Lost Odyssey review

On the other hand, if you're used to action-oriented RPGs, these interesting ring-making and Immortal-nurturing exercises can be a frustrating mix of stop-and-go combat and overwrought cutscenes.

After every other battle or so, you’ve got to halt, open up the menu and start tweaking away and forging new rings. Failure to keep up this maintenance screws you when you get to a boss- and for a game that’s generous with its checkpoints, it’s still a pain to get sent back even five minutes. Tack on way too many long cutscenes (many of which are back-to-back), plus some cheap thrills aimed at adventure gamers (sneaking missions, puzzles), and some players might begin feeling downright insulted by Lost Odyssey.

Above: We spent 20 hours just wishing we could get that hair off his face

That, more than anything, is why Lost Odyssey isn’t a great game- it’s just too tedious. The opening of the game is literally two hours of cutscenes mixed with a few instances of you making Kaim walk across a pretty environment. It doesn’t help matters that the load times are ridiculously long. And just when you think you can finally get down to some real adventuring, Kaim will look at something and cry, triggering a cutscene about his memories.

If you don’t skip these scenes, you’re treated to 10 screens of nothing but text, telling you some random snippet about Kaim’s past that has nothing to do with the game. After a while, you'll start to feel like you’re reading a book instead of playing a game. It’s true that many RPGs start out slow- but Lost Odyssey takes about 8 hours to get past the training dungeon and even then, you’re still triggering long cutscenes and tutorials at least once every 15 minutes. Four disks of this and most people will be ripping their hair out and to hell with how you like your RPGs.