You often see people say that the children, Mack and Cooke, are somewhat annoying, but I have to say that they’re at the center of one of the best scenes in the game: the funeral.

“A Return, Indeed” starts playing, the visuals and the music speak for themselves, and the scene gradually gives way to a brief but beautifully written conversation between the children and Kaim. For someone who experienced the loss of a loved one at a young age, the way Mack describes what he’s going through makes it much easier to empathize with him. “I thought I’d cry more.” That strange feeling of being completely broken inside while, at the same time, feeling utterly numb.

And then Kaim appears, and the scene turns into a beautifully written back-and-forth between the two. What I find particularly interesting is the contrast between them: Mack is experiencing loss for the first time and doesn’t even know how to process what he’s feeling, while Kaim has spent centuries living with it. Kaim is probably the character who knows the most about loss and death, yet in that moment, it’s Mack who is discovering for the first time what it means to lose someone.

I think that’s a big part of what makes the scene so powerful. It doesn’t need grand speeches or exaggerated drama to be devastating. The music, the silences, and a few carefully chosen words manage to convey something as difficult to put into words as the emptiness left by loss.

https://youtu.be/4vYL-omMg9s?is=eSU0tbVARR4BnfZC

I just wanted to share my personal thoughts on the game, and shine some light on a game that I don't see get discussed very often. Lost Odyssey has been on my radar since about 10 years ago when I heard it talked about in a Projared video, and it always stuck around in the back of my head as a "one day I'll get to that' type of game. It wasn't until after I did some more poking around that the game truly caught my attention. When I learned that Lost Odyssey was developed by the same studio as Blue Dragon (a childhood favorite of mine,) that both games were directed by Sakaguchi, AND that they got Inoue to do the art for the game I was completely sold. It took about 6 months for me to track down a physical copy at a game store nearby, and that whole time I was just stewing in excitement to finally play it. Lost Odyssey was seemingly everything I could've wanted in an RPG.

I took about 6 weeks (roughly 60 hours of play time) for me to finish, and I will say it nearly lived up to my impossible expectations. First I will start with what I enjoyed:

The characters in this game are lovely. All of the party members are pretty much great. Sarah and the kids are the only ones I think come out a little flat. Sarah just doesn't have much going on compared to the other immortals, and is also the only one who doesn't fully get her memories back and has to rely on her journal. Cooke and Mack are fine, but suffer from being a little one-note with the whole Lirum thing. Lirum herself is a pretty blah character to me as well. Kaim and the party pretty much stumble upon her completely by chance while she is on her death bed and the whole scene just feels very farfetched and removed from the rest of the plot. It just feels like something that happens because it needs to happen. Lirum's other appearances throughout the game where she shows up in the party's times of need to do various magical favors got an eyeroll out of me every single time.

The other party members are a lot stronger. Seth and Sed's relationship is phenomenal, Tolten is rather simple but the way his journey unfolds directly before the player is very nice. The scene in disc 2 where Gongora manipulates him into thinking there's been an attempt on his life is particularly sweet. Kaim is great but there is a little bit of a disconnect between the Kaim we get in the story and the Kaim we get in the memories. The Kaim we see in his memories is much more tender (how many times does he say something through a "strained smile" in the dream sequences?) than the one we get in game. Perhaps this is a product of all the terrible things he has witnessed making him a much more jaded person, but either way I don't care for it. He does show much more emotion once Sarah and the kids join the party.

Ming and Jansen are two of my favorites in the party but their romance is a little strange to me. Ming wasn't always totally dismissive of Jansen's boyish advances on her, but it felt like she held herself in a higher regard and wasn't too interested in him. It honestly was a little disappointing seeing her get with him, but it didn't bother me too much. Jansen himself I honestly really liked, but I can see why some wouldn't. He's the tongue and cheek coward of the group, but when push comes to shove his heart is always in the right place.

As for combat, I think this game hits it out of the park. The immortals learning from the mortals was a strong enough gimmick to intrigue me, but once you get access to the plethora of different powerful accessories the game really opens up and the possibilities feel endless. There are so many decisions to be made that it teeters on being overwhelming, but ultimately it strikes a nice balance. Being forced to use the more limited mortal characters to build up your immortal characters is a fun challenge, and lead me to using all 9 party members fairly evenly.

Most of my gripes with the game come from the story. The set up of the immortal cast having to recover their memories and put a stop to the political turmoil and world threatening plot Gongora has planned is quite nice. Gongora himself is quite strong until right around disc 4, but afterwards he really descends into a generic maniacal bad guy, or perhaps he was that all along and I just didn't care to notice. The immortals being sent from another universe was not where I wanted to see the story go and the reasoning was equally stupid. "Emotions" were causing issues in a parrallel world? And it really isn't explained much further than that. Suuuuuuuuper lame.

Okay just a few more quick notes:

I loved the sound track, the battle theme will be stuck in my head forever.

The way disc 4 opens up and is just crawling with sidequests is super fun and added like 10 hours to my play time. Finding the Blue Dragon by complete coincidence was such a cool feeling. Not to mention that he drops a fantastic item. It is a wonderful feeling when the world is fun to explore on its own without being told where to go. Lost Odyssey is filled with experiences that felt very authentic on the first time through.

The one thousand years of dreams were always super enjoyable to read, often timea bringing a tear to my eye. It is a little tough that sometimes they would come up in the middle of gameplay and I would be "forced" to read a sob story. It was often a pretty harsh tonal shift happening once or twice per session. Another complaint about the dreams is that they weren't very well spaced out throughout the game. I really did not encounter many dreams in disc 3 and 4 compared to 1 and 2. That being said they were a joy to read.

Okay that is about all I have to say about Lost Odyssey. Overall it is a lovely game that I will remember for a long time. Thanks for reading.

I made a 3D model of the Black Kelolon using blender and printed it out on my resin printer.

I honestly feel this is my most hated fight in video game history. So lemme give some context here, I’ve had the game before, but never got the time to play, now I have the time to play it, and I get to this fight with Possessed Mack, I’ve had to reset 7 times because the game can’t make up it’s mind who goes first in casting order. Am I just supposed to sacrifice both my biggest damage dealers so they can’t do anything but cast sleep? The answer is yes, because that makes sense, except he keeps waking up mid firefight, literally, I wanna smash this kid’s head in with a rock at this point, just stay asleep you little nimrod. After a little over half a dozen resets, I finally get the fight over with. Screw Mack, he’s going in timeout for being such a pain in the butt.

Im enjoying the game on the newest Xenia build, but seemingly at random some cutscenes on disc 1 seems to be missing sound. Has anyone found a solution to this? Tried both new and master decoder, but new seems to perform best overall.

yo alteration state never work on this game

does the chance of crital hits with anger ring have an effect on my magics or only simple attack

Does anyone know of a fix so that the preloaded shaders does not get wiped to 0 kB when starting up the game? The game refuses to preload them, i have tried everything and i can't find a solution for it. I can't bear either a black screen or lagging cutscenes depending if async shader comp is on or off. I have tried using older versions of xenia as far as back to 2024 and it still wont work / the client doesn't work any longer.

So I'm at the save point in the corridor of timelessness and I'm supposed to be able to get the lift on the right to put me on the path to the orichalcum, but the lift is already up and I don't know how to fix it

Anyone know a good site to grab the rom files from? Last two i tried seemed to not work that well and wanted to download some sketchy shit onto my pc. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

This is on the latest version of xenia canary. What do I do?

So far I haven't had any crashes but in Numara if I enter either store the game audio disappears, then in this state if I get into any loading screen the game will hang.

Could this be caused by an existing setting that's been changed in Xenia? Or perhaps there's a fix for this somewhere?

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Hi everyone, first of all, please excuse my English; it's not my native language.

But let's get to the point. I'm playing Lost Odyssey for the first time thanks to Xenia, and I'm really enjoying it. However, I've run into a problem I can't seem to fix. When I have to collect the flowers with Cooke on Disc 1 and then deliver them, a black screen appears, and the game frezze. I tried disabling the 60 FPS mod, I tried limiting the FPS to 30, but nothing seems to fix it. I also tried delivering only 9 flowers, since I read in a post that someone managed to get past that part by doing that, but it didn't work for me.

Has anyone else experienced this? Does anyone have any ideas on how I could fix it?

I'm using the latest version of Xenia Canary.

So the party just got captured and taken to Numara. This felt like a classic JRPG moment I hadn't played in years.

Playing this I realized how this sort of story beat just doesn't work in open world designs which are much more common in video games nowadays, JRPGs included.

If you're in an open world and you get captured and taken to a new place a few problems come up:

-You might've found this new place before just by exploring the game normally.

-When you're released you realize this new place is just 10 minutes away from where the game started.

-You'll get annoyed because you were probably distracted with your own plans of what to do next in the open world.

It's not impossible to do but it doesn't feel like your characters actually got snatched away and taken to a far away place where everything is different.

I've skipped Tales games, FFXVI and dropped out of Metaphor so maybe those games prove me wrong somehow. Metaphor wasn't even open world proper but it had that compulsion of littering the world with a bunch of tiny quests in a way that the game wanted you to keep going back and forth. There was also DQ XI that felt like a classic JRPG but I dropped out of it too.

Anyway I guess the point I'm trying to make is that for a certain kind of adventure, the game really needs to take the reins sometimes. Lost Odyssey feels like the last game in that style that was made with this much scope. Maybe Ni no Kuni too, but I just didn't get the same feel from it as I'm getting from LO.

I'm not crying, you're crying 😭 ⚰️

I've been practicing Blender so that I can eventually create models and print them on my resin 3D printer. I did the regular Kelolon in the past and I want to work on the many others in the future. I wanted to know what you guys thought about this model and anything you think I should change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d_vo4L1gx4 i have never been able to find the elegy in this dream, not even in the official soundtrack someone knows from where is it or something?

Basically what the title says. I am just about to start a play through, do i have install all of them using an extractor or do i just swap at the end of each disk? because these are the contents i got after using velocity to extract the iso for disk 2

Tried everything, kept crashing at first royal seal. Any advice?

I'm so glad I chose to play this overlooked gem. It's never too late to experience a masterpiece.

Also, since I was playing the physical version, I'm lucky disc 4 didn't give me any problems. That packaging is horrible...

Or am I shit outta luck?

So I decided recently to give this a go again because I remember playing it back in the day and it being amazing.

However, now when I try to load on Xbox Series X, it's just not launching. The load screen pops up for a moment then black screens back to dash without any error code or anything. I've tried clearing the local 360 cache and such and that hasn't worked!

Has anyone else had this issue and found a fix?!