• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Official North American Lost Odyssey Thread

Himuro said:
The hilarious thing about about the anti-traditional rpg people is that they don't realize the amount of variety in the jrpg genre. Almost every notable jrpg these days is completely different from the next. On the other hand, almost every fps' is practically the same.


honestly do you do this on purpose?:lol
 

Teknoman

Member
chaostrophy said:
I'm glad to hear about the great environment design. Setting is very important to me in RPGs. I can sometimes forgive a boring story, or flat characters, or uninteresting battle and character building systems. But if an RPG's world is one I don't end up wanting to spend time in, I lose interest fast.

Agreed. Though im not so forgiving on the other traits (specifically battle and character systems), environment is a top factor. That and music. No epic normal battle, boss battle or last boss battle themes = No purchase. Same for normal environment music.
 
Himuro said:
I was just using an extreme example since others want to use extremes when it comes to jrpgs. There's a considerable difference between Portal, Half Life 2, and Team Fortress 2, the Doom's, the Halo's. Still, the jrpg genre is much more varied than pretty much any genre out there.


We can all get along. Eat the delicious fruit of both genres. ;)
 
replayy said:
Just ordered the asian version. Can't wait, i've been looking forward to this since I got my 360.

I find it amusing that people can't just wait one week for the US version. :lol Oh well, a purchase is a purchase.
 

Surfheart

Member
Is anyone with the game struggling with the difficulty of the boss encounters?

I got through the
first boss, the griffon type thing
after a few attempts, but the second boss
the worm
is nailing me. I've had so many goes at it that I'm nearly at the point where I'm just going to shelve the game and never go back to it.

I don't want to "grind" I think that is an incredibly poor game design.

It just seems totally unbalanced. You have trivial encounter after trivial encounter and then bam, uber boss and 2 hours or hair pulling retries later I'm ejecting the disk.

Am I doing something wrong? Any strategies? I think my party are around level 14 or 15.
 

Teknoman

Member
Surfheart said:
Is anyone with the game struggling with the difficulty of the boss encounters?

I got through the
first boss, the griffon type thing
after a few attempts, but the second boss
the worm
is nailing me. I've had so many goes at it that I'm nearly at the point where I'm just going to shelve the game and never go back to it.

I don't want to "grind" I think that is an incredibly poor game design.

It just seems totally unbalanced. You have trivial encounter after trivial encounter and then bam, uber boss and 2 hours or hair pulling retries later I'm ejecting the disk.

Am I doing something wrong? Any strategies? I think my party are around level 14 or 15.


Well grinding has been around since the earliest JRPG, so its not really new if you have to level up abit more to survive a boss encounter you know? Either that or just rexamine weaknesses of the boss or the way you're going about killing em.
 

Teknoman

Member
deadairis said:
Like I said -- really disappointed in LO. Not a terrible game, but they played it about a decade too safe with the gameplay.

Im curious, what did Blue Dragon do better than Lost Odyssey?
 

FFChris

Member
I've played about 8 hours into Lost Odyssey, and it's excellent so far.

The thousand year dream text based stories sound like they'll be crap, but are really good.
The characters are great, especially Jensen, that guy has some great lines.
Enviroments are great, as are the graphics. Though there are occasional framerate drops.

The difficulty, it doesn't seem that bad to me. For the second boss
just attack it with its opposite element, water.
I've really enjoyed the difficulty of the game, not too challenging, not easy though.

Overall, seems an extremely solid JRPG so far. If you expect something mindblowing you'll be disappointed, but if you go in with an open mind you'll really enjoy the game.

Edit: Random encounters aren't much of an issue, as the encounter rate in most places is pretty low.
 

deadairis

Member
Teknoman said:
Im curious, what did Blue Dragon do better than Lost Odyssey?

Competence beyond the core design. I wasn't a huge fan of Blue Dragon, but it was utterly competent beyond just balancing hit points, magic points, damage output, and encounter timing.
And although it took more than a dozen hours, Blue Dragon did eventually start demanding something a bit more difficult than balancing a spreadsheet in combat.
 

sega4ever

Member
deadairis said:
Competence beyond the core design. I wasn't a huge fan of Blue Dragon, but it was utterly competent beyond just balancing hit points, magic points, damage output, and encounter timing.
And although it took more than a dozen hours, Blue Dragon did eventually start demanding something a bit more difficult than balancing a spreadsheet in combat.

were you playing on hard mode?
 

tak

Member
Has there been any word on a demo? This game has grabbed my interest, but I'm still not sure if I want to take the plunge.
 

Alex

Member
Where were all of the anti-turn based and classical people when Dragon Quest VIII came out? I remember certain people humping that and dropping 9's on it like no tommorow. It's a glorious game, DW1 was like my second or third game as a kid altogether and it's what got me into the genre, but it's hardly a tour de force of anything but a ton of hyper polished archaic conventions for genre nerds.

Granted, I really know betetr than to read reviews period, let alone RPG reviews from mainstream US pubs, but still

Also, I am a cult Suikoden fan, and I recall Suikoden V getting a near perfect score on Gamesspy, since that was posted... I'm not arguing quality, as I haven't played LO, but Suikoden V is a love song to Suikoden II, and thus is absurdly rooted in it's glorious classical nature. Different reviewers probably, I'm sure, but it'd be nice to see sites attempt to feign consistency.

There's just absolutely no logic to RPG reviews here in the west some times. It's like a bunch of this shit gets by on writers vying for some awkward internet cred on things like SMT and DQ.

Either that or they just wore all their 8-10 stamps out on the fucking eighty four million FPS's last year, most of which, gasp, play like they're ten years old!
 
Alex said:
Where were all of the anti-turn based and classical people when Dragon Quest VIII came out? I remember certain people humping that and dropping 9's on it like no tommorow. It's a glorious game, DW1 was like my second or third game as a kid altogether and it's what got me into the genre, but it's hardly a tour de force of anything but a ton of hyper polished archaic conventions for genre nerds.

Granted, I really know betetr than to read reviews period, let alone RPG reviews from mainstream US pubs, but still

Also, I am a cult Suikoden fan, and I recall Suikoden V getting a near perfect score on Gamesspy, since that was posted... I'm not arguing quality, as I haven't played LO, but Suikoden V is a love song to Suikoden II, and thus is absurdly rooted in it's glorious classical nature. Different reviewers probably, I'm sure, but it'd be nice to see sites attempt to feign consistency.

There's just absolutely no logic to RPG reviews here in the west some times. It's like a bunch of this shit gets by on writers vying for some awkward internet cred on things like SMT and DQ.

Either that or they just wore all their 8-10 stamps out on the fucking eighty four million FPS's last year, most of which, gasp, play like they're ten years old!

Ok...how many years ago was Suikoden V? And on what system?

This game is fantastic, dont get me wrong, but I stand by my stance that while incredible, Lost Odyssey plays like a PS2 2006 RPG.

Oh and SMT is nothing like DQ, or for the sake of argument, LO.
 
um, a 2006 PS2 RPG plays exactly like a 2002 PS2 RPG, which plays like a 1998 square PSOne rpg. whats the fucking difference? if you like that type of game then you like it. you shouldn't have to make excuses
 
DQVIII can get away with being turn-based because it's a DQ game, not that there is anything wrong with turn based rpgs. i don't think blue dragon is in the same league as persona 3 and vp2 tho.

i want to like and play this game but i absolutely detest random encounters, especially coupled with bad load times. >.>
 
FrenchMovieTheme said:
um, a 2006 PS2 RPG plays exactly like a 2002 PS2 RPG, which plays like a 1998 square PSOne rpg. whats the fucking difference? if you like that type of game then you like it. you shouldn't have to make excuses

Ok fine, so LO plays like PSOne Square rpg? I said I enjoyed the game, an opinion on gameplay isn't an excuse darling.
 

Alex

Member
XHitoshuraX said:
Ok...how many years ago was Suikoden V? And on what system?

This game is fantastic, dont get me wrong, but I stand by my stance that while incredible, Lost Odyssey plays like a PS2 2006 RPG.

Oh and SMT is nothing like DQ, or for the sake of argument, LO.

I didn't say SMT was like DQ

Plays like a 2006 PS2 RPG? Is that supposed to be bad? I think that's when Valkyrie Profile 2 came out. There's nothing you can do on 360 that you cannot do on PS2 in terms of gameplay, and LO came out in 2007.

That said, I thought the argument raised against LO was that it played like an old FF game? That's where my question came in, DQVIII just came out a little while ago, and it plays like it's from 1986. What exactly happened there that made it so exempt to what BD and LO are getting reamed by?

It's not just the traditional turn based either. Tales is an old series, Star Ocean is an old series, it's all old, just being of the traditional nature doesn't make it worse to a lot of people.

It also seems like an arguement squarely rooted to JRPG's. Bioware games are further and further busted derivatives of what they were back in the 90's as well, unless you wanna tell me slapping a Gears of War skin with terrible gunplay and AI somehow aided mass effect.

Then there's shit like Halo 3 multi player raving, I recall doing the same thing, only far more fun and with a larger scale back on the Tribes.

I'm not trying to knuckle down on any game in specific to call it old or dated, I want to know what happened in the last year to make everything without guns suck.
 
Ok fine, so LO plays like PSOne Square rpg? I said I enjoyed the game, an opinion on gameplay isn't an excuse darling.

i don't know, i haven't played it, but from the videos it is basically similar to a standard turn based RPG. the same RPG's we've been playing for 10+ years. i don't think most people who like j-rpg's play them for their wildly innovative gameplay.... at least i don't! that's what john madden is for!

madden 09 is coming bitches! confirmed by EA!
 

deadairis

Member
Himuro said:
I don't know what happened either. They loved DQVIII, DDS2, SuikoV, Persona 3, VP2...but for some reason they find games like Blue Dragon lesser quality. I guess it's the next gen effect.

Anyways I'm pumped for this game and it needs to come out right now. I'd love a demo.


It's a good example, especially since I did the Persona 3 review (and gave it a fairly glowing 4.5). I think I covered most of the issues with Lost Odyssey in my review (here). It's not the "next-gen effect" so much as the "not as good as last-gen games" effects. It's entirely possible to do classical style games and not do tired, broken down gameplay. Lost Odyssey, in particular, could have given the option to move battles a bit faster (even just by cutting animations), could have done something a bit more complex and compelling than "casters in back, hitters in front, hit as hard as you can and heal carefully," or could have had a story that wasn't a mash-up of other, better stories and themes.

It's not an atrocity of a game, but it's not as good as it could have -- and should have -- been.
 

Alex

Member
DQVIII can get away with being turn-based because it's a DQ game

Then that is absolutely fucking retarded, and I assure you I am a far, far bigger DQ fan than most. Got the first one on the NP giveaway, bought all the NES games, I adore the franchise, but like I said, it feels like certain shit just gets by so the terrible, horrible, no good very bad writers that helm modern sites and mags can try to gain credibility with the cult bases.
 
Just saw Lost Odyssey commercial on Cartoon Network!

Glad to see Microsoft learning their lesson and finally advertising their Japanese titles because they surely didn't advertise Blue Dragon nearly enough over here in the USA or Europe.
 

Surfheart

Member
FFChris said:
The difficulty, it doesn't seem that bad to me. For the second boss
just attack it with its opposite element, water.
I've really enjoyed the difficulty of the game, not too challenging, not easy though.

Yeah I realised that the second boss
is fire based, but so far Jansen doesn't seem to have the Aqua spell even though he has Lvl 2 black magic.
I've been anally searching every inch of the map and kicking over bins too.
 
Picking this up on day one... need to make room in the budget. Still just going to import the Asia version if the U.S. doesn't have a Japanese language track.
 
chinmonster said:
Picking this up on day one... need to make room in the budget. Still just going to import the Asia version if the U.S. doesn't have a Japanese language track.

I want the Asian version just for the boxart, but I have a US 360 =*(


here's hoping for a region free one from Playasia in the future
 
AgentOtaku said:
I want the Asian version just for the boxart, but I have a US 360 =*(


here's hoping for a region free one from Playasia in the future

Don't sweat not having a J-360... It comes in handy, oh, maybe once a year.
 

Aaron

Member
chinmonster said:
Picking this up on day one... need to make room in the budget. Still just going to import the Asia version if the U.S. doesn't have a Japanese language track.
US version will have five vocal tracks, including Japanese.
 
Top Bottom