Thanks so much for voting in my poll! The turnout was actually greater than I expected, but it brought with it an unfortunate consequence. As you can see from the results below, I’m mired in a four-way tie.

In order to fairly decide what I play, since there was no majority, I’m going to assign a range of numbers to each title between 1 and 100 and, using the generator on RANDOM.org, I will decide what I play.

00-25 – Shadow of the Colossus
26-50 – Mother 3
51-75 – Chrono Trigger DS
76-100 – Final Fantasy IV DS

The result was: 69.

Looks like my next game will be Chrono Trigger DS and my next poll will have only three choices.

Hey loyal readers,

I need your help in deciding what game to play next. I haven’t quite gotten my polling software down, so here’s a nifty embedded poll instead.

Basically, I want to continue to write impressions about games that I’m playing, but I don’t know which one to move on to next. A little about each of the choices:

Earthbound (Mother 2)

A fantastic, Dragon Quest-inspired RPG series by Shigesato Itoi, Earthbound is fantastic, quirky, and interesting. I played this back when I was in middle school, but I think it deserves reexamining. Ideally I would be hooking up my SNES, which I still have, to get this to work, so that would be an adventure in and of itself.

Suikoden Tierkreis

I’ve never played any of Konami’s Suikoden RPG series, but this DS gaiden-type story is said to have a pretty neat narrative.

Shadow of the Colossus

Universally hailed by nearly every human being who has played it, this game is held in such high regard that it was featured in Reign Over Me because its themes of loss and regret actually coincided with those of the movie. I can only go on without playing a game by Ueda for so much longer.

Mother 3

Held in super-high regard by the likes of Tim Rogers, among many others, the third of the Mother series is chock full of the same light irreverence of Mother 2, but coupled with a somber, deep, dark, heavy story that is sure to tug at the heartstrings.

Chrono Trigger DS

The DS remake of my favorite 16-bit game, you can’t really go wrong with CT. Developed by a dream team collaboration between Square and Enix before they were Square Enix (Squeenix!), Chrono Trigger was the swan song of the 16-bit JRPG.

Final Fantasy IV DS

The Final Fantasy whose release immediately preceded (in the US) my favorite in the series, FFIV has eluded completion from me on multiple rentals. A fine game that I just haven’t had the time to ever finish.

There’s also the obvious choice that you don’t like this feature, which I won’t take personally. If no one likes it, why do it, right?

This poll will remain open until 0000 14 July whereupon I will either narrow it down further or, if one wins outright, simply play that game next.

You can get some of these games at my Amazon aStore!

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.

With every Final Fantasy game there exists great (and not so great) teams of heroes bent on saving the world from some sort of evil force. While we could take a look at those heroes, let’s instead take a look at the evils that motivate these heroes to do what they do.

It should be noted that this feature will be full of spoilers.

Week 1 – Garland
Week 2 – Emperor Mateus of Palamecia
Week 3 – The Cloud of Darkness
Week 4 – Zeromus
Week 5 – Exdeath
Week 6 – Kefka
Week 7 – Sephiroth
Week 8 – Ultimecia
Week 9 – Necron
Week 10 – Yu Yevon/Jecht/Sin

Last game was the first to bring voice acting to the series, but it also had another important distinction: the first direct sequel. Love it or hate it, the J-Pop fueled, girl power infused Final Fantasy X-2 will always be an important milestone in Final Fantasy history. In fact, one could claim that its success directly led to the Japanese sequel to Final Fantasy IV, creatively titled Final Fantasy IV the After: Tsuki no Kikan and other story continuing side games for Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy XII.

Unfortunately for gamers, FF X-2 was a strange take on Final Fantasy X, with a mission structure and an all-girl cast that just oozed fan service, especially when changing “dress spheres.” It also featured many directly recycled assets from Final Fantasy X, making the game seem like a tired retread of ground already coverred. However, the lame sounding, but fun dress sphere system along with a new Active Time Battle system made for a game that was fun to play, at the very least.

The events of X-2 are set in motion by a sphere containing video that just might be of Tidus. Yuna can’t let this go, so the game’s main questline begins. It turns out that this video is not Tidus, but a dude from the past by the name of Shuyin who Tidus was based on in that whole confusing Zanarkand dream world created by the Fayth. Shuyin had a bit of a problem, he was dating a girl who was a summoner, which wouldn’t be all that bad if his country wasn’t at war and she wasn’t called to the front lines. It gets even worse when she gets captured as a POW and he’s gotta figure out something to do to save her.

Shuyin’s brilliant idea, the Vegnagun, the even more brilliant weapon of the opposing forces designed, for some ingenious reason, to attack indiscriminately, killing friend and foe alike. Turns out this weapon has an even more intelligent weapon attached to it as well, one capable of destorying the entire world. His girlfriend, Lenne, convinces him not to destroy the world and they both get shot.

We get to the present and Shuyin’s possessed some modern dude and he’s trying to destroy Spira with the Vegnagun cause he’s sad. That’s pretty much it.

Evil Rating:

Emo != Evil. Never managed to kill anyone, but rather to get himself and his girlfriend killed.

1/10

Cool Rating:

He looks just like Tidus (-5). He plays Blitzball (-2). He got his girlfriend killed (-3). I can’t go negative (-0)

0/10

Images and Video:

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.

With every Final Fantasy game there exists great (and not so great) teams of heroes bent on saving the world from some sort of evil force. While we could take a look at those heroes, let’s instead take a look at the evils that motivate these heroes to do what they do.

It should be noted that this feature will be full of spoilers.

Week 1 – Garland
Week 2 – Emperor Mateus of Palamecia
Week 3 – The Cloud of Darkness
Week 4 – Zeromus
Week 5 – Exdeath
Week 6 – Kefka
Week 7 – Sephiroth
Week 8 – Ultimecia

Now that we’ve moved past my least favorite Final Fantasy, we can talk about Sakaguchi’s swan song. Final Fantasy IX was a return to roots: a story about crystals, medieval technology, and cartoony characters. Unfortunately, the nostalgia-fest was not quite a return to SNES days of glory. The story was pretty unfocused and not all that interesting and if you didn’t play the first three of four Final Fantasy games, most of the jokes and references were totally lost on you.

Then there are the villains in the game. You have Kuja, a villain who subscribes to the Squall school of acting, Garland, a clear FF I reference, and the final boss Necron, basically a force of evil you’ve never seen before, kind of like the Cloud of Darkness.

So what can I even say about it?

Evil Rating:

?/10

Who knows?

Cool Rating:

3/10

The concept art is kind of cool…

Images and Video:

In-Game

Sweet Concept Art

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.

With every Final Fantasy game there exists great (and not so great) teams of heroes bent on saving the world from some sort of evil force. While we could take a look at those heroes, let’s instead take a look at the evils that motivate these heroes to do what they do.

It should be noted that this feature will be full of spoilers.

Week 1 – Garland
Week 2 – Emperor Mateus of Palamecia
Week 3 – The Cloud of Darkness

Final Fantasy IV was a masterpiece of soap operatic storytelling. Characters joined, left, fell in love, died, were amnesiacs, and were under mind control. It was a mess, but it was an entertaining tale of redemption for an evil man and his love for his woman.

Unfortunately we still had this very strange story anomaly where you’d play through about 90% of the game thinking one guy was your enemy (Golbez, in this case) only to find out that the real culprit was some other bloke (Zemus/Zeromus, in this case). While we can forgive the weak characterization in these early games, FF IV started to reach the saturation point for this nonsense. Sure, we love fighting evil, but wouldn’t it be nice to not just have a quick “Oh, this guy was mind controlling everyone” kind of thing be pulled on us?

So Zemus/Zeromus happens to be a Lunarian, or a dude from the moon, who’s decided that living on the moon blows. To fix this problem, he’s decided to kill everyone on the planet and take the planet for the Lunarians to live on. The other Lunarians are, surprisingly, not on board, so it’s up to the crew to take this sucker down.

Evil Rating:

He’s evil, but not evil enough to want to get his own hands dirty. 99% of the evil he causes is realized through his mind controlled puppets. I’ll give him points for wanting to kill everyone on the planet, but he’s gotta lose some for laziness. That and he totally gets owned by the heroes and has to let the embodiment of his hatred be the final boss.

7/10 (mostly because his evil intentions raze an entire town, kill multiple player characters, and are cool, but he loses points for the totally lame mind control plot)

Cool Rating:

Well he gets cool points for being from the moon. He’s also too cool for school, preferring to make others do his dirty work while he chills out on the moon. It doesn’t get much cooler than that, except that he gets owned pretty easily and has to unleash his hatred upon the world to actually be formidable.

7/10

Images:

Zemus (DS)
Zeromus (Amano Artwork)

Video:

It’s probably too early to start calling me Nostradamus (we’ll have to wait until the regular season of baseball ends to know just how good I am), but if you remember this post I mentioned that Mario RPG’s launch on the VC in PAL territories would spearhead a US release. Lo and behold, Mario RPG, one of the greatest Mario games, SNES games, and RPGs in gaming history.

It’s too bad that Square Enix won’t be releasing any of its other landmark SNES RPGs on VC, preferring to milk tons of money out of players with remakes (which we like) and ports (which we find a bit annoying, but kind of like anyway). Go out and buy Mario RPG and let’s hope that Earthbound hits the system soon.

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.

As you all know by now, I love Chrono Trigger. The prospect of this new port of the SNES classic to the DS has me positively salivating at the thought. It all sounds super cool that I’ll be able to own another cart of this fantastic game and that it will have those nifty little improvements made to it.

Then I look at the new Final Fantasy IV remake released on the DS. It’s not just a port like Chrono Trigger is, it’s a full-blown reworking of the game adding 3D, cutscenes, and even voice acting and I can’t help but feel just a wee bit cheated. FF IV DS launched this past Tuesday for $39.99, since Square Enix knows that they’re the only company that can get away with such exorbitantly priced DS games, but I can more or less justify paying that much for a game that is significantly improved over its SNES iteration. The new version has a retooled difficulty level and added content as well, so, while pricey, it’s still a fully-featured new game of sorts.

How can I justify paying for a straight port of the best SNES game out there when I know that the company is capable of putting some effort into coming out with an improved version? Chrono Trigger may be an absolute classic, but it would definitely be served by improved graphics or even a more significant modification like with Persona 3: FES. In that game Atlus actually added on an epilogue of extensive length and substance.

It’s not exactly out of the question to have rereleases of this nature in Japan. Nintendo as been releasing updated versions of its NES Mario games since the days of the SNES with Super Mario All-Stars. I suppose it brings with it a chance to give a new generation an opportunity to play games which are far beyond what is playable without the Virtual Console or similar service, but I just can’t help but feel cheated knowing that I will inevitably pay quite a large sum of money for yet another marginally improved version of Chrono Trigger, despite my intense love for the game.

I guess there may be a silver lining to the rather lackluster effort involved in this DS rerelease: the hopeful high sales of the rerelease may lead to a proper sequel to Chrono Trigger.

SPOILER ALERT: This review may contain story spoilers. Read at your own risk!

Sakaguchi’s new company Mistwalker has had its share of problems. For very perplexing reasons they chose to chiefly develop for the Xbox 360 with side development on the Nintendo DS. As a result, nothing they make for the home console, no matter how good, will ever sell all that well in their home country. His first 360 game, Blue Dragon, sold 200,000 copies in Japan, which may sound good at first, but when you look at Final Fantasy XII’s two million sales in Japan, a whole order of magnitude more, it suddenly doesn’t seem like Sakaguchi is getting a fair shake. In fact, both Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey are no better or worse than a typical Square Enix game, but their sales are typically much lower, with Lost Odyssey only selling around 100,000 in the Land of the Rising Sun.

So now that I’ve more or less made it clear that LO is about as good as any Final Fantasy game, lets delve a bit deeper into it, because there are some differentiating aspects that actually out-Final-Fantasy Final Fantasy.

The Story

Some of the greatest buzz about the release of Lost Odyssey revolved around the fact that its story was penned by the famed novelist Kiyoshi Shigematsu. You’d be correct to be skeptical about this, bringing in outside, famous talent does not make a great story by default. So, does it fall flat on its face? Yes and no. The actual, plot-driven story is nothing you haven’t seen before. It’s about as Final Fantasy, clichéd of a story as you can find with an evil retainer, sorcerer dude who takes over a country, blah blah blah. I was able to predict most of the twists, which was disappointing, but there the real allure to the story comes from two things: the permise and the short stories.

Let’s start with the premise:

The main character, Kaim, is an immortal. He’s been around, as of the start of the game, for a thousand years. This factors into gameplay in a rather neat way, but also makes Kaim and his fellow immortals very compelling characters (unfortunately the only ones of the bunch). Kaim also suffers from amnesia (ugh…RPG cliché #1), but this actually informs and enhances our brand new gameplay mechanic: short stories.

What happens when you have an author write your story? You end up with short stories in your game. Depending on what part of the game you are in and what part of the map you walk by, you will trigger one of Kaim’s lost memories. These play out as breaks in gameplay as you read these expertly written short stories illustrating the various themes of the game. This is basically hell for gamers like my buddy Phil who hate gameplay interruptions like cutscenes, but for me these great little stories really flesh out the characters that would otherwise be pretty generic.

Lost Odyssey succeeds because its storytelling methods are so innovative and far-reaching. While the plot itself and its resolution is more or less mundane, the idea that these characters have literally been around for a thousand years and bring with them maturity and characterization to go with it makes for a satisfying experience.

Something should be said about the non-immortal cast though. Aside from Jansen, the rogue-ish comic relief (in personality, not in class. He’s a black mage), the mortal characters range from lame to downright irritating. The wonder twins, clear ripoffs of Palom and Porom from Final Fantasy IV, are the spunky girl that we’ve seen way too often and the shy, quiet, ANNOYING boy that comes from anime. Tolten is the whiny, un-confident, whiny (it needs to be said twice) king-in-training and Sed is just the uninspired grizzled old guy, although he’s the best of the riffraff.

Gameplay

This isn’t anything that radically different from any other turn-based RPG. You have the usual spells and techniques, with two small wrinkles.

The first of these gameplay differences comes from equippable rings. These rings that you equip can add effects to your attacks, from added effectiveness to enemy types to elements or status effects. In order to activate these effects, you must hold a trigger and time the intersection of two rings. Perfect alignment leads to higher damage or more probable status effects.

Immortals make up the next significant gameplay change. Since none of the immortals can die, according to the story, none of them can really die in battle either. If an enemy manages to fell one of your immortal characters, they will go down for about two turns, then automatically resurrect with close to half of their health. If everyone in your party happens to be down at the same time, you do lose the battle, but it’s a pretty nice to know that if an immortal goes down you can just wait it out. Tied into the immortal system is the way that skills are allocated to immortals. Partying with mortals allows immortals to “Skill Link” and learn the specialty skills of the rest of their party. These skills can then be implemented by the immortals at any time once learned, even if the mortals aren’t in the battle with them.

Like I said earlier, everything else is what you’d expect from a turn-based RPG, no surprises there.

Graphics

If you thought that Sakaguchi did some beautiful work on the PS2, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The second of his 360 RPGs and the first to feature more realistic characters (Blue Dragon’s characters were more anime-like, created by Akira Toriyama), Lost Odyssey is about the most gorgeous game I’ve ever seen. I just got a hold of a new, large, 1080p-capable television, and let me tell you, it looks fantastic. Let me also say that it’s not perfect, especially due to the Unreal engine that’s so in vogue nowadays.

As an Unreal engine game, Lost Odyssey suffers from most of the same shortcomings of other games of its type. Load times are long, framerates are far, FAR from stable. The game frequently stutters and is sometimes unstable. In my 60 to 70 hours of gameplay, I had the game freeze on me at least twice. The beauty and flexibility of the Unreal engine comes at a real price, but at least its not like the typical dark, drab, brown shooters mostly put on the Unreal engine, there are some genuinely bright and colorful vistas and locales.

Sound

A close friend of Sakaguchi, Nobuo Uematsu composed the themes and music of Lost Odyssey, but he doesn’t do anything super-special in the score for this game. In fact, it’s more or less a forgettable soundtrack that I mostly kept turned down in favor of listening to my own music. Everything else is pretty crisp and clear, but the English voice cast is pretty boring and annoying. Lucky for you and anyone in auditory range, you can elect to listen to the Japanese voice cast, but you end up with odd lip syncing and subtitling since they are aligned to the English vocal track, not the Japanese one. This is disappointing to be in both video games and anime, since it means the subs cater to the dubs, meaning they aren’t translations, but transcriptions. The difference is subtle, but, like I said, disappointing.

Final Verdict

Final Fantasy XII was a pretty far departure from the typical Final Fantasy fare, with real-time combat, a different loot system, and a shift away from the more recent Final Fantasy narrative style. In a sense, Lost Odyssey is the true Final Fantasy XI. If that’s what you’re looking for, pick this game up. The concept and characterization of the immortals is spot on and the short stories really do flesh out the game’s story and make it stand apart. Lost Odyssey isn’t going to blow you away with its gameplay and story, it’s just gonna fill that RPG-shaped hole in your heart, especially if you only own an Xbox. While a bit lengthy for a rental, it’s more or less a one-playthrough event, so rent or buy used if this sounds appealing. It’s definitely a good game that’s worth playing if you can get your hands on it and love JRPGS.