UK Release Date: 29-02-2008
Platforms: XBox 360
Publisher: Microsoft
Price: £44.99

Hironobu Sakaguchi's vast new role-playing game lives up to
expectations: the man who created the Final Fantasy franchise has hooked up with Microsoft to create a traditional fantasy RPG for the Xbox, perhaps the first heavyweight attempt for the platform, and the result is a beautifully detailed, richly plotted adventure.

Players take charge of Kaim, a wandering immortal warrior, who's spent the past 1000 years as a hired sword. Blighted by amnesia, haunted by half-remembered fragments of his past, he is a rarity in Japanese role-playing games, a psychologically complex, certified bad-ass who seems to care less about storming the castle and saving the princess than about finding some place to hide from his demons. The other characters who join your team, both those that the player controls and NPCs, also largely buck cutesy stereotypes. Kiyoshi Shigematsu, a sci-fi and fantasy author of some renown in his native Japan was brought in to work on the storyline of Lost Odyssey, and his influence shines. Dark shadows haunt this universe, political as well as monstrous.

Like the Final Fantasy titles, this is a game with lots of cut-screens, especially in the first third of the action. While this may prove taxing for the impatient gamer, there is a lot of background to establish, a lot of ground rules to go through, and patience pays off. Besides, the cut-screens are gorgeously designed and animated, the voice acting is good and there is excellent use of text to explain some of the plot lines.

To the gameplay. Fight sequences are, of course, turn based, but Lost Odyssey's designers have introduced a nice tweak: you set up the types of attack that each of your characters will perform, but in the animated screens where the attack plays out there's a chance to hit and release one of the trigger buttons. Time it right and you'll perform a critical hit. It's not super-complex, and once it's been mastered you can nail it almost every time, but it makes combat more than the passive, watch-and-hope experience that it is in most turn-based RPGs.

Of course, you don't buy this sort of game for button mashing, but rather for its scope, size and storyline. Lost Odyssey scores highly in each of these regards. It's huge, for a start, with about 50 hours of core gameplay as well as 20 or more hours of side quests to bury yourself in.

There's been some grumbling about the load times, but this reviewer found them no great chore. Likewise, some preview-players have raised eyebrows at how traditional the game is. Lost Odyssey sits firmly in the tradition of its Final Fantasy forefathers. The bosses are winged and beastly, the music is symphonic and the plot is epic. But that's surely the reason fans of RPGs keep coming back for more. If you are a fan, dive in. Hours of fun await.