I closed my last post with yet another finger waggled in Lost Odyssey’s direction, this time for its problems with pacing. Poor pacing plagues the majority of Japanese role-playing games, a genre unconcerned with keeping the players occupied in long, exclusive sections of gameplay or story. In its favour, Lost Odyssey tries to deal with this issue. Unfortunately it breaks up these exclusive sections with odd switches from play to story and vice-versa. Rather than keeping me engaged in both elements, these switches left me bewildered and detached, as I’ll elaborate on in a couple of examples.

The first of these examples is within the mid-game’s extensive exposition in the city of Gohtza, where several cut scenes detail the party’s attempts to negotiate peace between warring nations at crisis point. In the midst of this and for the first time, the game suddenly gives the player control of Mack and Cooke, the party’s allegedly adorable orphaned urchins. The kids are in the city’s train station, and have learnt from a rather irresponsible old woman that there’s a spiritual place where people can be reunited with loved ones they’ve lost. To try and see their dead mother, the kids hatch a plan to steal a train, and the game tasks the player with leading the kids onto said train to help them with their objective.

Harmless enough, you may think, but at this stage the player is well aware that breaking up the party for whatever reason is going to lead to poor consequences. Indeed, that proves to be the case. The kids steal the train and end up being caught in a blizzard, nearly getting themselves killed. This leaves only half the party present to protect the then-attacked city, nearly getting themselves killed in the process,  while the other half of the party chases after the kids… and nearly get themselves killed. Of course, these consequences are predetermined because the plot is linear, but the game is still demanding the player to do something that’s clearly foolish, something they know will only end in disaster. This invalidates the player’s control over proceedings, further disconnecting play and story from each other.

The second example is even guiltier of that sin. Once again, it’s a switch from a long section of exposition to one of gameplay, and again the player is given control of a character for the first time. This time the highly unusual recipient is Gongora, the game’s nefarious villain and all-round douche. The players has to direct Gongora to a podium in Uhra Castle. The game then cuts to a scene where Gongora gives a speech to the crowd outside, an act that the player understands contextually to be his usurping of the nation. After giving the speech, the player retains control of Gongora, leading him to a room where he meets with seven of his sorcerers. To test their loyalty he engages them in deadly battle, and the player controls him in the game’s menu-based battle mode as he executes them one by one.

Challenging control or careless fragmentation?

As you’ve probably realised, my problem with this switch is that it places you in control of the game’s big bad boss, asking you to undertake acts of evil to advance the story along. Now, I have no problem with playing as an evil character – I’ve just been playing as a blood elf mage in World of Warcraft last night – but I found it completely bizarre to be taken from control of the good guys for twenty plus hours to control of the bad guy for five minutes. It felt like a very careless way of breaking up a long section of exposition with a glimpse of gameplay, and it once again distanced those two distinct elements. Is there an argument for Lost Odyssey’s unusual switches doing something interesting that challenges the player’s understanding of control and narrative, similar to what BioShock so famously did? Maybe, but I find it hard to believe that was the deliberate intention of the developer in this case.

This is why I’m such a fan of Final Fantasy X. While Lost Odyssey makes me feel like I’m unlocking a story, Final Fantasy X made me feel like I was travelling with its protagonist Tidus through his story. It did this by restricting narrative perspective to him, with players even hearing his internal voice occasionally reflecting on the game’s events This made me feel like Tidus was retelling his story to me. Yes, Final Fantasy X is certainly guilty of very long, exclusive sections of gameplay and story, probably even more guilty than Lost Odyssey, but I much preferred being told its story in a way I could appreciate. For all its maturity, its strong writing and its likeable characters, Lost Odyssey delivers its story in such an odd, fragmented way that it makes it hard for me to care about it at all, and that really is a great shame.

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