Almost a year ago I was happily playing on the Xbox 360 that my brother had bought when it stopped working... Just as we started playing Halo 3, which was exceptionally annoying, but what was really annoying was the fact that the warranty on the 360 had expired and I'd need to pay Microsoft to get it fixed, but it was sort of forgotten once we got our hands on a few Wiis.

 But that all changed over a month ago when a Matte Black 360 Elite made it's way into the house, I got to finish Halo 3, although I'd probably have been more impressed if I'd have been able to finish it the day after it first made it's way into the house all those months ago...

But I have been able to play Lost Odyssey, one of a series of games developed for Microsoft in Japan to help make the 360 appeal to Japanese gamers. The game is produced by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi & is only his third game produced outside of Square Enix. He was also involved with Blue Dragon, the game that featured character designs from Dragonball Creator Akira Toriyama & the two games share similar monsters.

Playing the game, I got the feeling that all the best aspects of the Final Fantasy series have been pulled together. The game opens amidst an immense battle that seems reminiscent of the dream sequence of The Spirits Within, a battle that is interrupted when a meteor falls onto the battlefield (FF VII). The characters themselves seem familiar, drawing from FF VIII, X2 & XII & the map system is similar to FF X. Initially I thought the influence of FF VIII was greater than any of the other games, this is probably due to the "magical industrial revolution" background the game has, but whereas in FF VIII, Squall & Co gained abbilities by junctioning with GFs, the immortals in Lost Odyssey (you start with two, Kaim & Seth) can only gain abilities when they're linked with mortal humans.

Like many Japanese Role Players, levelling up is a pre-requisite & Lost Odyssey is no different, although there does seem to be a pre set limit to how much you can level up in each section of the game. I managed to play through for a few hours before I ran into some difficulty & decided to backtrack to raise my level, however after back tracking almost to the beggining of the game I wasn't able to level up at all & had to rely on gameFAQS to inform me that I needed to use Aqua on a particularly tricky Boss Battle. 

One thing that I find comforting is the fact that the game itself is spread across four discs & despite playing for over 10 hours, I'm still only on the first disc. There's also a number of language options to choose from, as well as an English dialogue track, you can also choose to play the game in Japanese among other language options like French or German.