Nick Taylor travelled to Paris to meet some of the development talent behind the legendary Hironobu Sakaguchi’s latest game, a fantasy role playing epic for the Xbox 360.

In 1987, Hironobu Sakaguchi was a lowly games designer for Japanese software firm Square. He’d been designing games for years but, so far, none of his titles had sold well. He decided to have one final stab at it before quitting the industry, so he created the game that he’d always dreamed of making, a last attempt at designing his perfect title. He called it Final Fantasy and it became an instant and enormous hit.

After working on a dozen Final Fantasy sequels, which have sold 80 million copies around the world, Sakaguchi is these days renowned as one of the godfathers of computer games. For the past four years, he’s been working with Microsoft at the Mistwalker studio on another vast fantasy Role Playing Game that aims to throw the weight of the Xbox 360 behind his unique imagination and games experience.

The result, Lost Odyssey, will be the largest RPG ever to be released on the Xbox. Four discs deliver over 70 hours of gameplay, with 30 boss battles and hours of eye-watering, painfully detailed character scenes. The player takes charge of Kaim, an immortal warrior with no memory. For the past 1,000 years, he’s been roaming around a quasi-historical realm, lost in an existential morass. The things he’s seen and done have left him with a patchy memory and a bad case of depression. Haunted by fragmented dreams of the past, he’s like a shell-shocked version of the Highlander – a suggestion I put to Daisuke Fukugawa, the director of Lost Odyssey, and Takehiro Kaminagayoshi, its production manager, when I went to Paris for an early look at the title.

Fukugawa agreed the Highlander movie franchise was one of the many influences on the game.
“All of Mr Sakaguchi’s games go through many years of development,” he said. “There is always a richness to the worlds that are created in his games, one that draws on hundreds of influences. Before we start working on the story, we create an entire civilisation, and from that we cut out the plot of the game.”

Lost Odyssey was part-scripted by Kiyoshi Shigematsu, an award-winning Japanese novelist. This is the first time he’s turned his hand to the format, and the presence of such a respected writer attests to the clout Sakaguchi wields.
“Shigematsu was given almost complete control of the story,” said Fukugawa. “Mr Sakaguchi only had one premise – that the hero lived 1,000 years. That was key, but the rest was left up to Mr Shigematsu.”

The result should be that Lost Odyssey boasts a considerably more mature storyline than most Japanese RPGs. The hero is complex; the backdrop is politically intriguing and the other player- and non-player-characters rise above the dopey clowns that populate many similar Japanese titles.
“We wanted to make an epic, to create a profound experience,” said Fukugawa. “The main character has lived many lives already, and tasted every side of the human character – the good and the bad. He’s bitter from his experience, and the civilisation we created around him is somewhat broken and corrupt.”

Lost Odyssey takes place against a backdrop familiar from traditional RPGs; it’s a world of swords and dragons, gold pieces and the clink of chain mail. However, there is a twist. A few years prior to the action, the discovery of ‘magical energy’ has led to a ‘Magical Industrial Revolution’, causing the rapid development of hybrid mystical technology. On the surface, this Magical Industrial Revolution changed the game’s world for the better, but it’s clear from its early stages that some nasty truth is being covered up by those at the top. Outside the pleasant cities, battlefields are strewn with limbs. Vast wars are taking place, and seem to have been grinding on for years – the battle scenes that kick the game off are a showcase of just what the Xbox 360 can do when it’s kicked up to 11.

It seems from this early look as if huge amounts of the game’s story – perhaps as much as half – take place over cut-screens. Takehiro Kaminagayoshi told me that as you get further into the game there is more live action but, after all, this is a Sakaguchi title, which means there was always going to be a high proportion of the game that you watch, rather than play. The designers have worked in at least one live-action element to the combat. It’s turn-based, like most RPGs, so you select what each member of your party is going to do and then sit back and watch them do it. However, hitting the trigger button at the right time creates a critical hit, which does more damage.

Lost Odyssey is slated for a 29 February release, and if the game plays out with the complexity and attention to detail of the early stages I got to see, it looks set to be the first truly successful Xbox role player, and one that might actually raise the bar for fantasy RPGs across all platforms.