Make it turnbased and I'm happy.

on PS3？absolutely impossible.But it's  time for Hironobu Sakaguchi to retire.

A project that is in the finishing stages and hasn't even been announced yet? Come on, it's obviously a DS game. TGS just passed so if it were Microsoft publishing some 360 game that they had plenty of screenshots and media for, I'm pretty sure they would have showcased it. A DS game can have a small enough dev time to be damn near out the door when it's announced.  The last two Sakaguchi DS games(Away: Shuffle Dungeon and Blue Dragon Plus) got announced 3 and 5 months away from release.

To the contrary Lost Odyssey is one of the best selling JRPGs this gen. Blue Dragon also did pretty well for a crappy game.

I'm sure Microsoft pays a pretty penny for exclusivity and the games tend sell a fairly well even with a smaller Japanese userbase. I don't understand at all how its a "failure of a decision."

@kenryoku - you are agreeing with me here right???

Who's Monatan? Didn't you once say you didn't play a single JRPG between Final Fantasy 7 and Lost Odyssey? Or was that someone else?

@outlawauron - dude, you are kidding right? The game was not intended to be a revolution to jrpg's. How come noone had an issue with this style of turn based battles when final fantasy did it for like 6 games??? Just off the top of my head, lost odyssey added the linking, ring and immortality factors to battles. How does that lack originality?

Uncreative and unfinished is hardly what I would use to describe lost odyssey. Obviously our opinnions are different on this matter. But for the record I think the game design in it is incredible.  Also dude, fun should be one of, if not the first thing a game review looks at.

I prefer turn based battles as well. In fact, I commend Lost Odyssey on having a turn based battle system. However, I wish Mistwalker could have made the battle system a bit more interesting. The characters aren't really individualized (you can just link all your skills to your immortals), and it doesn't bring much new to the table. That may be fine for some people, but it's actually less advanced than some battle systems from the 90s, and JRPGs need to innovate now more than ever. I love JRPGs, and I want them to thrive. The market is responding to innovations in gameplay and fun, not a great story or great graphics. If JRPGs can shift with the demands of the market, they can reach the sales level they used to have.

The thing is, Final Fantasy actually made turn-based battles interesting.

Final Fantasy 7 had a humongous variety of materia to give each of your characters individualized skills.

Final Fantasy 8 allowed you to give each of your characters their own GFs and Junctions.

Final Fantasy 9 improved on both of these by making skills learnable from equipment, and making each character truly unique with their own skill set (only Vivi could learn Black Magic, only Dagger could summon, etc.).

So no, it's not really the same. And Lost Odyssey even holds a lot of the same JRPG cliches ("this enemy can only be killed with magic, but can't be hurt by physical attacks!!!"). By the way, the immortality factor is fairly pointless. Not exactly an innovation to say that your characters will be randomly revived in the middle of battle.

I probably rag on the game too much, but its fans give it way too much leniency and seem to completely ignore its faults.

While I agree, it was terrible, that is actually just our perception and not reality. Traditionalist loved the game, and Seth was a great character.

How come when I post like this, I end up having a 5 page long discussion with a mod in PMs about how I need to stop acting like my opinion are more important than others, and you just go out for a cheeseburger, lol.

Either way, the DEVELOPER of LO is great, if you liked the game or not, and anything he does will probably appeal greatly to a certain segment, because it will be their "bag."

...and yes, I be cappin words in the middle of sentences. What!? Rep it.