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| Pollyanna 2413th Post
 
Platinum Carpet V.I.P- Board Master
    
    
    
    
    
|  "Re(10): Thread Derailer Rearmed" , posted Mon 21 Jan 20:35
WARNING: This has NOTHING to do with Bionic Commando. If you aren't Maou, or you aren't interested in random Lost Odyssey ramblings, please keep scrolling. Forgive me for robbing you of the time it took to read this.
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And lately I'm an enabler. Let me get my revenge for my derailed Miyazawa Kenji topic (I found what I hear a good translation to give to someone) by asking more about my man Sakaguchi's Lost Odyssey and how it's so (last disc aside) wonderful that I should brave a Japanese xbox360 and follow Fred's advice get a warranty from somewhere big like Bic Camera and wander around the world with it to places where it would be far too expensive to return it even if it broke.
What, are you asking me to babble about LO some more? I'll give you the "potpourri medley ultra rambling edition", then.
The extra, option stuff is very nice, because it's easy to get into. I found the optional maze especially...uhm...wonderful? Terrible? Wonderfully terrible? Every encounter is practically like a boss fight, and the concept of the maze was really crazy, because you kind of had to think in 3D.
Instead of being divided into floors and rooms, the maze was just two giant rooms with 3 levels (like floors) each. You had all these moving platforms, then rotating platforms that moved both horizontally and vertically, so you had to think about what you were effecting above, below and all around you. It drove me insane, but it was deviously clever.
That was my greatest joy on the otherwise lackluster 4th disk. It's like...the game is fantastic and fantastic and fantastic, then it has some mind-blowing half hour FMV super disaster extravaganza where you're just exhausted from watching it. (that's a good thing)
Then it splits the team up and you have to suffer through hours of boring fights (because you don't have a full team!) only to find that there's no interesting plot developments left by the time you all get back together. If they would have answered some of the burning questions they left you with at the end of the game, they could have supported themselves to the end, rather than collapsing under their own weight.
Since I'm rambling, I'll say that the villain is completely uninteresting, but amazing to watch all the same, because of how well his face animates. He does these...things with his eyes and eyebrows that I really get a kick out of. By virtue of artistry alone, even the less interesting characters end up with a subtle depth to them.
Uhm...what else? The last boss theme is neat, because it's a hard rock song with a chorus on top of it, then taiko drums, then like this...weird talking/rapping...then they combine it all, and it's totally awesome.
On a final note, although I'm not in the "turn based is outdated" or "random encounters ruin a game" crowd, both elements can easily be game-ruining. In so many RPGs, I've felt like every enemy encounter is just an obstacle to seeing more of the plot (the later Suikoden games are especially guilty of this).
Fortunately, in LO the battles are very well paced. The encounter rate is extremely low, but the fights themselves take longer than usual in RPGs. By the time you've reached the end of each dungeon, you've gotten enough EXP that the enemies don't give it to you anymore, and you're ready for your next set of monsters.
Since you have to pay attention in each battle, casting time is always a consideration (a very nice addition) and you can tweak so much with skills and such, the game never felt monotonous. It also helps that they hardly recycled enemies at all. That's almost unheard of in games these days where you generally have 5 enemies that get color changes or slight mods from the beginning to end.
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| Pollyanna 2414th Post
Platinum Carpet V.I.P- Board Master
| "Re(3):Re(10): Thread Derailer Rearmed" , posted Tue 22 Jan 11:12
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I'm excited to hear about the fun of the random battles. The only thing about the demo from TGS or whatever that didn't impress me was that the fights looked pretty...simple and old. If there's fewer of them but they're fun and involved, I'm completely happy with that. Lunar~Eternal Blue (Mega CD version especially) entertains me to this day with the field-distance strategy of its random battles, and the crushingly high encounter rate of the Phantasy Star II Sega Ages remake I'm playing now is outweighed by the fact that the battles are incredibly difficult and fun.
So, basically I need to wait for a hardware redesign or wait for the 360 to utterly fail (even more...getting surpassed by PS3 is pretty sad) so that I can get it dirt-cheap and buy it just for Lost Odyssey, I guess?
You mean the demo where all you could do was attack, because it was the beginning of the game and you just had Kaim (who only learns moves from other characters)? That was...yeah...they shouldn't have shown that.
You must be really selective if there's NOTHING else you want on 360. There's always Blue Dragon, too! It's roughly as good as LO, and certainly good for Chrono Trigger fans (unless you're one of those fans that would be insulted to think that it could ever replace CT, which really isn't what I'm trying to say).
Or you know, there's always Bionic Commando.
But it seems like you're on a really limited budget or something. I always wondered about that. Do you have a criminally low paying job, or expensive apartment payments, or a greedy girlfriend or something? You're not in college, are you?
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| Maou 1345th Post
Red Carpet Executive Member
| "Re(4):Re(10): Thread Derailer Rearmed" , posted Tue 22 Jan 11:53
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But it seems like you're on a really limited budget or something. I always wondered about that. Do you have a criminally low paying job, or expensive apartment payments, or a greedy girlfriend or something? You're not in college, are you?
Nah, I'm mostly just frugal as far as entertainment goes (in contrast to most friends), especially since I'm only just out of school and since by tradition I pay very little for games----about 90 percent of the games I own were bought used from Book Off or from the famous big black treasure warehouse in Gunma.
For the 360 it's an especially big problem since these things seem to be exceptionally, mind-bogglingly poorly made. Since I only really play games in Japanese, it doesn't make much sense for me to get anything but a Japanese one, but since it will surely break, I can't very well go anywhere besides Japan to have it fixed, nor can I be paying to ship it around the world to wherever I might get its warrenty fulfilled. A quandary! Especially since MistWalker is literally the only thing that I want the system for.
But I'm glad to hear your thoughts on LO, which sounds like just what I need.
Heh. What is this Bionic Commando?
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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