If The Last of Us is a "Citizen Kane moment in videogames", then Lost Odyssey is the "Waterworld moment in videogames", because this has to be one of the biggest scale failures i've ever played.
Had to drop this bad boy 9 hours in. The dialogue is dogshit, and there is A LOT of it. You'll think David Cage is David Mamet after this thing. Voice acting is dogshit, especially by one of the central characters that talks the most. Sound-mix is dogshit, at times you can't even hear what's being said. Sometimes actors are mumbling, other times it's a sound mixing issue, frequently it's both. Facial animations are straight from SIMS 2, but the camera is right in their face. The game pretends to have some cinematic aspirations it has no business at even beginning to pull off. The whole thing is in engine too, so it didn't have a common sense to help itself with some neat looking pre-rendered splendour. Next to something like MGS 4, which came around the same time and had the same cinematic ambitions, this looks like dumpster time.
It's a shame, though, because this game has many good things going for it. I didn't mind the gameplay, though the game is not balanced very well and has some insane difficulty spikes early on. I liked the music and art direction. I very much enjoyed how visual novel sections were done, and there is a clear difference between the writing in those and the rest of the game. The stories and atmosphere in these are sublime and are truly something to behold. To the point that i wish they were the main storytelling device. Everything else could go straight into shredder. The writing in this game is so terrible, i couldn't believe my own perception of reality.
I have limited experience with major 3d JRPGs, so maybe horrible dialogue and deplorable voice acting is par for the course, in which case i gotta say nope to that genre. It's probably not that dystopian, but this here is some aggressively annoying stuff that is fully deserving of it's obscurity. If this game became a hit, i would probably NOT harm myself (i had nothing to do with this game's advent in objective reality after all) but pretty plausibly lose my faith in humanity.
Had to drop this bad boy 9 hours in. The dialogue is dogshit, and there is A LOT of it. You'll think David Cage is David Mamet after this thing. Voice acting is dogshit, especially by one of the central characters that talks the most. Sound-mix is dogshit, at times you can't even hear what's being said. Sometimes actors are mumbling, other times it's a sound mixing issue, frequently it's both. Facial animations are straight from SIMS 2, but the camera is right in their face. The game pretends to have some cinematic aspirations it has no business at even beginning to pull off. The whole thing is in engine too, so it didn't have a common sense to help itself with some neat looking pre-rendered splendour. Next to something like MGS 4, which came around the same time and had the same cinematic ambitions, this looks like dumpster time.
It's a shame, though, because this game has many good things going for it. I didn't mind the gameplay, though the game is not balanced very well and has some insane difficulty spikes early on. I liked the music and art direction. I very much enjoyed how visual novel sections were done, and there is a clear difference between the writing in those and the rest of the game. The stories and atmosphere in these are sublime and are truly something to behold. To the point that i wish they were the main storytelling device. Everything else could go straight into shredder. The writing in this game is so terrible, i couldn't believe my own perception of reality.
I have limited experience with major 3d JRPGs, so maybe horrible dialogue and deplorable voice acting is par for the course, in which case i gotta say nope to that genre. It's probably not that dystopian, but this here is some aggressively annoying stuff that is fully deserving of it's obscurity. If this game became a hit, i would probably NOT harm myself (i had nothing to do with this game's advent in objective reality after all) but pretty plausibly lose my faith in humanity.