Has anyone here played this yet? I finished it awhile back, but I really really have to recommend it to anyone with a 360. It's done by mystwalker (or mistwalker whichever) which was founded by the original ff dev. It's a really really good game. It has old school ff written all over it. It's got the serious storyline of 4 with the battle system (minus ATB) and character count of 6 with the characters still meaning something to the story. Speaking of the story, it's quite heartfelt. If you play this game and don't feel any kind of twinge, you are not human. It started out very depressing and got more depressing, but progressively got less depressing. There weren't any characters that I didn't have some kind of attachment to in some way. It was hard to only pick 5 of them at once to use in battle. At least they all partook in cutscenes.
Anyway, you start playing as Kiam, an immortal who's lived for 1000 years, but has, for reasons yet unknown, lost his memory (cliché I know, but it works well for the story). It throws you right in the middle of an intense, and huge, battlefield. The characters are comprised of two types. Immortals and mortals. If immortals are knocked out, they will revive automatically in 2-3 turns provided you haven't already res'd them. Mortals are the only characters that can naturally learn skills. Once a mortal learns a skill, you can equip that skill to the immortal and after gaining a certain amount of SP you learn it (similar to the esper system in 6). There's also front and back row, but with a twist. The front row has a defense bar with 4 notches in it. It's total is the total of hp for the front row. The further it is drained, the more damage your back row will take. When it's full, the back row damage is almost nullified. Restoring hp to the front row, however, won't fill this bar back up. Only ending the battle or using skills that recharge it will bring it back in line with however much hp is left on the front row. Everyone gets a turn each round unless you are using a skill that takes multiple turns to cast. Even then, there are other skills that one character can use to dramatically speed up the casting of the previous.
The other really cool thing I found about this game were the dream sequences. Doing certain things can unlock memories in Kiam's past. These memories play out in a story book fashion. Not much for visuals. Just a heartfelt story accompanied by music and sound effects. They are rather powerful stories too. You can find an example of them on youtube very easily. None of them have anything to do directly with the plot. They just give you insight to the kind of person Kiam is and the people he's interacted with in his 1000 years.
Anyway, this was the first next-gen RPG I've finished in a long time. The last console rpg I remember actually finishing was probably FF10 or something to that effect. And on handheld ff4ds. There just hasn't been much in the rpg department lately that I've truely enjoyed like this one.
Topic: Lost Odyssey (Read 1890 times)