - it was released as a book in Japan - but as a load-bearing pillar of a massive video game, it’s super clunky, and one thing Lost Odyssey does not need is more clunk.- Characters in general are older and more interesting I don’t blame Shigematsu for being wordy - I’m a writer, I get it - but I really value delivering an emotional punch in as few words as possible. It’s like watching Oppenheimer in IMAX and Vanderpump Rules on your phone at the same time.Īnd The Thousand Years of Dreams stories are so long. The psychic damage caused by this tonal whiplash gave me a migraine. And then you’re dropped back into the game, where your dumbass healer is whining about the rain and hitting on the only woman for a thousand miles, who defends herself by demanding that Kaim tell her she’s pretty, and the only thing your heroic protagonist can muster is a dismissive TSK because he’s too hot to give a damn about anyone else. ![]() One minute you’re reading a deeply soulful story about Kaim encountering various members of a family whose nomadic religion forces them to march non-stop into the West, leaving their deceased family members behind. The writing in these stories is so good it emphasizes how weak the dialogue is in the main game. If you love thinly drawn characters screaming Made Up Proper Nouns at each other, you’ll love Lost Odyssey. It feels very much like a remaster of a long-lost PS1 JRPG, with all of the good and bad that entails. After surviving a meteor strike, Kaim is dispatched by the ruling council of Uhra to investigate strange occurrences at Grand Staff, a massive construction project designed to harness magical energy run by Councilmember Gongora, who believes it will finally give the Republic of Uhra victory over the nation of Khent. 1000 Years of Dreams is so much better than the main Lost Odyssey story (or any of the other Mistwalker games). Players control Kaim, a thousand-year-old immortal warrior. So how is that narrative? Well, it’s, uh. Using the Unreal Engine to make a JRPG is a good metaphor for the Xbox 360 in general: a machine designed to make fast-moving, visually stunning action games forced to render a slow-moving, deliberate narrative experience. ![]() Building the game in Unreal allowed the team to start development before the Xbox 360’s hardware was finalized, but they also had to deal with constant updates to the software, and a game engine that was originally created to run, well, Unreal, a PC-based first person shooter. The team used Unreal Engine 3 to build everything out, which allowed for a graphical fidelity that did Scheurer’s designs justice. Some of the game’s concept art was done by Christian Lorenz Scheurer, who’s worked on a lot of big sci-fi movies including The Fifth Element, and Lost Odyssey has the same dense, overdesigned creativity of that film. The world is in the middle of a magic-driven industrial revolution, so everything has this cool rickety, Victorian, art-deco style, like steampunk but with less top hats and more glowy purple shit. Lost Odyssey ‘s best quality is its visual design. From its brooding, hot-boy protagonist to its techno-fantasy world, Lost Odyssey has more in common with Final Fantasy 8 than Dragon Quest. While Blue Dragon is a love letter to the Saturday Morning Cartoon vibe of JRPGs like Chrono Trigger, Lost Odyssey ‘s ambition was to tell a mature story about war, family, memory, and the passage of time, mostly achieved through a visual novel-style storytelling device and not the game’s actual narrative.
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