Kaim, the main character of Lost Odyssey, is a thousand-year-old immortal who has lost most of his memory, and scattered throughout the game are points where he experiences déjà vu - seeing children playing at a park will remind him of one of his hundreds of kids; a church’s bell ringing will remind him of hearing the same as a dock worker, etc. These scenes are presented through storybook segments called “A Thousand Years of Dreams” by award-winning Japanese novelist Kiyoshi Shigematsu. These are clearly the highlights of the game, and why Hironobu Sakaguchi, the game’s producer and scenario writer, didn’t hand off all of the game’s writing responsibilities to Shigematsu is beyond me. Maybe he did try to, who knows.

Lost Odyssey’s main plot-line is boring, standard Japanese role-playing game fare, full of “Magic Republics” and evil politicians, while “A Thousand Years of Dreams” are original and, more often than not, moving. Kaim has had dozens of wives and the previously mentioned hundreds of children, and has had to grieve for all of them. He’s also fought in wars and smaller-scale battles throughout his entire life, and has seen countless friends die. That doesn’t stop these stories from being beautiful though, as suns rise over farmland, elderly women bake the best bread you’ve ever tasted, and seasonal flowers bloom in port towns. It’s almost a shame these scenes are presented only through text; they could have been even more special as cut scenes or even playable sections. Maybe it’s because Shigematsu’s masterful command of language doesn’t come through in the English translation; in the original Japanese, text probably would have been preferable.

There are also good parts of the main story, but they start to lose their meaning when a funeral is turned into two consecutive fetch quests and a minigame. Sakaguchi’s last console RPG, Blue Dragon, had a story that was shallow and maybe even a little stupid, but at least it was fun and lighthearted, whereas Lost Odyssey’s is too serious and too depressing for its own good.

The leveling and combat systems are also classic JRPG, and are also not quite as good as in Blue Dragon. Why have random battles when enemies could instead be represented on the overworld? Why not have the ability to charge your attacks and spells, sacrificing speed for power? The bosses are also stupidly hard - many of them should have had half the amount of hit points they do. You could argue that this makes them interesting, and more like puzzles more than traditional video game boss fights, but nobody wants to do the same fight over and over and over again.

Lost Odyssey is still recommendable, especially if “A Thousand Years of Dreams” would interest you, and you want to hear the best soundtrack Nobuo Uematsu has composed in years, but it’s not the opus fans of the genre are looking for right now.