I still remember my first experience of a Japanese RPG, the year was 1997, I was 10 and Final Fantasy 7 was released. Called round to a friends house for a few games, we stumbled upon what would be an absolute revolution in both my gaming experience and everyone else's. Everything about the game was fresh and new, the story was engrossing, the battle system addictive. It was as close to gaming perfection as a game can get. Years down the line, the Japanese RPG has wore thin, only a handful have been realised in the current generation of consoles, and those than have, have generally been used as coasters. But in comes Lost Odyssey, does it re-invent the JRPG? Does it bring a fresh new battle system? Is it a revolution? The answer is no, it does none of these things, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. The strength of Lost Odyssey is held in the fact that it sticks to close to traditional JRPGs, it actually brings back those fond memories of gaming days past.

From a graphical standpoint, the game is very attractive. After the first 20 or so minutes, I got the impression that the game was going to be very dark and maybe even gothic, until I found myself in the main city of Urha, a beautiful city with hundreds of NPCs to interact with all doing their own thing. The look of the game reminds me slightly of Final Fantasy 8, and infact there are quite a lot of similarities, both ashethically and in the gameplay (even the menus remind me of FF8). The sound is spot on. The score is fitting with the feel of the game, but at the same time it doesn't really standout. You wont find yourself humming the theme in work the next day, but at the same time its good enough to be noticed.

Lets get one thing straight, Lost Odyssey is a hard, slow game. After your first spat of action on the battlefield, in which your pretty much invincible, the game jumps off to a friendly city. It will be around another hour or so, depending on how much you explore, before your thrown back into the action, and when you are, oh boy. Normal enemies, the grunts you would run into in any game and level up with, seem so hard they could qualify for boss battles (Nice to see random encounters back in a JRPG also). And boss battles are insanely hard, even against the first boss you come across. I had to have multiple attempts to take him down, and in the end, I got damn lucky. This game is harder than any of the Final Fantasy's, but in my opinion, that's not a bad thing. There are a lack of games this hard, I'm bored of playing through a 10 hour game only to be dissatisfied with the experience. Speaking of which, there are a good 40 hours worth of gameplay in Lost Odyssey (not including re-loads), however a lot of the game is spent in cut scenes and not in combat. Lost Odyssey wont be a game you'll be taking back to trade in after a week.