Lost Odyssey

Mistwalker's 2008 Japanese RPGs Lost Odyssey is free this month on Xbox Live.

Three new titles are being added to the Xbox One's backwards compatibility library today.

Lost Odyssey might be one of the most touching games I've ever played. I remember meeting that dying woman in the village who turned out to be my - lead character Kaim's - long-lost daughter, even though we looked roughly the same age. Then there was the gnarled old pirate your team meets (and recruits) who turns out to be the son of a lady in your party, who looks much younger than he does. This is possible because Kaim and a few others are immortals and have lived for hundreds of years.

It really is award season for expectation-exceeder Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, which was last night crowned Game Developers Choice Awards Game of the Year.

UPDATE 01/07/2014: Hironobu Sakaguchi's next game is indeed Terra Battle and is indeed for smartphones.

Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of Final Fantasy, is already in the final stage of development on his latest game.

Microsoft has popped some Lost Odyssey downloadable content onto Xbox Live.

Microsoft plans to release fresh downloadable content for Lost Odyssey in Japan on 10th April.

Microsoft could be planning to expand role-playing game Lost Odyssey into a series.

HMV is offering 1000 Microsoft Points to anyone pre-ordering Lost Odyssey before its release on Friday.

Given the involvement of hotshot RPG superstars like Final Fantasy creators Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobuo Uematsu, it should come as no surprise that Lost Odyssey is utterly, utterly traditional. There's no fannying around with real-time combat here, like there was in Final Fantasy XII, just reams and reams of random battles, exploration and cut-scenes. Over the course of its 40-odd hours, it progresses at a glacial pace, taking a good few hours after you fire it up just to reach the barest semblance of a plot (which, just so you know, involves an immortal called Kaim trying to discover why he's been alive for so long).

In this, it is identical to every single other Japanese RPG to have ever existed. Indeed, there is little here to address the many failings of the form. Characters enter battle with earnest catchphrases like 'only the strong survive', and leave it only after punching the air to celebrate success. Battles are random - very random: playing through one stretch of the game twice triggered about seven encounters the second time after precisely none the first time. You'll spend at least half of the game searching through bins and rifling through strangers' drawers while they watch you without caring. The hero is - and I've forgotten how many times we've seen this before - an amnesiac. And the story, which is spread across four discs, frequently veers into saccharine sentimentality.

There are the inevitable stealth bits, treasure hunts, and item auctions, assembled into what could only be called bite-size chunks if you have a planet-sized mouth. Don't even think about sitting down to play Lost Odyssey if you haven't got an entire hour to play it: most save-points are between 20 and 40 minutes away from each other, and many of them are nearly an hour apart. Then there are moments of utter absurdity, like the bit where a queen flashes her chest at some armoured guards to secure safe passage to a foreign king, or the bit where you're forced to play through a series of funeral-based mini-games. Technically, it's all over the place, with neat tricks like depth-of-field effects offset by minor glitches like a smattering of eye-hurting frame-rate stutters. Even for what is a resolutely traditional Japanese RPG, cut-scenes are noticeably long, and there are lots of them.

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Eurogamer has confirmed that the recently released Asian version of Lost Odyssey can be played in English and works on PAL Xbox 360 consoles.

Lost Odyssey will be out in Europe on 29th February, although Microsoft hasn't jumped up and down about it in its usual public manner.

Game creator Hironobu Sakaguchi has announced that Lost Odyssey will be released in Japan this December, followed by Europe and America next February.

PlayStation 3 may be expected to dominate in terms of playable next-gen game demos at the Tokyo Game Show this week, but any Xbox 360 owners attending will at least get the chance to sample one of Mistwalker's RPG titles.

More details of Lost Odyssey, the forthcoming Xbox 360 RPG from Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, have been revealed in Dengeki Xbox 360 magazine.

Apparently there are currently 100 members of staff working on the game and that number includes Daisuke Fukugawa, who worked with Sakaguchi on the FF games at Square.

Takamasa Ohsawa, who worked on the Shadow Hearts games, has taken on the role of art director, and is working on Lost Odyssey's overall look and style as well as character designs.

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Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi has announced that his new Xbox 360 titles, Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon, are coming along very nicely, thank you - and will be in the shops next year.

Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi has revealed a few more details of his forthcoming Xbox 360-exclusive title, Lost Odyssey.

In an interview with Canadian website Globe Technology, Sakaguchi said: "The gameplay experience is basically a traditional turn-based RPG, a bit like Final Fantasy.

"However, there are new ideas incorporated while playing: you can experience a little bit of real-time action."

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