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xannosideWell, the conclusion is I'm pretty bad at keeping up with LJ, and even worse at posting. In any case, I felt that this was a pretty good opportunity to get a couple more reviews in, especially for a couple of games that old-school Final Fantasy fans have been waiting for:
Lost Odyssey for the Xbox 360
Short Review: For old-school JRPG fans, this is the game you've been waiting for. For everyone else, it's worth the play if you don't mind the old battle systems.
Actually Hironobu Sakaguchi isn't only the creator if Chrono Trigger. He has either been involved, directly and indirectly, with pretty much every single Square Soft game for the last 20 years, specifically as game producer and director of Final Fantasy I-VI and President of Square since 1995. Anyways, he started his own company, Mistwalker, to get back into the game-making seat in 2002, and Lost Odyssey is one of the results.
Big picture? There's a couple things that stand out immediately, and you can trace it directly back to the games that Sakaguchi had a direct hand in.
This guy is from the era of Final Fantasy before their protagonists became a bunch of whiny, spikey-haired, emo-kids with too many zippers, and as a result, Lost Odyssey's Kaim is possibly the most interesting (and least irritating) protagonist created by a (former) Square Soft person since Ashley Riot rhythmically stabbed people in the face.
It might be because he, like Ashley, almost never talks.
The graphics are absurdly pretty. It's like watching a movie. The character designer was Takehiko Inoue. Those of you who may have read Slam Dunk, Real, or Vagabond, have seen his style before, and combined with the power of the 360, makes for some really impressive-looking character models.
The battle-system is basically old-school turn-based. No action bars, no real-time combat, even the order of combat system introduced in FFX is mostly there for edification and serves very little actual purpose.
So the question is, do you prefer the old-school systems or the quicker, generally more complicated, real-time systems now prevalent in both FFXII and Bioware's Mass Effect? If it's the former, this system is like a comfortable walk down memory lane. If it's the latter, this could be a very irritating game to play. Personally, I'm closer to the former, but I've played enough of the latter to notice how it could be annoying.
The story seems interesting, but there are major pacing issues; the game starts with, well, an enormous bang, and then comes screeching to an almost immediate halt, and this cycle repeats throughout at least Disk 1. It's somewhat disappointing because this was not the case with the games that Sakaguchi was known for. Still, the story overall holds its interest and the mouthy jester-like character-role has been reduced, finally, to a secondary character again.
Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core for the Sony PSP.
Short Review: A story that every Final Fantasy VII-fan has wanted to hear for over a decade, slapped on top of a decent, if not especially well-balanced game.
Gamers may have not quite forgiven Sony and Square Soft for the FF7-remake gotcha in 2005, and Dirge of Cerebrus was apparently awful, but this is the game that is supposed to make up for it.
And it does, more or less.
The story is the biggest draw here, telling the tale of how Zack (known best for his support role in Cloud, Aerith, and Sepiroth's backstories in FF7) became a member of SOLDIER and met all the other main players (and most of the secondary ones) in FF7. The voice-acting is really spot-on, and the script is even decent. Square has moved a long way past FFX, where you were skipping dialog just to get to the end of the damn scene.
The big deal is that Sepiroth wasn't the first SOLDIER to go totally nucking futs, and you spend most of the beginning of the game investigating how this happened.
The battle system is radically different from most Square Games. Zack fights by himself with no other party-members. You select his actions, in-real time, from a list using the R/L buttons, but the real combat engine is almost entirely random, as Zack's limit breaks and combat bonuses and whether he goes up in level or not are selected at random via a 3-slot lottery system in the upper left. It takes some getting used to, and but once you are, battles flow very quickly and it will take a major boss to even make Zack blink.
The graphics are decent for a PSP game, and hey, last time we saw them in a game was in FF7...so the comparison can't even be made.
Lost Odyssey for the Xbox 360
Short Review: For old-school JRPG fans, this is the game you've been waiting for. For everyone else, it's worth the play if you don't mind the old battle systems.
Actually Hironobu Sakaguchi isn't only the creator if Chrono Trigger. He has either been involved, directly and indirectly, with pretty much every single Square Soft game for the last 20 years, specifically as game producer and director of Final Fantasy I-VI and President of Square since 1995. Anyways, he started his own company, Mistwalker, to get back into the game-making seat in 2002, and Lost Odyssey is one of the results.
Big picture? There's a couple things that stand out immediately, and you can trace it directly back to the games that Sakaguchi had a direct hand in.
This guy is from the era of Final Fantasy before their protagonists became a bunch of whiny, spikey-haired, emo-kids with too many zippers, and as a result, Lost Odyssey's Kaim is possibly the most interesting (and least irritating) protagonist created by a (former) Square Soft person since Ashley Riot rhythmically stabbed people in the face.
It might be because he, like Ashley, almost never talks.
The graphics are absurdly pretty. It's like watching a movie. The character designer was Takehiko Inoue. Those of you who may have read Slam Dunk, Real, or Vagabond, have seen his style before, and combined with the power of the 360, makes for some really impressive-looking character models.
The battle-system is basically old-school turn-based. No action bars, no real-time combat, even the order of combat system introduced in FFX is mostly there for edification and serves very little actual purpose.
So the question is, do you prefer the old-school systems or the quicker, generally more complicated, real-time systems now prevalent in both FFXII and Bioware's Mass Effect? If it's the former, this system is like a comfortable walk down memory lane. If it's the latter, this could be a very irritating game to play. Personally, I'm closer to the former, but I've played enough of the latter to notice how it could be annoying.
The story seems interesting, but there are major pacing issues; the game starts with, well, an enormous bang, and then comes screeching to an almost immediate halt, and this cycle repeats throughout at least Disk 1. It's somewhat disappointing because this was not the case with the games that Sakaguchi was known for. Still, the story overall holds its interest and the mouthy jester-like character-role has been reduced, finally, to a secondary character again.
Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core for the Sony PSP.
Short Review: A story that every Final Fantasy VII-fan has wanted to hear for over a decade, slapped on top of a decent, if not especially well-balanced game.
Gamers may have not quite forgiven Sony and Square Soft for the FF7-remake gotcha in 2005, and Dirge of Cerebrus was apparently awful, but this is the game that is supposed to make up for it.
And it does, more or less.
The story is the biggest draw here, telling the tale of how Zack (known best for his support role in Cloud, Aerith, and Sepiroth's backstories in FF7) became a member of SOLDIER and met all the other main players (and most of the secondary ones) in FF7. The voice-acting is really spot-on, and the script is even decent. Square has moved a long way past FFX, where you were skipping dialog just to get to the end of the damn scene.
The big deal is that Sepiroth wasn't the first SOLDIER to go totally nucking futs, and you spend most of the beginning of the game investigating how this happened.
The battle system is radically different from most Square Games. Zack fights by himself with no other party-members. You select his actions, in-real time, from a list using the R/L buttons, but the real combat engine is almost entirely random, as Zack's limit breaks and combat bonuses and whether he goes up in level or not are selected at random via a 3-slot lottery system in the upper left. It takes some getting used to, and but once you are, battles flow very quickly and it will take a major boss to even make Zack blink.
The graphics are decent for a PSP game, and hey, last time we saw them in a game was in FF7...so the comparison can't even be made.
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no subject
on 2008-03-31 02:53 pm (UTC)