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| Pollyanna 2436th Post
 
Platinum Carpet V.I.P- Board Master
    
    
    
    
    
|  "Re(2):Lost Odyssey US release anybody?" , posted Thu 14 Feb 14:15
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I'm going to pick it up when I finish Eternal Sonata, which will be soon. I sincerely hope that they've worked out the framerate problems that raped Blue Dragon. Before playing Eternal Sonata I'd almost forgotten that it was possible to play a 360 game where the framerate didn't grind to a halt at regular intervals.
The problem is much much less, but it still exists. To give you an idea, I would say the framerate issues in BD were consistent and occasionally invasive. In Lost Odyssey, they were infrequent, and invasive a few times at most. In BD, I can remember the problem and I can remember being annoyed. In LO, it's definitely negligible.
If anyone has any questions, I'll be more than happy to answer them. My opinion of the game has soured somewhat since I finished it, but I still love it and I'm still irritated at the misinformation going around about the game in regards to its load times and frame-rate problems.
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| Samson
118th Post
Regular Customer
| "Re(3):Lost Odyssey US release anybody?" , posted Thu 14 Feb 18:58
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If anyone has any questions, I'll be more than happy to answer them.
I'm only a few hours into the game (Crimson Forest), here's my question : I find "status" rings (paralyse, poison...) to be highly inefective. Did you rely on them during your play through ?
Regarding the game as a whole : the so called technical issues are inexistant, or completely forgetable. There are loadings, but they're so short they don't deserve to be mentionned.
There are slowndowns but mainly during cutscenes, so who cares ?
Sceneries are breathtaking. Characters, monsters and spell effects are beautiful.
Did any review mention that the game does NOT suffer from the huge issue every game built with the Unreal Engine do ? Texture pop-up. This ruined some Bioshock stages for me, hurts my eyes everytime I enter Mass Effect character screen. Lost Odyssey is pop-up free.
OK, the battle system is not a revolution. But it has its share of novelties, one being that even random battles are hard and need thinking and not just "attack, attack, attack".
One important thing : it's a mature game. Characters are grown ups. Complex grown ups.
The "dreams" you get to read are plain beaufiful. How can 5 screens of text make you cry ?
I love Lost Odyssey.
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| Pollyanna 2437th Post
Platinum Carpet V.I.P- Board Master
| "Re(4):Lost Odyssey US release anybody?" , posted Thu 14 Feb 19:21
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I'm only a few hours into the game (Crimson Forest), here's my question : I find "status" rings (paralyse, poison...) to be highly inefective. Did you rely on them during your play through ?
No, the status rings are pretty useless. I mean, when you get the higher levels of them, they might be better, but I wouldn't bother. I would recommend sticking with the "killer"-types that do increased damage to certain enemies, or just the "attack up" or "drain" types.
Rings on the whole are somewhat useless anyway, since double attack is almost definitely going to give you more damage. They kind of dropped the ball on that. They give you all kinds of rings to make later in the game, but there's almost no motivation to make them.
On another note, I really appreciated how the random battles were longer, but fewer. Better to have 5 worthwhile battles than 15 pointless ones. Also, the enemy variety is awesome. You see very very few (if any, outside of the hidden dungeon) repeated enemies. Extremely rare these days!
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| Pollyanna 2438th Post
Platinum Carpet V.I.P- Board Master
| "Re(5):Lost Odyssey US release anybody?" , posted Thu 14 Feb 20:35
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All kidding aside, there's a clear anti-Japanese pro-American bias in the gaming press lately. There's no use complaining about it though cos you'll just be called a weaboo and complaining never changes anything anyway.
So the game has a good story huh? Is the setting well conveyed? What I mean is, does the game make you feel like you're going to different distinct places? I've always enjoyed the travelogue aspect of RPGs, so I'm hoping Lost Odyssey will play up to that.
I think it's because we're finally seeing good American console games. You have to think that American games are going to appeal to American game reviewers. In the past, the market was Japanese-dominated, so there was no point of reference, but now that they're seeing good games that also appeal to their sensibilities, the Japanese games look less appealing.
My complaint is that people bitch about the lack of innovation coming from Japanese games and praise one FPS after another. Granted, all of those FPS games are DESERVING of praise, but that doesn't make them any more innovative than something like Lost Odyssey, which is critiqued for being "stale".
Anyway, the story is excellent up until the last disc and the settings, while not totally mind-blowing, are certainly distinct and more than reasonably interesting. I guess the world could come together a little better as a whole, but there's lots of variety in terms of the cultures and locations. I liked Gohtza and the "old sorceress' mansion" best, I guess.
If you're an overhead-map fan, they kind of...meet you half way. When you walk from one location to another, it shows a map and you select from a menu, but when you get your ship, then you can fly anywhere in the world like in a classic overhead map.
Unfortunately, the ship is goddamned annoying.
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| Pollyanna 2439th Post
Platinum Carpet V.I.P- Board Master
| "Re(4):Lost Odyssey US release anybody?" , posted Fri 15 Feb 06:35
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Where do you think it went wrong?
With the rings being rendered so obsolete so easily, how well does the battle system hold up in spite of that?
The battle system holds up very well, because the rings were never much of a big deal. It ends up being flawed from the start, because they're useless for mages and by the time you can make lots of different rings, there's no reason to.
But anyway, the system is good because it's constantly evolving. There are times where defense is your best enemy, and times where you absolutely have to protect the back row. Then, when you get more characters, everything changes, and sometimes when a character gets a new move, everything changes again.
I also like the emphasis on timing and stat buffs at the end of the game. Triple attack, for example, is very powerful, but takes longer than a turn to execute. Therefore, if you want to make it worthwhile, you have to do the strongest attack up buff (which of course, takes longer to cast than the weakest) and a "skill execution time down" buff so it comes out in one move. This may or may not be worth it early on, but later, when you get quick cast and double cast, it becomes standard practice.
But even with those skills, whenever you use a spell, you have to think "do I have time for two spells or just one?" or "do I have time for the strong version, or just the weak one?". Or maybe "everyone has lots of HP now, but by the time I get this spell off, they might need it."
I'd highly recommend everyone check out the hidden dungeon because it really puts the system to the test, and even after hours of leveling, every encounter can be as hard as a boss fight.
As far as the story falling apart, well..I don't want to spoil too much, but there's a point on the 3rd disc where a bunch of crap happens and it's just...one explosive, exhausting cinema after another (this is a good thing).
The thing is, after that, they split your party up and the gameplay falls apart. The game does a very good job of not wasting your time like most RPGs do. There isn't any pointless walking around and every fight is worth fighting. Then...suddenly, when you only have 2 people on your team, your entire team dynamic is shot and the battles just seem like obstacles. I mean...this happens in a lot of RPGs, so it's nothing NEW, but it's especially unfortunate in this game.
This part of the game goes on for far too long, and when the plot/gameplay FINALLY gets back on track, it's like they forgot what the game was even about. By the end, you're left with more questions than answers and the feeling that someone else took over the script at the last minute.
Also, speaking of the script, on the English end, it really gets sloppy in some of the scenes on the last disc. Like...the characters just aren't communicating with each other. It's less bad on the Japanese end, but still a bit of an issue. I mostly blame it on the English scriptwriter/director, though.
It's not like the game ever gets genuinely bad or anything, it's just that it sets the standard so high, then doesn't live up to its own expectations.
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| Maou 1369th Post
Red Carpet Executive Member
| "Re(4):Lost Odyssey US release anybody?" , posted Sat 16 Feb 03:07
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One important thing : it's a mature game. Characters are grown ups. Complex grown ups.
The "dreams" you get to read are plain beaufiful. How can 5 screens of text make you cry ?
OH MAN. Samson's line is exactly why I want to go to the trouble of getting a 360 that is sure to break just for one game and one game only. I can't wait to play this...when 360's cost 10000yen used. Ironically enough, I'll be playing Phantasy Star II in the meantime.
Sakaguchi's story sounds like the solution to whatever malaise is affecting Japanese RPG's of late...and I suspect that said malaise is the dropping of characters' ages and the combination of "crazy plot twist" with the revival of the "kid goes on an adventure" thing that worked with Lunar and FF V in 1992 and 1994, but was replaced by greater things by the time of 32 bit RPG's, only to fall backward in the PS2 era.
I mean, under Sakaguchi, even as late as FF VII, characters were adults, and even if FF VIII and FF X had young characters, their vibe and the story were seriously done and unusual. At least Tales of the Abyss turned the kid thing on its head with a bratty, childish 17 year-old rather than the 17 year-old acting like a 30 year-old thing that's become so endemic and boring.
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I've always enjoyed the travelogue aspect of RPGs
ALso, right on, nobinobita! This is one area where there's been the potential at least for much improvement with modern consoles. Yeah, FF VI is still my favorite RPG, but the towns that look the same hurt when I play them now. The thing that got me the most excited when we had our FF XII thread here was the talk of the amazing TOWNS...as a living, breathing, architecturally unique city, Rabanastre was just thrilling. Plenty of games still manage to produce boring towns with good graphics, but in this day and age, the new landscapes and citiscapes for the adventurer could be one of the most exciting things about RPG's.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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| Maou 1377th Post
Red Carpet Executive Member
| "the legend will never die" , posted Thu 21 Feb 07:27
Casting Raise on this thread, as I finally got to see a friend's (American) copy of Lost Odyssey, which really impressed me even in translation! In terms of story and atmosphere, it's just superb, and while the vignettes of Kaim's memories lose a bit in the translation and the animated text would be more impressive than the English (the word 'tear' falling seems less striking than the corresponding kanji), I can see just how much I want to own this game.
Mechanically, it's just like you said, Polly: the low encounter rate makes fights so much more fun. It's bizarre how long developers took to learn this...not only has Chrono Trigger's lesson of fighting enemies on the same screen remained ignored for a decade (and even the on-screen enemies were late to be mimicked), the obvious choice of low enounter rates has only just now been picked up? Madness.
The only downer is how inexplicably little effort went into creating the townspeople who populate the gorgeous towns... Not that it's as bad as FFVII's stupid looking entire cast on top of pre-renders, but still. Kaim is gorgeous, why can't the rest of you townsfolk be?
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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| Pollyanna 2446th Post
Platinum Carpet V.I.P- Board Master
| "Re(1):the legend will never die" , posted Thu 21 Feb 08:13
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Mechanically, it's just like you said, Polly: the low encounter rate makes fights so much more fun. It's bizarre how long developers took to learn this...not only has Chrono Trigger's lesson of fighting enemies on the same screen remained ignored for a decade (and even the on-screen enemies were late to be mimicked), the obvious choice of low enounter rates has only just now been picked up? Madness.
The only downer is how inexplicably little effort went into creating the townspeople who populate the gorgeous towns... Not that it's as bad as FFVII's stupid looking entire cast on top of pre-renders, but still. Kaim is gorgeous, why can't the rest of you townsfolk be?
Hahaha...yeah, I totally ignored the townspeople. If they had anything good to say, they should have tried to look prettier. Lots of poorly-rendered women with big boobs.
On the other hand, I talked to every single person in Blue Dragon. I even remembered a lot of their names.
Speaking of Blue Dragon and seeing things on screen, everyone complained that the game was too easy. Fearing this, I tried avoiding most of the enemies and found it fairly challenging. It's nice to have that option, especially since so many people complain about random encounters.
I REALLY hate how Tales games have visible enemies, then random encounters back and forth between games. You get used to seeing the enemies, then when you have random encounters, they're 10 times more annoying.
But you're talking about enemies on the same screen, like...the menus just pop up and the enemies are already there, right? There's no graphical difference.
That's a cool effect, but I don't know how possible it is with a lot of games, Lost Odyssey being one of them. If you notice, the characters have many different renders. Battle renders, town renders, cinema renders in various levels of detail. The battle renders are better than the "walking around" renders, so they have to load them separately.
I never got sick of how the camera would pan past the characters in battle while you were working the menus. With the music, it was epic every time.
I guess FF12 managed the "enemies on the map" thing fairly well, but the renders in that were really low poly, they just had super awesome textures. Very clever!
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| Maou 1379th Post
Red Carpet Executive Member
| "Re(2):the legend will never die" , posted Thu 21 Feb 08:31:
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On the other hand, I talked to every single person in Blue Dragon. I even remembered a lot of their names.
Now that's interesting. I'm of two minds. The first and only RPG series where I ever TRULY felt like townspeople were worth my time was the Lunar series, seeing as how it's the only RPG I can think of where people consistently had multiple things to say AND changed what they said after about every event. Crazy.
On the other hand, Tales of the Abyss took the townspeople thing too far with a million pointless NPC's I didn't care about but was forced to talk to. "Your name's Noelle? You pilot my plane? Okay, shut up and drive it like the nameless peon in Final Fantasy VII, thank you." XII may have gotten it the most perfectly of modern RPG's, with its varied, sexy, interesting townspeople. Then again, XII did everything mostly perfectly visually.
As for on-screen enemies, YEAH, I mean, I appreciate that I'm not playing action RPG's, but it baffles me that it took RPG's so long to do Chrono's on-screen enemies, and that no game besides XII has even somewhat tried to do same-screen fights. I appreciate that people want to make different, more detailed battle scenes, but I seriously long for the day when the menu pops right on screen like in Chrono, the camera zooms into battle, and we go seamlessly. Seems odd that a change in screen born of necessity back in the day persists two decades after the console RPG's advent. We ditched the stupid 2-head-tall people for the most part, why not work at getting battles back on the same screen and making -that- screen beautiful?
Still I am glad at how dynamic Lost Odyssey's battle angles and idling animations are, they're wonderful.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
[this message was edited by Maou on Thu 21 Feb 08:34] |
| Spoon 1515th Post
Red Carpet V.I.P- Platinum Member
| "Re(3):the legend will never die" , posted Thu 21 Feb 09:57
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On the other hand, I talked to every single person in Blue Dragon. I even remembered a lot of their names. Now that's interesting. I'm of two minds. The first and only RPG series where I ever TRULY felt like townspeople were worth my time was the Lunar series, seeing as how it's the only RPG I can think of where people consistently had multiple things to say AND changed what they said after about every event. Crazy.
On the other hand, Tales of the Abyss took the townspeople thing too far with a million pointless NPC's I didn't care about but was forced to talk to. "Your name's Noelle? You pilot my plane? Okay, shut up and drive it like the nameless peon in Final Fantasy VII, thank you." XII may have gotten it the most perfectly of modern RPG's, with its varied, sexy, interesting townspeople. Then again, XII did everything mostly perfectly visually.
As for on-screen enemies, YEAH, I mean, I appreciate that I'm not playing action RPG's, but it baffles me that it took RPG's so long to do Chrono's on-screen enemies, and that no game besides XII has even somewhat tried to do same-screen fights. I appreciate that people want to make different, more detailed battle scenes, but I seriously long for the day when the menu pops right on screen like in Chrono, the camera zooms into battle, and we go seamlessly. Seems odd that a change in screen born of necessity back in the day persists two decades after the console RPG's advent. We ditched the stupid 2-head-tall people for the most part, why not work at getting battles back on the same screen and making -that- screen beautiful?
Still I am glad at how dynamic Lost Odyssey's battle angles and idling animations are, they're wonderful.
I remember how in Ultima VII, almost everybody in town was unique, complete with their own portrait and name. I remember the older Ultimas had some enemies... ok, ONE enemy, on the map, and the rest were random encounters. The one enemy was really important, though! It was the pirates, and you had to defeat them to capture their ship for your own use.
The later Ultima games didn't have the wholly separate "combat game" from the roaming, in the manner that has become more common with western RPGs.
I remember that in FFXII, I looked at the cities and thought, "oh no... if I'm going to have to talk to EVERYONE in EVERY TOWN after EVERY EVENT... ". The towns are much better made in FFXII than in most other RPGs and really do look very alive, but once the thought of the influence of all those townspeople on my playing of the game snuck in, I turned off the game to lie down for a bit. In truth, I don't think that every town has THAT many people for you to interact with, but I have to say that I was pretty intimidated at first.
I think that making the "combat" and the "rest of the game" beautiful exists as a problem simply because the game design has made these two separate worlds. You tend not to think of this in many western RPGs because they're designed to have both occur immediately in the same world. So you could say that they've never had that problem to begin with; the only problem they have is whether or not they are pretty enough for you in the first place.
Well, a company tried to make an RPG with the really nice Silent Storm engine... which should've been great, except it wasn't.
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| Pollyanna 2447th Post
Platinum Carpet V.I.P- Board Master
| "Re(5):the legend will never die" , posted Thu 21 Feb 17:54
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Rabanastre definitely blew my mind, and made me SO excited about playing XII. I'd place it among the greatest RPG cities in recent memory, together with Ave in Xenogears and Dollet in FF VIII.
Rabanastre is one of the most amazing towns -ever-. It really blew my mind, too. All the stuff in the shops! I couldn't get over it!
I think the towns in FF9 were especially well-designed, too. But that's from an artistic perspective, not a gameplay perspective.
I think one of the most powerful "town experiences" I had was Vane in Lunar 2, though. It doesn't hurt that Lemina was my favorite character.
The towns ALWAYS suck in Tales games. In the 2D ones, they at least look pretty, but they're generally filled with tons of people with nothing good to say. The original ToD was the WORST. Unreasonably huge towns with dialogue like:
Mom: I'm making pancakes!
Son: I love mom's pancakes!
Dad: My son loves my wife's pancakes!
Anyway, on a different note, there are a lot of limitations that come along with "same screen" battles. You end up with a bunch of wide-open, mostly empty areas like you have in FF12. A lot of enemies, attacks and terrain just don't work out that way.
I've gotten to where I like seeing the enemies (no random encounters), but I think LO balanced it well by making it essentially impossible to level up very much and giving you a low encounter rate. That way, almost every fight is necessary.
Yyyrgh...but when I went to old areas again for extra stuff, that was annoying.
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| Maou 1380th Post
Red Carpet Executive Member
| "Re(6):the legend will never die" , posted Fri 22 Feb 03:00
Heheh, you're SO right about the pancakes. I enjoyed the first town in Abyss (I almost said Dali, but that was from FF IX, same vibe) with the merchants. Everything else involved taking 55 elevators up to talk to pointless people. Or maybe that first town left a good memory because it was the only place I didn't have to backtrack back and forth six times to.
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I think one of the most powerful "town experiences" I had was Vane in Lunar 2, though. It doesn't hurt that Lemina was my favorite character.
Vheen/Vane, really? Interesting---tell me more! I didn't notice it when I was like 12 playing the Mega CD version, but I love now how it's a town that's really showing its age, with the battered roof of the guild (never noticed it before the remake), and of course how it used to be this majestic city in the sky (one the first in RPG's, to my memory). This goes into even greater relief with the remake's unfortunate choice to use the exact same Meribia from the Silver Star Story remake with nothing changed at all. C'mon, even a flourishing place changes after 600 years. Ick.
For a game of its time, in 1994 the multi-layered port town Dalton complete with parked Dragonship and the madness that was Pentagulia were the most impressive to me, too, I think.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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