guys the naysayers have the final say don't u understand. No amount of convincing is gonna change their minds.
Impulsivity is a troll on all Msoft forums and rearly have anything positive to say about a game unless it is on a Sony system.

OT: like i said before the game is a success on both fields [financially and gaming wise] here's hoping the upcoming slew of both west and eastern RPG emulate or even outshine LO

   I loved Final Fantasy VII, X, X-2, Shadow Hearts Covenant, Shadow Hearts from the New World, Persona 3, Xenogears....dozens more on top of that.  I played the first dragon warrior on the NES at 4 and loved it.  I've been playing plenty of turn based JRPGs ever since.  Its not that I don't like the genre, its that Lost Odyssey is a bad game.  The render isn't bad, but the animation is horrid even in the cutscenes (perhaps especially in the cut scenes), the combat doesn't add anything interesting, the characters are poorly designed and uninteresting.  The only good thing (and its really good) is the text stories you get periodically.  They are really interesting and well written.  Not well written enough to make it worth continuing to play through the game to get to them though. 

   Loving JRPGs makes me hate Lost Odyssey all the more.  It's painful to see Final Fantasy made so badly when you love Final Fantasy type games.  LO makes FFIX look like an absolute gem.

    And the "active" battle system in LO was done better ten years ago in a game called the Legend of Dragoon if you're going to point to that as a type of innovation.  It was also done much better in the Shadow Hearts games.

   I don't hate ALL games on MS systems, I liked KOTOR, Mass Effect, Jade Empire, Oblivion and Bioshock a ton, of course they were all better on PC (like every xbox game thats any good).  As for JRPGs no, I have not seen a single exceptional 360 JRPG.  The closest was Eternal Sonata which would probably barely crack the top 20 JRPGs if it was on the PS2 maybe beating out wild arms 4/5 by a nose.  The so called JRPG advantage would be more meaningful if there was more quality then quantity.  I doubt any of you can honestly say that Lost Odyssey would have been even remotely competitive if it wasn't in a generation starved for JRPGs, its not quite Epemeral Fantasia bad (the first JRPG for PS2 which was HORRID beyond all belief) but it was not worthy of any praise or hype at all.

The combat is exactly the same as in many of the jrpgs you claim to like, with the ring mechanic to boot. That's a fairly common setup among the games you enjoy - by the book turn based + single "innovative" mechanic. And the ring scheme works good at that.

The story is at more interesting that some of the latest dragon warriors with a theme on the earlier discs (picking up what remains of one's own family) that's been rarely done. And it's well done to boot. Surely some of the characters are cliché, but jrpg characters are by definition clichés - very few instances we get of innovative storytelling and writing we get.

Anyways, it's obvious you just don't like it because it's a 360 exclusive that can't be played on the pc which is to be expected from your sig and posting history.

zing!

It doesn't, but MGS paid for the development. Mistwalker is essentially a 2nd party developer at the moment. ~$5 of every sale goes to retailers and distribution. The rest is money MGS and Mistwalker sees.

Not quite, Freebird. Torillian is closer to the truth.

Here's a great article on Gears of War, and the cost breakdown of the game - assuming it sold 1 million copies.

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/12/19/ps3-xbox360-costs-tech-cx_rr_game06_1219expensivegames.html

The breakdown that was given for Gears, a $10m game plus marketing and such is as follows:

In this case, all of the bolded expenses would of been taken care of by Microsoft or Mistwalker, and are part of the cut they would receive from the project. This totals roughly $45.00 of each $60 copy sold. So we can assume, then, that $45.00 of each copy sold went back to Microsoft/Mistwalker. Now, how it was split up is questionable. At 850,000 copies shipped to retailers (which may be low, depending on how you want to take it), Lost Odyssey has made Microsoft/Mistwalker around $38,250,000 in Gross Revenue.

Now, having said all of this, Lost Odyssey's budget, at the highest, was put around $20m + marketing. This would signal that the end budget was most likely around $25m for the game. Assuming all of those costs, LO still made money due to the simple fact that Microsoft published it, and waived any fees associated with the game, since MS bankrolled the whole project - unlike Gears where they just distributed it.

So then we can take these charts, and get the following numbers on what a developer makes, depending on how the game is published:

Now, what I am stating by the difference in Gross Revenue/Game and Actuals is marketing, and other costs that didn't directly relate to making the game, but bringing it to market...Which is a $7.00 fee per game.

So then we can assume that a really bad 3rd party with no publishing/distributibng abilities makes just under 50% of the $60 per game, and a 1st party makes a whopping 75%.

"A milestone worth celebrating. The best selling next-gen jrpg, by far."

Congrats to LO. It looked like an ok game to me, of course the "BY THE CREATOR OF FINAL FANTASY" tagline helped I'm sure. Hopefully Star Ocean and IU will sell even better.

Star Ocean The Last Hope has a chance because it is part of a popular series.  IU doesn't seem to be getting much fanfare though.

But will Lost Odyssey reach the 1 million milestone?