2007, Game of the Year

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Darashiva said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:

I've never owned any of the XBox consoles, but if/when I do, the first game I'll play will be Lost Odyssey.  I still want to play a game that is a worthy successor to Final Fantasy 12.  (I've also need to try The Last Story, but I digress.)  The Lost Odyssey has a 78 on Metacritic while Final Fantasy 13 has an 83.  This makes me wonder if the critics underrated Lost Odyssey back in the day.

I think Lost Odyssey came out at a time when JRPGs had a bit of a bad reputation due to what was perceived as dated gameplay elements dragging the whole genre down, so almost any game in it that wasn't trying some weird new things with various gameplay elements got points deducted from their final score. Turn-based battles seemed to often be seen as particularly egregious offenses in some critics eyes for whatever reason. I often found that if I played any JRPG that came out during the first half of the seventh console generation (2006 - 2010), I could quite reliably add anywhere between 5 to 10 points to their metacritic score and it would be closer to my own opinion of them, and occasionally the difference was even greater.

This makes a ton of sense.  How a game gets rated has a lot to do with the age of a person doing the rating.  If a person started gaming in the NES era, for example, then they will rate 2D platformers a lot higher than a younger person.  In this case, with turn-based RPGs, a person who started gaming in the SNES-PS1 era will rate these games higher than a younger person would.

Anyway, I love turn-based RPGs, so that probably means I will like Lost Odyssey a lot.