Photo by Dan Siney
LOST ODYSSEY
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Goddamnit, when I first started playing Lost Odyssey I was all fired up to write a review about how Hironobu Sakaguchi has lost his touch, but then, before the first disc ended, the game completely turned around and now I love it. Being proved wrong sucks, although in this case it also rocks. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Lost Odyssey is the latest JRPG by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the guy who created the Final Fantasy series and directed, produced, or executive-produced all FF games from I through X-2, at which time he stepped down from Squaresoft (this was before they became Square-Enix) for reasons relating, as I understand it, to the box-office flop of the film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. He then went on to found Mistwalker and is now busy creating JRPGs for the Xbox 360, the first of which was Blue Dragon, which I did not like. Lost Odyssey is a big improvement.
The game’s protagonist is Kaim, an initially dour immortal amnesiac. Already we’ve entered the Land of Clichés, and at first, he embodies the archetype established by Cloud Strife and Squall Leonhart. The major difference between a Final Fantasy game and Lost Odyssey (and I wish I could figure out how to hint at this in a way that leaves it unambiguous without sounding like a spoiler, but we can’t have everything) is that Kaim actually gets over himself early on, in a scene that makes it apparent why he is so dour. He has an arc that doesn’t just consist of angsting like a fuckhead through 90 percent of the game and then learning to treasure his friends in time for the big confrontation at the end. (Or, to put it another way, it’s a game about adults instead of postadolescents.) None of this is apparent at the beginning, and until the scene in question, which I will not spoil, I was convinced it was just going to be Cloud Strife all over again.
A great deal of the game consists of “A Thousand Years of Memories,” a series of short stories with fuzzy background images and accompanying sound effects, triggered when Kaim sees something that jogs his memory. These short stories are a pleasure to read, and although they do tend to harp on the same theme over and over again (“Everyone but Kaim can live and raise families and grow old and die and be reunited with their dead loved ones”), they do it intelligently and with variety.
There’s nothing new here, but I haven’t seen it done this well before. It could have been a terrible morass of everything that’s ever been mediocre about Final Fantasy games, but instead it somehow turned into a fairly somber, legitimately mature, and at times moving reflection on the value and fragility of life.
Now’s the part where I explain the problems, and they all spring from one: The game is agonizingly slow, especially to start. It requires an investment of time and attention to get anything out of it, and when I say investment, I mean you won’t get anything back from it immediately. Going to Lost Odyssey after Devil May Cry 4 felt like slogging through molasses. This, together with Kaim’s personality at the beginning of the game, the absurd difficulty of the first boss, and the ridiculous helmets of the army Kaim is fighting alongside during the opening cinematic, initially convinced me I would hate it forever, and I only kept playing it because I had to.
I’m very, very glad I did.
I’m trying not to say too much, because it’s best if you discover it on your own. It’s got a boozing, whoring, endearing rake of a secondary character who’s a laugh riot, and a couple of early plot twists that most games would save for the final act. It’s got absolutely beautiful depth-of-field effects. It has much better Nobuo Uematsu music than Blue Dragon did. It also has its downs, like an inconsistent frame rate and one character in particular who looks like he’s drawn by Akira Toriyama amid a cast otherwise designed, or so it would seem, by Yoshitaka Amano. And those stupid helmets.
But my opinion of it overall is very high. If you’re familiar with the JRPG genre you’ll almost certainly like this one, and if you’re unaccustomed to games of this pace, try renting it and playing through the first disc. Don’t give up too early—it rewards those who stick with it.
BURNOUT PARADISE
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Electronic Arts
This game is really easy. Not in terms of play challenge—it’s a driving game so it’s kicking my ass as usual—but in terms of interface. There are no obstacles whatsoever: no “achieve rank X to unlock neighborhood Y,” no plot to progress through, no currency, not even event-select menus. The whole map is open from the beginning, you enter events by hitting gas and brake simultaneously at intersections, you earn new cars by running them off the road, and you can start big 100-car pileups whenever you want and exit them to go back to racing just as easily. You recover from totaling your car fast enough that you can do it three times in a race and still take first place (if you’re better than me). It’s the most sandbox-y open-world sandbox game I’ve ever played—it’s like a collection of mini-games. At one point I started driving against traffic and dodging oncoming cars just for the hell of it, and after a few moments realized that the designers had anticipated players doing that, and the game was scoring me for distance traveled and number of near-misses.
On the one hand, having access to the whole game from the beginning is refreshing compared with the last few driving games I’ve played. Being able to plug Burnout Paradise into the console and do anything is great compared with hours of grinding for the best lap time or enough cash to buy the next batch of cars in, say, Project Gotham Racing 4. On the other hand, I’m not sure how long it’ll hold my interest, because I already feel like I’ve seen everything it has to show me, and I’ve never cared about achievement points. Winning races doesn’t unlock new content in a direct way (though it does put new cars on the road for you to run down and claim), so what’s my motivation for playing?
Apparently, my motivation is that the music is good, SSX 3’s DJ Atomika is on the radio between songs, and the play experience is nearly meditative—every time I turn the game on, I blink and an hour has gone by.
I’d like to see more sandbox games adhere to Burnout Paradise’s design philosophy. In other words, I like it a lot.
STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD
