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Why Everyone Hates It: By popular opinion, Lost Odyssey is a sad pathetic generic attempt at making a game on par with Final Fantasy by someone who's totally over the hill.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: Mechanically, Lost Odyssey is very much an early 90's throwback, which may be a turn-off for some. It is also features an awful lot of text in fonts which really insist on being viewed only on an HD-TV, which may be a turn-off for those who appreciate the older feel.
Why I Like It Anyway: Lost Odyssey is a game I picked up hoping that I would absolutely love it. As it stands, it's merely a game that I like. The personal appeal for me going in, and the source of some disappointment in the resulting game, is a matter of pedigree. This is going to be a bit of a journey, but bear with it.
Lost Odyssey was co-developed by two studios. The first, and more recognizable, is Mistwalker, the relatively new company formed by Hironobu Sakaguchi in 2004, and feelplus, a team pulled together specifically to help Mistwalker develop games, as their in-house talent is more or less limited to the aesthetic side of things. Hironobu Sakaguchi, as many are already aware, is best known for creating the Final Fantasy series. Meanwhile, feelplus was pulled together primarily by picking up the pieces of Nautilus, who lost their financial backing shortly after creating Shadow Hearts: From the New World. Now, as anyone who has previously read this feature's earlier article on Koudelka should know, Nautilus (formerly Sacnoth) was comprised of some of the most talented people ever to work on the Final Fantasy series. So essentially, what we have here is more or less everyone who was involved in the SNES era Final Fantasy games getting back together and cranking out a new one (with the odd exception of artist Yoshitaka Amano, who is in the Mistwalker family, but skipped out on this project).
This really is the best way to describe Lost Odyssey. It is essentially Final Fantasy 4, with modern lavish graphics added to it. You have a party of 5 characters at a time, a surprisingly large list of status ailments that includes a 3 round petrification, a pair of little kids who specialize in different types of magic, and some really surprisingly difficult boss battles requiring some serious strategy. The degree to which the game feels like a throwback is staggering quite frankly. While it brings back much of what's enjoyable about older RPGs, not much new is being brought to the table.
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The one main thing that sets the game apart from the average SNES FF game, and really does deserve a fair deal of mention, is the importance the game places on protecting spell-casters. Like many older games, each character can be placed either in the front row, dealing full melee damage and taking the full force of every attack, or stuck in the back, where there attacks don't matter for much, but they take less damage. Here, this is taken to a bit of an extreme. Casters may as well not be able to attack for all the damage they do, and will die in one or two attacks if left up front. On top of that, attacking someone who is casting a spell delays it, potentially into the next round. On the plus side, the more HP characters in the front row have, the greater the reduction in damage to those in the back, and enemy AI will generally take this into account. Given that all this applies to both the player's party and any enemies encountered, the degree to which magic damage outclasses physical, and the fact that around halfway through the game, your party consists of 2 fighters and 4 mages, peeling away front liners and focusing attacks on casting mages to push spells to the next round becomes quite important.
Another interesting wrinkle of the game's design is the fact that half your party members are amnesiac immortals. Beyond the impact this has on the plot, which we'll be getting into soon enough, this is actually reflected in combat. Mortal characters learn particular new abilities as they level up, and are down for the count when they hit 0 HP. Immortals on the other hand will get right back up 2 rounds after dying if you can avoid having your party wiped out in the interim (a rather big if, since again, everyone will die within a round or two if the front line falls). Immortals also never learn new abilities at level up, but have a number of ability slots (very small initially, but upgradable with rare items), which they can fill by gradually studying abilities possessed by mortal party members, or granted by accessories, somewhat similar to the esper system from FF6, but with party members rather than fossilized gods.
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The immortality of half the PCs is also, of course, almost the entire focus of the game's plot, and is handled surprisingly well. It's acknowledged that you just plain can't kill these people, which leads to the main antagonist of the game not being so much of a megalomaniacal evil overlord out to take over and/or destroy the world, but more of just the biggest jerk in the world. He puts a huge amount of time and energy, particularly in the backstory, into just completely ruining the lives of the immortal party members and anyone else he has a problem with. It's rather refreshing. As is the fact that unlike most RPGs, Lost Odyssey will fully acknowledge the library of spells everyone in the game has access to, leading to scenes like a massive war being fought where, as things begin to look rather grim for one side, they bring in a wave of healers to cast revive on their fallen comrades. Also rather refreshing is the ability for immortals to have (mortal) children, something which isn't seen too often, and having the black mage of the party double as the heavy drinking, coniving, womanizing, comic relief.
The other thing that really needs attention regarding the plot is, arguably, the main selling point of the game. An actual respectable author (Kiyoshi Shigematsu for what it's worth) was brought in to write a series of over 30 vignettes about the main character's backstory, which are encountered randomly throughout the game whenever something triggers a memory for the main character. So, for example, you'll be walking through a town, run into an otherwise unimportant NPC who mentions they're thinking of joining the army, and suddenly a 10 page story about the main character helping a mercenary with cold feet escape from his unit before the more seasoned warriors in the room kill him to keep him from giving their position away. For the most part, these stories are honestly quite good, and really do an excellent job of showing the difference between actually good writing, and what tends to pass as good for the average RPG. Particularly when contrasted against the actual in-game script, honestly.
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Unfortunately, these interesting little short stories are absurdly front-loaded. Assuming you're exploring fairly thoroughly, you'll hit the first dozen or so within the first hour or two of the game, and more or less cease to find them at all by the second half of the game. This sort of pacing issue is symptomatic of the one big flaw that keeps me from really being able to sing Lost Odyssey's praises. Terrible pacing. While the basic meat of the gameplay is fun, the plot is fairly interesting, and eventually the game even pays lip-service to exploring the world map and finding secret areas. Ultimately though, this is all bogged down by awful pacing and filler. The plot gets rolling with the party heading out to investigate something in a foreign city. Shortly thereafter, it's revealed that they just left the city the main villain is hiding out in. The trip back, fairly arbitrarily, requires traveling through the rest of the world over 30 or so hours of gameplay, with nothing interesting or significant occurring beyond filling out the party roster.
So this is where Lost Odyssey sits. It's a very oldschool RPG, good for a nostalgic fix of mid-90s RPG goodness, with solid mechanics and early-game challenge. It's also extremely dull, with lifeless characters trudging through pointless dungeon after pointless dungeon. Given the number of dull lifeless RPGs which also feature insultingly mindless gameplay, it's still superior to a lot of what's out there. With a bit more effort though, it could have truly been a great game.
