00:00:32.53 Dave Hello everybody, my name is Dave Jackson and you're listening to Tales from the Backlog. This is a video games deep dive review podcast where each week I'm joined by a guest to bring a game out of the backlog, play it, and discuss. My guest today is a friend of the show, a returning guest, one host of Lightning Strikes Thrice, and an immortal podcaster, welcome back Ryan Batie. 00:00:56.48 Ryan Thank you so much, Dave. It's really great to be back here talking JRPGs with you again. I guess Tunic was not a JRPG, but you know, it has vibes. 00:01:05.86 Dave Right, ah we have previously done another JRPG. We did Final Fantasy 10. That was episode 99 of the podcast. Tunic, like you said, was episode 63. And then we also did one of the episodes that I most frequently get feedback about, which was the discussion about whether video games need to be fun. 00:01:23.59 Ryan Mm. 00:01:27.78 Dave And that was with Brad Gallaway from So…Videogames, gamecritics.com. And that episode was in May of 2023. It doesn't have an episode number ah if anyone wants to go back in time and check that one out. ah Today, we're going to be talking about Lost Odyssey. So back on the JRPG train, it is an RPG developed by Mist Walker and Field Plus and published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox 360 in 2008. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, thank you for stopping by. Here is how spoilers work today. ah This is the same policy we do on every episode. There will be a no spoilers section for a while where we'll talk about basically as much as we can without spoiling the story. And then we will warn people when spoilers are beginning so you can jump out if you don't want to be spoiled about Lost Odyssey. Afterwards, we'll talk about all the spoilers stuff that we want to talk about. So. 00:02:28.31 Dave What is Lost Odyssey? I kept my elevator pitch simple here. This is the sad adult JRPG in a series type of game that is generally full of optimism and stuff like that. This one's a bit more bleak and dark yeah from time to time. What would you say? 00:02:50.53 Ryan Yeah, that ah you just nailed it in one ah my because mine is basically a wordier version of that. I my elevator pitch is ah would you like to play a deeply sad meditation on aging and relevance made by a guy who himself was feeling ambivalent about his own own place in the game creator landscape ah that happens to be disguised as a quote unquote love letter to the 32 bit era of JRPGs? 00:03:19.31 Dave The answer to that question is yes, I would like to play that game. ah I played this on an Xbox 360. It is famously not available on PC. It has not been re-released on other systems. It's only available on the 360 or backwards compatible on the later Xbox systems. Shout out to Xbox for actually caring about backwards compatibility. 00:03:43.76 Ryan Seriously. 00:03:43.87 Dave But I actually went to my local game store. I bought a used Xbox 360 and lost Odyssey in order to play this because I don't have a Series X or something like that. ah It took me 51 hours to get through it. Part of that is I was following a guide. Part of it is I didn't do a ton of side content once that stuff opens up. ah It can be a much longer game if you want it to be. ah So Ryan, where did you play this? How long did it take you? 00:04:12.14 Ryan So I played this on the Xbox One through backwards compatibility. It's not on their digital store, ah but 00:04:16.48 Dave Mm hmm. 00:04:21.22 Ryan When I was the last one of the last times I was downsizing I decided that I wanted to keep a few of my disk 360 games even though I was selling my 360 and this is one of the ones that I saved um you it it you put the disk in it installs all four disks at once even just off the main disk and um 00:04:30.96 Dave Mm hmm. 00:04:44.57 Ryan I my game clock was closer to 65 hours um because I did most of the side content there was one thing that I did not fully do uh and it was because it was too obnoxious but yeah it's this is 00:04:50.25 Dave Mm 00:05:03.76 Ryan If you're mainlining this game, it will probably ah be about 50. You can get it up to about 70 if you want to explore literally everything the game has to offer. um Thankfully, yeah, the guides for this are robust, and you can search for like different side quests if you're stuck on just one thing. 00:05:21.75 Ryan And that part is nice. The people who have written about this game have really done a good job of writing about it in detail. so 00:05:31.43 Dave Yeah. 00:05:31.88 Ryan Yeah, Xbox one through backwards compatibility about 65 hours. 00:05:36.62 Dave Nice. And I think that this game is still available. Like if you don't want to go buy the disc, I think you can buy it on the digital store like the new Xbox series consoles, but maybe not the Xbox One store. I see Wario 64 posts about sales for this game all the time. 00:05:53.08 Ryan Oh, OK. 00:05:53.28 Dave so I think that it is available that way. ah, The physical Xbox 360 version cost me like 25, 30 bucks or something like that. Luckily, Xbox 360 is not crazy expensive like some older systems are, not yet, I guess. ah So there we go. um So how did we first get into Lost Odyssey? This is neither our first time playing this game. So ah Ryan, we'll start with you first, as we always do. How did you first hear about this game? What made you want to play it? When did you first play it? 00:06:29.12 Ryan So yeah, I have loved Final Fantasy games basically since I've loved video games. It was my second big video game love after Mega Man. 00:06:35.33 Dave Mm hmm. 00:06:39.44 Ryan And um after Sakaguchi kind of left square and disgrace, ah you know, that was kind of when I was like an upper class person in high school and then I went to college and I didn't really have time for video games but I like kept some of those video games on the back burner and when it when I found out that Sakaguchi was doing two high-profile JRPGs for the Xbox 360 to try to bring sales in Japan for the 360 up I was like oh 00:07:14.10 Ryan I don't really care about Blue Dragon, but Lost Odyssey is exactly my shit. And so I like to keep it on the back burner. 00:07:18.99 Dave Mm hmm. 00:07:20.59 Ryan And then ah kind of when I got back from college, I bought a used 360 at that point. And i'm honestly, the first time I played it, because I think mentally I had hyped it up for like three years or maybe like two years or something. 00:07:33.93 Dave Mm 00:07:38.59 Ryan I thought it was kind of bad like it was a very just like meh six out of ten experience for me it felt kind of like a cheap knockoff of all of these final fantasies that I loved and I didn't really go back and try to replay it all the way through until a few years later and then I ended up being way warmer on it so I had a it was a it was a pretty big whiff the my first time what about you 00:07:41.56 Dave hmm. 00:08:05.46 Dave Yeah, I played this in 2012 or so, so not right when it came out, but I was an Xbox person with the original Xbox and then the 360. I didn't have a PlayStation until I got a PS4. So the Xbox 360 was my console. 00:08:19.96 Ryan Hmm. 00:08:22.32 Dave And I also loved some Final Fantasy games up before that, most notably six and 10, but I didn't have, well, that's a lie. I played 13 when it came out on the 360, but um That's a whole other can of worms with ah with that game there. 00:08:39.33 Ryan Yeah. 00:08:39.43 Dave But um I don't know exactly why I got into this. I know that an employee at GameStop recommended it to me, which is like, there's an oddly high number of my favorite games that started with like, hey, I'm looking for an RPG. Hey, have you tried Morrowind, try Dark Souls, try Lost Odyssey, all three of those, just some dude at GameStop recommending it. So hell yeah. 00:09:03.83 Ryan That's so cool. 00:09:04.87 Dave Yeah, to those three people, good job. but um So I got this, but I don't think it was like, oh yeah, also the people who made Final Fantasy did that. I don't know if I knew that back then. 00:09:16.80 Dave But I played it a ton. That first playthrough was more of that 70, 80 hour playthrough where I did everything I could. And I loved it back then. It completely blew me away. And then it's just never really been available since then on modern systems. And I think even recently, Sakaguchi said he's not interested in 00:09:37.58 Ryan Yeah. 00:09:41.75 Dave like making it more available. Who knows? Hopefully people buy Fantasian and he's, you know, regains the taste for money or something like that. um 00:09:50.23 Ryan Yeah, well, I mean, honestly, even though we might be jumping around a little bit, even though his mobile RPGs aren't really my thing, it made him financially successful again. 00:10:03.04 Dave Well, that's good. 00:10:03.43 Ryan Like, yeah. And so and that's part of the reason why he didn't want to go back to console is he was like, well, um Terra Battle did really well for me, and I don't have to feel like the disgraced you know guy who ah got an entire studio in Hawaii completely shut down through my hubris. 00:10:22.67 Dave Mm hmm. 00:10:23.06 Ryan So I'm just going to stay in the mobile space now. 00:10:25.80 Dave Yeah. Well, uh, here's hoping, um, people in the future, hopefully you're listening to this and you're saying, you know what, Dave and Ryan, he did, he did go back. Uh, so, um, that was my history with it. I loved it when I first played it. And then for over 10 years, I just kind of was like, Hey, it would be nice to play that game again someday. Maybe they'll put it on the switch or on the PC. And then I was like, you know what? 00:10:50.21 Ryan Hmm. 00:10:50.91 Dave Fuck it. I'm just going to buy a 360 again and I'll play it. And now I'm starting to. buy more games for the 360 that are kind of stuck there. So next month and a little tease for another one of those coming up, we have Deadly Premonition coming up where I bought that for 360 because the PC version doesn't work. 00:11:10.31 Dave So ah it's going to be it's going to be a fun one for sure. 00:11:12.50 Ryan That is a game that I'm really, really interested to hear the episode on because Yeah, and like what it is because that game dominated so much discourse for so many years and people have kind of finally stopped talking about it at every opportunity they could take. 00:11:25.78 Dave Mm hmm. 00:11:30.03 Ryan And so I feel like now is the time when someone could be the most fresh coming into that game. 00:11:36.13 Dave Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be fun as we're talking. I'm recording about that in like two weeks. So that's gonna be a good time coming up in October. ah So I'm using that 360 for more than just lost Odyssey and to ah to get into our opening thoughts here. 00:11:47.63 Ryan Yeah. 00:11:51.62 Dave I didn't love Lost Odyssey as much this time around. I just think that I'm paying closer attention. Like I have the microscope on it more now than I did back in 2012 when I was playing it. And I like it, I really enjoyed the story back then and now I am replaying it. There are parts of the story that I really enjoy, but not the whole thing. ah So it might be a little difference in how much I explored every nook and cranny this time around, or maybe just like, 00:12:25.53 Dave Thinking about the approach to storytelling, there are some weird decisions in here that I don't think are very good. 00:12:32.29 Ryan Mm hmm. 00:12:32.40 Dave But I think that, you know, we talked about in the pitch, like the the sad adults JRPG, I think that a lot of those themes that would attract someone who wants like a ah much more mature, a much sadder, ah more 00:12:39.29 Ryan Yeah. 00:12:48.76 Dave i like the contemplative tone in a game like this. I think a lot of that stuff still does really work really well. ah So I still think this game is pretty good. There is just some stuff that I don't think is great as far as storytelling. And ah I think the pacing really got to me sometimes more so the second time around. 00:13:05.43 Ryan Mm. 00:13:08.24 Dave ah But I'm glad I revisited the game this time. 00:13:11.79 Ryan Good, good. I'm glad. Yeah, it falls in a really weird space for me where, um you know, JRPGs were, you know, one of my big, big first loves and one of the reasons why I got so into video games. And, you know, I still do an incredibly deep dive podcast on JRPGs and so that 's still part of my life. But in the intervening years between now and when I first loved the game, um I've gotten tired of a lot of um bits of tedium that are baked into the genre. 00:13:49.90 Dave Mm hmm. 00:13:51.10 Ryan And the interesting part about this game is that it has a lot of that tedium, but because it is positioned in this way as like an old guy making the kind of JRPG that made him famous, um and is a love letter specifically to 32-bit JRPGs The genre has moved on and a lot of the things that Lost Odyssey prioritizes are things that the modern genre does not prioritize. 00:14:27.15 Ryan And so I saw that, you know, I was also bothered by the pacing bits. 00:14:27.53 Dave Mm hmm. 00:14:32.51 Ryan I also think that there is too much like interconnective tissue tedium. And I also think the story, the bones of the story, are incredible. But the way the story is told sometimes falls flat. But I think because I came in nervous that I was going to be very against it, I ended up being really pleasantly surprised. And so my ultimate thoughts on this game are like a very warm 8 out of 10, provided that you have the patience for the things that it requires patience for. 00:15:10.28 Dave Mm hmm. 00:15:10.86 Ryan Just it scratches an itch that a lot of modern JRPGs do not scratch. And it's interesting that it was purposefully backward looking at the time that it was released and is even more backward looking now. But I think that actually like it works in its favor almost as often yeah as often even as it works against it. 00:15:34.84 Dave Yeah, I think that this episode, at least from my perspective, and it sounds like from your perspective too, it's going to be one of those games where we're like, you know, this game is good. So this is not going to be like trashing the game or something like that. But because it's good, the parts that are not good stand out more. 00:15:53.11 Ryan mm hmm. 00:15:53.50 Dave in something like this where you're like these elements are good and this like you know we have a sequence of four or five plot events and like three of them are really awesome and then the ones that don't stand out more because they're next to the things that are really good. 00:16:08.89 Ryan Yeah. 00:16:09.05 Dave um And I think that that's going to be where some of the glaring things come in. ah But we have a long podcast ahead of us to dig into those things. So let's listen to a bit of music, something that I think a lot of people do like about this game. And we'll come back and we'll set up the story. 00:16:27.60 Ryan Wonderful. 00:16:30.75 Dave Lost Odyssey was written by the Final Fantasy series creator, Hironobu Sakaguchi, after he left Square and formed his own studio. So the game begins with a quote that kind of sets the tone for some stuff that's just gonna be really important throughout this game. The quote reads, when people die, they just go away. If there's any place a soul would go, it's in your memories. The people you remember, they're with you forever. And that quote sets up I think multiple things that this game really wants to focus on. ah This game deals heavily in loss. It deals heavily with memory because of some stuff that our main characters are going through. 00:17:14.89 Dave ah so Interesting quote, and then the game throws you into a battle at the beginning, you have heavy infantry clashing with more heavy infantry and like heavy, heavy, they're like, you know, the heaviest armor knights fighting out on the battlefield. 00:17:30.55 Ryan Mm hmm. 00:17:30.80 Dave ah There's weird robots out in the battlefield smashing and slicing people up. ah There are battle towers with mages on there that are healing and reincarnating dead soldiers to go fight again. ah It is a wild opening scene and oh One of the things I think is really impressive about this game's presentation is a lot of these like set piece cutscenes are really, really impressive. And there's some really good ones later on in the game, but I think one of the best ones is this opening cutscene in this battle. 00:18:03.32 Ryan Yeah, I agree. And it's for folks who are not around at the time. Square Soft and then Square Enix were unparalleled at pre-rendered cinematic cutscenes. 00:18:15.71 Dave Yeah. 00:18:19.55 Ryan No one else really came close, at least in the space that they were working in. I think you could make an argument that like Blizzard's ah ah plot cutscenes for Diablo and Starcraft are like, up there as well but basically in the JRPG space it was just square and even something like Legend of Dragoon which was trying to ape square like it was off. Sakaguchi himself was not responsible directly for those movies but 00:18:51.58 Ryan He was the one who established the studio in Honolulu that worked exclusively to make these cutscenes so good. And then his downfall was that he was like, well, we basically have a movie studio already. Let's just make Final Fantasy the spirits within and then Final Fantasy the spirits within like totally tanked and destroyed the studio. So anyway. um I bring all that up because one of the big things about Lost Odyssey is that Microsoft gave this studio or this pair of studios a ton of money because they really wanted to penetrate the Japanese market. 00:19:32.90 Ryan and these cutscenes are as expensive looking as Final Fantasy 10 and 8 cutscenes. 00:19:40.86 Dave Yeah. 00:19:42.05 Ryan They are really, really well animated and like they really play on spectacle and it's yeah it's awesome. 00:19:50.78 Dave Yeah. 00:19:53.47 Dave Yeah, speaking of that spectacle, so continuing on with that cutscene, we're introduced to our protagonist, Kaim Argonar, who enters the fray, kills a bunch of soldiers. You have a tutorial boss fight against this weird hammer arm machine. i You know, utility in battle, don't ask any questions why you would make this machine. It's just there to basically just drop and crush a very thin line of people. But ah it's a cool looking cutscene. It's a cool boss fight. Ah You beat that thing and then suddenly the spectacle kicks off because the sky above the battlefield opens up and like meteors start falling from the sky, ah killing everybody on the battlefield, except for Kaim. 00:20:41.29 Ryan yeah um this battle is so it's just like it's so you know there there are a lot of games that will throw an introductory battle at you to teach the basic mechanics and this is like barely even that because most of the mechanics that make the battle system interesting aren't available here at all but what it does do is show off the power of the Xbox 360 in real time because while you're fighting you see all these like hordes of animated soldiers all around you fighting and dying as well so it does not feel like it is all of a sudden separated from the battle. 00:21:07.69 Dave Mm hmm. 00:21:20.76 Ryan Kaim is in the fray in the middle of it you beat the guy and then all hell breaks loose it's it's 00:21:27.42 Dave Yeah. 00:21:28.37 Ryan a very powerful opening. 00:21:30.49 Dave Yeah, it's really good. And so like, that's where the, ah you know, the big spectacle ends when this meteor comes and the whole battlefield is, you know, washed with fire and magma and all that stuff. ah But Kaim gets up from it and everyone is like, hey, we didn't think anyone survived. And we're surprised too, but we learn the reason for that is because Kaim is immortal. He is one of a handful of immortal characters in the game. 00:22:00.11 Dave Kaim doesn't remember anything about his past. He starts out, you know it's the amnesiac protagonist here. There's a reason for it in this game, that which we'll get to later. But um that's one of this ah game's big themes that it touches on as well. We talked about things like loss and memory and stuff. We have them all in kind here ah because I think this game's biggest theme that it touches on the most is what it's like to be immortal and, you know, live many lives and see everybody that you love die throughout the course of all of your lives. 00:22:38.78 Dave And then Kaim gets his memory wiped at some point. So it's like, you know, you go through the process of recovering memories, but every time you recover memories in this game, it's always something really sad. And like some of them are quite brutal that you remember. 00:22:51.37 Ryan Yeah. 00:22:55.00 Dave So like, this is the kind of subject area that this game wants to play in and spends most of its time in. 00:23:02.80 Ryan And it's an interesting contrast because so the big like, um, uh, the the the the The quick and dirty, I guess, elevator pitch for Sakaguchi as a storyteller is that he did not care about story at first, and then when they were developing Final Fantasy III, his mom died, and he was really rocked by that experience. um And so then death became this obsession of his from, you know, 00:23:37.70 Dave Mm hmm. 00:23:38.57 Ryan Four and seven, especially. And then, you know, he kind of got more into an advisory role after that. But um this is a lot of his pet themes. But instead of focusing on the desk themselves, they focus on the people who are still living. 00:23:58.30 Dave Yeah. 00:23:58.43 Ryan And I think that is a much more mature approach. And also, I think I might be informed by, OK, I'm an old guy. I've lived forever in industry terms. And um I've seen a lot of loss both in my personal life and in the industry. And I'm just trying to reckon with that and reckon with you know how it has shaped me as a person. um i i i I could be wrong, you know, this is speculation, but I feel a lot of Sakaguchi working out some shit in this game. 00:24:33.70 Dave Yeah, there's definitely a lot of that with what the immortal characters have to reckon with, and we'll touch on that in just a second. I want to introduce a couple other main characters here. We have another immortal character that Kai meets really quickly named Seth. And Seth is another immortal. ah She is a soldier kind of like Kaim. She also doesn't remember you know much about her past. So we have these two immortals, and then we meet our third character really early in the game. And there's more that we meet later. But the main three for a little while are Kaim, Seth, and then Jansen. 00:25:14.34 Dave ah who is a mage. Jansen is tasked by one of the local, we'll say, generals to go along with Kaim and Seth on a mission to check out this giant magic engine that's being constructed. And Jansen's not immortal. Jansen's just a regular guy. And that's like part of Jansen's character too. Jansen's very weird for a JRPG character. I don't think I've ever seen a character quite like him. 00:25:46.72 Dave ah he's always wisecracking, he is always talking. He's one of those people that like, just mouth is running no matter the situation. Jansen works through situations by talking to himself, to other people. So he's always talking. ah And so we have these two immortals that are very stoic, we'll say, especially Kaim. 00:26:06.17 Ryan Mm hmm. Mm hmm. 00:26:09.12 Dave And then you have Jansen, who's the exact opposite of that. And the way that they, you know, They work with the immortal characters, basically showing you throughout all of the things that you learn, why the immortal characters would be so stoic and so, you know, possibly just sad about a bunch of stuff that they've lived through. 00:26:24.70 Ryan No. 00:26:30.42 Dave And then you have the mortal character who, you know, obviously doesn't have that same perspective. And it's interesting to put them together like that. 00:26:38.72 Ryan It is. I've ah yeah I've got a couple notes on this. um First is I want to um just emphasize something that you wrote down, but we haven't said yet, which is like, kind stoicism is almost comedic to the point where he is the the point where he's saying, I don't know or I don't care about everything. ah sort Yeah. 00:26:58.89 Dave Early in the game, yeah, for sure. 00:27:00.84 Ryan um And yeah, he's he's basically, he's like cloud in reverse, where cloud is like a bitter dumb asshole who can't connect to people because he's a teenager and chime is a bitter stubborn asshole who can't connect to anyone because he's just seen too much shit and he's he's he's lost contact with the piece of humanity that allows him to to be warm. 00:27:21.86 Dave Yeah. 00:27:26.92 Ryan um Which, I mean, he is the closest thing. like Speaking of JRPG for adults, um there are no main characters between the ages of 16 and 19 in this game, which is, like, unheard of. 00:27:42.65 Dave oh and unheard of yeah 00:27:44.94 Ryan And early game kind is like the closest we get because he's but he approaches it because he's an old guy. um The other thing that I want to say that I think I wrote down later, but it's a good point to put it down here. Jansen. um So this game, especially because it was being funded by Microsoft and all that, um the voice acting track was originally done in English and the mouth movements were animated to the English voice track, not the Japanese. 00:28:07.19 Dave Oh, unheard of, yeah. 00:28:16.58 Dave Mm. 00:28:18.27 Ryan And Jansen's, I'm going to have to stop myself from saying Jansen because I play this game half in Japanese and half in English just to kind of back to A-B test the different voices. 00:28:27.82 Dave Uh-huh. 00:28:30.26 Ryan um And Jansen's voice actor was encouraged to ad lib and improvise almost all of the time. 00:28:38.58 Dave Mm-hmm. 00:28:40.07 Ryan And that's where you get his motormouth persona. um And the amount that he actually talks out loud in the Japanese version is like less than 30 percent of it and but you know the subtitles show the English dialogue and so it has all the ad libs but Jansen in particular would not work without the voice performance he has and that encouragement for improvisation because it makes what could be a very stock character of like really annoying ladies man who ah is really only out for himself at first and then like you know slowly grows to to you know care for and love people like 00:29:26.34 Ryan that character could have been so annoying. And he is a little bit annoying, but on purpose in a very endearing way. And like in general, every character who seems pretty one note at first gets at like some deepening and expansion by the end of the game. 00:29:33.93 Dave Mm hmm. 00:29:44.28 Ryan Jansen went from one of my least favorite characters to one of my favorites, um just by sure force of his charisma and his personality with him constantly talking. 00:29:56.00 Dave Yeah, yeah, he was pretty annoying at first. And he remained, you know, to some degree of annoying the whole game for me, but I did end up liking Jansen as a character. 00:30:06.30 Ryan mm hmm. 00:30:06.54 Dave And I think part of it is, as you said, there's growth to Jansen. And as you also said, there's growth to basically everybody. And I think Kaim is a really good example of starting out as that character who literally just could not care, like doesn't have the capacity to care about small little day to day concerns anymore. He doesn't remember anything, but he knows that, you know, he's seen some shit. So like you said, um a lot of his dialogue early in the game is either I don't know, or I don't care. He does not elaborate on those statements either. That's all he has to say most of the time. 00:30:45.60 Ryan Mm hmm. 00:30:45.97 Dave But there is development and growth with Kaim when a certain other characters get introduced later on in the story that I think is quite good. 00:30:55.85 Ryan I agree. 00:30:55.94 Dave So yeah. ah So we have this kind of plot. in like the way that the story is presented in an RPG like this. so you know you have your characters, you walk through the world, you have your animated cutscenes, you have ah your nicer pre-rendered cutscenes. um But this game introduces another type of story presentation, ah which is really interesting and very non-standard for this type of game, ah which are these written text sections called The Thousand Years of Dreams. They're little short stories that you come across at key points in the story, or you might find them doing side content or exploring. 00:31:42.18 Dave Some of them are mandatory as you play through, but there's a lot that you will miss if you don't go poking around everywhere any chance you get like the opportunity. ah These short stories were not written by the main writing team. They were written by Japanese author Kiyoshi Shigematsu, who And they were translated for the English version of the game by J. Rubin, who I knew the name J. Rubin because J. Rubin is Haruki Murakami's translator for his books. And I've read lots of Murakami's books. ah And these are, um well, let's just say that the quality of writing between the main game 00:32:26.21 Dave and these thousand years of dreams, short stories are ah stark. It is a big step up in quality of writing. 00:32:30.68 Ryan Yeah. 00:32:34.04 Dave Now, I will are i will in the defense of the people writing the rest of the game, 00:32:35.05 Ryan Mm 00:32:41.09 Dave They have different goals for the type of writing that they're doing here. 00:32:42.71 Ryan hmm. 00:32:44.60 Dave ah For the rest of the game, they don't need to describe anything visually, for example, because you see it in the game, in the place that you are. ah But these are really descriptive. They are really heartfelt. ah Each story is going through one of Kaim's memories or maybe one of Seth's or another character that you might meet later. um These are... really just excellent. And I think that a lot of the emotional core of this game lives in these stories, which is really interesting to me. 00:33:16.44 Ryan Absolutely. I totally agree. They are really lyrical and their presentation. So um there was a preorder bonus in Japan where you could get these compiled in a book. um I don't think it was ever officially localized and brought over here, but I was thinking about it as I was, you know, because we were talking about 00:33:30.38 Dave Ooh. 00:33:39.26 Ryan and favorite passages to share in in the spoiler after the spoiler wall and um just as text they don't hit quite as hard they're still very beautiful but the way that the game it's like you know certain words are animated where there will be like a word like that like falls down onto the screen a few times 00:34:01.56 Dave Yeah. 00:34:02.70 Ryan um And there are occasional sound effects on top of whatever the background music is. 00:34:06.62 Dave Yeah. 00:34:09.52 Ryan And it really is just like, even though you're just reading these short stories, some of which can take like 10 to 15 minutes to read, honestly. So it's like, it's hefty and can feel a little bit like an interruption if it happens right as you're trying to play the game. 00:34:17.84 Dave yeah 00:34:26.03 Ryan um Just the overall package, the the the way that they're written and translated, the way that they are presented on screen is very powerful and really just like drips with humanity and grief and it I like cannot, I was 00:34:50.67 Ryan I was skeptical of having so much story delivery being done in this odd method at first, but I was totally won over after I read just a couple of them because they are beautiful. um Yeah, J. Rubin, I saw J. Rubin give a talk ah about translation of Murakami's works a few years ago, and it's the it's like the talk that got me interested in localization in the first place because of the way that he talked about um having conversations with an author and like really trying to get to the like emotional and artistic essence of ah what a particular author is trying to get at and trying to then 00:35:17.07 Dave Hmm. 00:35:33.59 Ryan shape that poetry and that symbolism into something that can be understood in the English language or whatever language you're translating into. um it is His work, both Shigematsu's work writing them and Ruben's work translating them, I cannot speak highly enough of. They're so good. 00:35:55.17 Dave Yeah, it's excellent and um very similar to so if anyone out there has not played Lost Odyssey but has played near the original or replicants, it's the same as the sections giving kinase backstory in that game. 00:36:10.64 Ryan Yeah. 00:36:11.66 Dave um background music you know a little bit of like very light but a little bit of visual flair as you're reading it. It's funny those um little animations like a word like falling down or a word like fading in or spiraling or something like that. It's like you know the things that I learned how to do in PowerPoint when I was in high school to spruce up my presentation or something like that but 00:36:36.07 Ryan yeah 00:36:36.89 Dave um yeah the content in them is really, really good. And so I think that like when you play Lost Odyssey, if you're interested in like the pitch of what the story is exploring, those themes of immortality and loss and life and death and things like that, I think you might be surprised to see like most of that theming is located in here and not in the main game. 00:37:02.31 Ryan Mm hmm. 00:37:04.47 Dave And it's one of the like Things it's one of like the criticisms about the writing of the main story that I have is that the main story is more focused on a political plot and I don't think the main story Where our main characters the immortals and the mortals can could talk to each other about these exact things I don't think the main story does enough of that ah but I The message is given across in these Thousand Years of Dreams short stories where I think a lot of them are there to give you Kaim's immortal perspective. Most of them are about Kaim. 00:37:45.34 Dave on his travels throughout these thousand years with just random people that he meets out in the world in a random ass town. you know They have their problems. Kaim has a much bigger perspective on everything because he's probably seen this situation dozens of times. 00:38:02.72 Ryan Mm hmm. 00:38:02.86 Dave ah so Most of them are there either to give you Kaim's, you know, immortal perspective on these things, ah or to just let you soak in the tragedy that Kaim sees over and over and over again ah through his long life, or both. 00:38:18.92 Ryan Yeah. 00:38:21.42 Dave ah So these were like, appointment reading basically it was like because you can get these and you can choose like do I want to read this now or do I want to read it next time I save or next time I sleep I think is the thing ah but I always read them right there on the spot this was my favorite part about the story in this game was reading these the only problem is 00:38:35.09 Ryan Mm hmm. 00:38:44.63 Dave ah Sometimes you'll get like four of them in a row, like in the same town, you'll unlock like four of these, which I don't think is great. 00:38:48.80 Ryan Yeah. 00:38:53.51 Dave I think they should be spaced out a little bit more, but they are so good that I did want to read every single one that I came across when I found them. 00:38:54.47 Ryan Mm hmm. 00:39:03.22 Ryan Yeah, yeah, I tried once because I was just in a groove to like but I came across three in a row and I just wanted to keep playing that night. I didn't want to switch to a different gameplay mode like reading and ruminating. And so I waited till I stayed at an inn. And what I noticed was, number one, when you read them back to back to back to back, you kind of forget some of the details. And then the second is that where you find them in the story, will often add a little bit of resonance because what happens is you like stumble across a conversation and then that conversation makes like it says you know something triggered a memory in time and then it will be commenting not directly on what just happened but it's like oh that reminds me of a different time that I was very sad um and so that that that context 00:39:46.25 Dave Yeah. 00:39:58.85 Ryan That context of where I ran into them ended up mattering more, so I stopped doing that. 00:40:03.92 Dave Yeah. 00:40:04.57 Ryan um i want to say this is There was one ah early story, um one early dream that kind of lays out the thesis for the 1000 years of dreams in total, and if it's okay, I'd like to quote it. 00:40:20.59 Dave Yeah, sure. 00:40:21.24 Ryan um So I don't remember exactly which this might be from the flowers one. Anyway, ah it just says, Kaim continued his long journey, a dizzying number of years and months flowed by years and months during which numberless wars and natural calamities scourged the earth. People were born and they died. They loved each other and were parted from the ones they loved. There were joys beyond measure and sorrows just as measureless. People fought and argued without end, but they also loved and forgave each other endlessly. Thus, was history built up as the tears of the past evolved gradually into prayers for the future. 00:41:00.08 Dave It's good stuff. And that's, I mean, that's representative of all of these stories, basically the, the con, like the conversations that are in those stories. And then they always kind of end with that kind of a perspective, I guess that Kaim has, or, you know, just, just something to, to leave you with as the story's ending and you move on to the next thing you're doing in the main game. 00:41:26.94 Ryan Mm-hmm. 00:41:28.41 Dave So ah these are great, and I think they are, you know, mandatory reading, basically. 00:41:32.12 Ryan Yeah. 00:41:35.37 Dave like I can't imagine playing this game and missing the content that these give you, the subject matter that these give you. These are yeah awesome. 00:41:44.73 Ryan yeah I completely agree. 00:41:48.39 Dave um 00:41:54.05 Dave Now you mentioned that those dreams, oh, let me restart that. I'm trying to figure out how to, let's see. 00:42:10.35 Dave We'll just do a music break right here. Yeah, music. 00:42:11.98 Ryan Okay. 00:42:15.11 Dave Now Lost Odyssey we talked about at the beginning is quite a long game. um You know, this genre has a reputation for being very long, but I think that the average game is shorter than Lost Odyssey in the genre, especially the average Final Fantasy game. 00:42:28.23 Ryan for 00:42:30.04 Dave And so I talked about in the beginning how the pacing kind of drags and I, you know, I play a lot of long games and I don't always feel the length of them, the way that I felt how long Lost Odyssey is. 00:42:41.46 Ryan the 00:42:44.42 Dave And it was only 51 hours for me, but it was a long 51 hours. 00:42:48.80 Ryan Yeah. 00:42:49.05 Dave So I wanted to kind of dig into a few reasons why I think this game feels as long as it does. um The first reason is that the first disc is full of plot events that propel you forward, you meet new characters, you have a motivation to go to a new place. um There are a lot of really memorable scenes that happen in the first disc, we'll say, and into the second disc a little bit too. And then you have a very long stretch where 00:43:23.21 Dave It's not to say that nothing happens because you have character interactions and you have a very slow development of characters. But there is not a big plot moment that happens really until like disc three. Like you might go an entire disc in this game without having one of those big things that makes you excited to move forward in the story again. Where like 00:43:50.33 Ryan Mm hmm. 00:43:51.93 Dave This game kind of feels like it's stuck in the mud from time to time. And I think part of that is the ah combat takes a long time, which we'll talk about, and then that you know gets compounded by the fact that the dungeons that you go through take a very long time in this game. 00:44:09.15 Ryan Hmm hmm. 00:44:10.52 Dave They're all long dungeons. And in those dungeons, I don't think there's enough storytelling to make you kind of excited to push on in that dungeon basically like you'll have a conversation at the beginning of the dungeon you might have a very short thing in the middle and then you'll fight a boss and maybe the boss's plot relevant and you might meet a new character or something like that at the end of the dungeon but there's like almost no storytelling that happens in those, you know, sometimes two hours while you're doing that. 00:44:44.90 Ryan Yeah. 00:44:46.24 Dave It is just all combat, maybe some light puzzling, you know, as, as dungeons go and stuff like that. So if you get like two or three of those in a row, suddenly you're looking at a long stretch of game where, uh, there were points where I forgot what was really going on in the story because there was so long in between, we'll say like very important things happening. 00:45:00.37 Ryan Mm hmm. yeah it so it is super interesting in that um i feel like a lot of video games and honestly just like a lot of fantasy stories have a very doughy middle section where essentially it's the gang goes on a journey and it's a travelogue as they go from place to place and there are some 00:45:33.08 Dave Mm hmm. 00:45:34.34 Ryan interesting things that happen in the populated places, but I think ah one of Lost Odyssey's big flaws is that most of the dungeons, the reason you're going through them is that you have to go through them to get to the next place. 00:45:43.00 Dave Hmm. 00:45:51.07 Ryan It's like, you know, there there are there are certain exceptions where you're going there for a story reason, but for the most part, it's like, oh, this mountain pass is blocked and so i have to go to the ice cave or oh um i you know can't get into town so i have to go through uh an enemy infested back way to get to town so it's entirely just like these dungeons which by and large i personally like which we can talk about in a little bit but like i agree with you that um 00:46:23.10 Ryan story takes such a backseat during these dungeons and so the gang goes on a journey section of this game feels very story sparse and it a lot of the dungeons are meet mechanically but they don't but number one they're too long and number two they do not do a lot to justify themselves other than this is an obstacle that's been put in front of the party and that's it. 00:46:47.73 Dave Yeah, the other thing that I was working toward that you are are touching on there is that the, I guess like the, we'll say three main things that will take up your time, which are doing dungeons, doing story content, and reading the Thousand Years of Dreams are very modal and separated from each other. 00:47:07.33 Ryan That's funny. Mmhmm. 00:47:09.00 Dave ah There are not often Thousand Years of Dreams sequences in the middle of dungeons. There are not often long story things in the middle of dungeons. ah You are often like in dungeon mode, or I'm going to sit back and watch 15 minutes of cutscenes, or I'm going to find a Thousand Years of Dreams thing and read it when I'm walking around town during like the parts of this game where you're just kind of like let loose in a new town to go talk to everybody, maybe pick up a few side quests. um you know visit the shops and stuff like that. 00:47:41.71 Dave And you'll pick up some thousand years of dreams during those sections as well. Sometimes, like I said, there's one town where it's like, you take two steps and you get another thousand years of dreams and then repeat that three times. 00:47:52.53 Ryan Yeah. 00:47:54.81 Dave um So I think that if it were mixed up a little bit more, like if I'm going through a dungeon that takes two and a half hours to get through, I would like to have that broken up by some extended cut scenes or 00:47:58.80 Ryan who 00:48:07.62 Dave a couple of thousand years of dreams stories, but the fact that there is nothing to break that long stretch up makes it feel longer and when it's just battle after battle after battle after battle while you're doing these puzzles and stuff like that. 00:48:14.83 Ryan Yeah. Yeah. 00:48:24.09 Ryan I agree, and I think that speaks to just like the pacing issues overall in this game, because i'm the. 00:48:29.50 Dave Mm hmm. 00:48:34.78 Ryan And you stop me if this should go behind a spoiler, well, but it's basic, just basic structure stuff. um 00:48:43.12 Ryan almost the entirety of Disc 3, like two thirds of Disc 3, is the one place where all of a sudden the dungeons have a very explicit story motivation and it becomes this very railroaded linear experience. And it is' all it's a lot of people's favorite part of the entire game. um When people talk about a Lost Odyssey fondly, a lot of them immediately go to, oh, well, disc three, where the plot finally kicks in. And like all of the gameplay that I'm doing is directly tied to that plot. 00:49:25.58 Ryan But like there are almost no thousand years of dreams in there. There are almost no side quests or exploration in there except for exploring these dungeons that you're in. And so it's it's whiplash where, OK, things were going too slow for too long and there was too much meandering. And all of a sudden there is no meandering. And I and it can be almost claustrophobic. Just how propulsive it becomes. 00:49:54.12 Dave Yeah. And then after that, you have like that railroaded section of, you know, if I remember right, a couple of pretty long dungeons in a row. And like the story is picking up then. So you do have a little bit more drive to get through those. And then disc four is like, Hey, did you notice we didn't have any side quests in this game? Disc 4 is like, okay, all of the side quests are now available and you can go do the final dungeon whenever you're ready. 00:50:18.74 Ryan Oh my god. 00:50:23.36 Ryan Yeah. 00:50:23.43 Dave um But it's ah that's another odd pacing decision to, you know, Most games I think for the better will break up the main story by letting you pick up on you know side quests in each town that you go to in this game will give you like. 00:50:36.30 Ryan Mhm. 00:50:39.58 Dave Some really light things where it's like you know someone lost something maybe you can go find it out you know in the. area directly outside of their town or something like that or they're these treasure hunts that you come across where you can find some treasure but like the side quests side quests are basically all only available in disc four so it's like uh disc one 00:51:00.66 Ryan Mhm. 00:51:04.29 Dave propels you forward with the new story, the new characters, everything is, you know, got a lot of momentum. Disc 2s in most of Disc 3 are very quiet for the most part. It's a lot like quiet moments, which, you know, there's a lot of good quiet moments, but that's what it is. 00:51:20.56 Ryan Mhm. 00:51:21.45 Dave Then Disc 3 is like, okay, long, like you said, very linear dungeons you're going through. 00:51:21.76 Ryan Mhm. 00:51:27.55 Dave And then Disc 4 is like side quest time. do what you want, then the game's over. So like when you lay out how it's all paced out, it is pretty odd. 00:51:37.09 Ryan it is and it's it you know um final fantasies seven and eight also have the like okay final disc time for the big side quest but it is not merely as extreme as it is in lost odyssey where yeah you can approach the final dungeon and by the time you approach the final dungeon you might be approaching 50 hours and so you're like you know what i want to be done with this game now but there's another like 00:51:50.00 Dave Yeah. 00:52:01.75 Ryan 15 hours of stuff that you can do. Some of it sucks, but some of it is really good also. 00:52:08.05 Dave Yeah. 00:52:08.82 Ryan ah Like I was really, I was surprised at how much I was enjoying some of the optional battles and stuff. And it's just kind of baffling how they, how they just shunted all of it into disc four. It's really, it's, it's hanky. 00:52:22.95 Dave yeah Yeah, I think that that's. You know, you can blow that up into. just how the story is told in this game in general, it's pretty disjointed, it's uneven, the pacing is weird, but the content is often quite good. 00:52:42.19 Ryan sir 00:52:42.29 Dave And you know when we get to the spoiler section, ah because we've taken quite a bit of time talking about the story here, when we get to the spoiler section, we'll definitely talk about a lot of that good stuff. And then there are parts about the story, important things that I think are quite bad or at least need discussion to dig into to see, you know, where we land on them. 00:53:01.73 Ryan Yeah. 00:53:03.64 Dave But there is a lot of really good stuff in the story and in some of that side content too. 00:53:05.84 Ryan Mm 00:53:08.96 Dave So ah for now, we will put a pin in the story. 00:53:09.06 Ryan hmm. 00:53:12.40 Dave Let's listen to a bit of music and come back and talk about the presentation in Lost Odyssey. 00:53:20.74 Dave So we talked a little bit about the spectacle of those big cut scenes. And that's definitely on display here. We talked about voice acting as well earlier. um And the other things about the presentation that I wanted to note are, um is you and I are both, obviously we did the Final Fantasy X podcast together. We're both big fans of Final Fantasy X. 00:53:46.71 Ryan Mmhmm. 00:53:46.86 Dave So I turned this game on and I was like, wow, this is Final Fantasy X on the Xbox 360 with how it's all presented ah to you. 00:53:50.59 Ryan Mmhmm. 00:53:55.60 Dave It has the same linear progression through ah you know very narrow linear paths to walk on. um When you get into battle, it has that same camera showing off your characters getting ready for battle. In this game, people have little voice lines at the beginning and end of combat ah instead of just the little animations they did in Final Fantasy 10. You have the animated like run ups to go run up and hit enemies in combat. Now, I think that stuff contributes to this game feeling slow also because you're 00:54:34.86 Dave your average standard you know random battle because of all of these animations and load-in and all of that ah takes longer than I think it should. 00:54:43.76 Ryan Absolutely. 00:54:43.98 Dave But it does have that cinematic focus to the presentation the same way that um Square has always been known for. you know When a new Final Fantasy dropped, especially when it was a new Final Fantasy on a new console, 00:54:54.75 Ryan Mhm. 00:55:00.66 Dave They were always like, okay, here's where we're setting the bar for presentation now. Uh, can you keep up with us? Final fantasy 10 felt like that too, to me. Um, lost Odyssey feels like they wanted to basically do what final fantasy 10 did, but with, you know, better graphics, basically. 00:55:20.08 Ryan Yeah, and I have another note about that, which is that um because it was on the 360, Lost Odyssey also, because it was on the 360 and because it was kind of developed by two separate studios, one hand story and one handling the gameplay, 00:55:34.24 Dave Mm hmm. 00:55:36.96 Ryan um It was on Unreal Engine. And Unreal Engine is not as bright and colorful as a lot of other PS2 era JRPGs are. 00:55:49.65 Dave Yeah. 00:55:50.67 Ryan um And they make that work a lot of the time. And there is still some like green and blue, like you know in especially one of the the big coastal city, city-state that exists. But um they managed to make the additional like brown and earth tone of the Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 3 in particular, work with the more mature angle with very like industrialized, smoky, dark cities. 00:56:20.87 Dave yeah 00:56:21.45 Ryan But I do think that one of the things that makes the dungeons feel so sloggy sometimes is that that's where all of the just like they don't try to make the dungeons that visually interesting and so it's where all of the crimes of Unreal Engine 3 being so brown but pop in because it's it's it's tough to care about a dungeon when it's just like another cave. 00:56:39.72 Dave Yeah. Uh huh. 00:56:50.24 Ryan Oh this cave has a little green in it because it's poisonous or like this cave is a little bit more purple because it's evil but for the most part They're all just caves. 00:57:01.34 Dave Yeah, the dungeons are not very visually interesting. um There's some like architecture to some like when you go in like some ruin type dungeons, but there are a lot of caves and there are just a lot of outdoor area dungeons too that are also not very visually interesting. like I think a lot of the ah work that went toward visuals in here went toward those cutscenes and also the character designs are pretty ah interesting as well. 00:57:36.37 Dave um kind really bothers me with that one little wisp of or strand of hair down like running down the middle of his nose like come on man like tie that shit back you don't i guess he i guess he's like man i've been alive for over a thousand years i don't care about this anymore but like i have long hair and i'm like come on man 00:57:40.30 Ryan Oh my God, yes. 00:57:51.02 Ryan Yeah, it's me too. i I even, we did not talk about this before the podcast, I have two comments and my own notes written in all caps. I want to sweep that strand of hair out of my face so badly. 00:58:07.27 Dave Yeah. 00:58:09.77 Dave Yeah. 00:58:09.83 Ryan But they were like, look at what we can do. We can make this hair like, you know, blow in the wind and still stay perfectly in the center of his forehead. 00:58:14.54 Dave Yeah. 00:58:16.47 Ryan And I'm like, yeah, it would probably itch his nose all of the time. Just get it. 00:58:21.94 Dave yeah 00:58:22.52 Ryan yeah 00:58:23.27 Dave Get it out of there. Yeah. What are you doing? I mean, I, again, I know that you're a thousand years old and you're above the petty concerns of the mortals, but come on, man. Like, uh, anyway. 00:58:32.89 Ryan Yeah. Doesn't that itch a little? 00:58:36.62 Dave Yeah, exactly. Like you probably still feel itches for sure. 00:58:39.87 Ryan Mm hmm. 00:58:40.22 Dave ah But yeah, the presentation is like for the Xbox 360, I do think that this game looks really good. And I can only imagine that if you're playing it on ah a 00:58:49.75 Ryan Yeah. 00:58:52.05 Dave the more powerful Xbox will say. Like I know some people play this on Series X and they do like the upscaling with the backwards compatibility. I'm sure that this game looks really good if you have that going on. 00:59:01.64 Ryan yeah 00:59:03.40 Dave On the Xbox 360, on my shitty little 1080p monitor TV that I played it on, it looked fine. 00:59:12.99 Ryan Yeah, the upresing on the Xbox One did a lot. And the only downside is that sometimes there were certain lighting effects that didn't deal well with the anti-aliasing and it would make a flickering effect every now and then. 00:59:28.06 Dave Mm-hmm 00:59:28.08 Ryan Yeah, both the upres and the like improved lighting does wonders. It is a really good looking game. 00:59:38.30 Dave Nice Music in Lost Odyssey is composed by a longtime collaborator with Sakaguchi, which is Nobuo Uematsu, who's one of ah one of my favorite video game ah composers and returned to work with Sakaguchi again on this game. ah So this soundtrack is really interesting. It feels different to me and probably because a lot of my familiarity with Uematsu's work is from the Super Nintendo and the PlayStation eras of Final Fantasy. 01:00:13.95 Dave So this is a soundtrack that incorporates, you know, orchestras and electric guitars and stuff like that. 01:00:17.43 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:00:22.17 Dave um A couple of shout outs that I wanted to give for some songs. First of all, the main theme of Lost Odyssey, I think, is just an excellent piece of music. 01:00:30.21 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:00:31.51 Dave It is moody as hell and really sets the tone. um You know, if you sit on the main menu and just listen to it. um It's definitely sad, ah but it has a couple of, you know, hopeful movements in it ah where it kind of lifts up. 01:00:42.81 Ryan yeah 01:00:48.54 Dave And um as Uematsu does, that melody is reused in many, many different forms throughout the rest of the game. 01:00:57.21 Dave And another shout out to the map screen music. I forget what the actual track is called, but it just kind of gives you another version of that melody. But then like a couple minutes into it, it kicks into like electric guitars and stuff. And it's like just really fucking good. 01:01:14.12 Ryan Yeah. 01:01:16.36 Dave And it's the map screen where you usually spend about 10 seconds on that screen, just like going to the next one. 01:01:17.38 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:01:24.12 Dave um So I hope that people just kind of sat on that map screen and could hear that ah that transition, because that song rocks. 01:01:33.63 Ryan Yeah. 01:01:33.79 Dave But I think the soundtrack is not always the most memorable or evocative, but during the moments I think when it's supposed to hit, it does. 01:01:46.46 Ryan Yeah, I agree with that. And it's it's so tough to compare Uematsu's work here with his body of work with Final Fantasy because with Final Fantasy, you know, he has these iconic melodies that are new for these different games and they're usually tied to characters, but then he's also working off of and adapting these melodies that have been around since the first couple of games. And so it's hard when it's all new but yeah it's like half the soundtrack for me is amazing and half of it when he's trying to ape his own past work too directly it can get kind of phoned in so like for example just the battle fanfare that happens at the very end of each battle 01:02:30.68 Ryan um is trying to be the victory fanfare from Final Fantasy, but because it can't use that exact melody, it just kind of sounds a little farty to me. 01:02:34.84 Dave Yeah. 01:02:41.75 Ryan um but but by and large, I agree with you. I think that there are a lot of really excellent tracks that hit when they really need to. 01:02:50.94 Dave Yeah, the battle music is interesting too, because it's not the... ah so it it It reminds me more of the Final Fantasy X battle music, where it's like, it's battle music for sure, it's kind of upbeat, but it's Lost Odyssey is probably the most reserved. JRPG battle music that I think I've heard in a while, ah you know, especially compared with Final Fantasy seven or six or four or something like that, just thinking of Final Fantasies that I've played recently. 01:03:10.86 Ryan Mmhmm. 01:03:20.96 Dave um So that was yeah I mean it kind of fits too like the Immortals are not going to be super jazzed up to go into battle to fight you know little slimes or something in the dungeon right it's all this is pretty ho-hum for them and I think the music kind of fits that tone a little bit. 01:03:30.48 Ryan Yeah! Mmhmm. 01:03:39.56 Dave um On the other hand, I do want to give a shout out to the final boss track, which is ah if you've ever just like listened to a composition and just imagined in your head like the composer just fucking mashing a piano and lightnings crashing around them and stuff. 01:03:44.97 Ryan yeah 01:03:59.07 Dave um That's what this final boss track is like. Like it's not it's not dancing mad. um It might not be one winged angel, but it's like Uematsu is like 01:04:09.69 Ryan Yeah. 01:04:10.35 Dave ah I'm gonna let my love of progressive metal come in, in this final boss track here. 01:04:15.89 Ryan Yeah. 01:04:16.14 Dave And it's got like the vocals, ah like the chorus going, ha, ha, ha, ha, you know. um 01:04:23.69 Ryan but so 01:04:25.78 Dave And then it just goes into this wild, like progressive metal song, um, you know, very like dream theater type stuff, uh, for a touch point that I'm familiar with. But, um, that is, uh, I had forgotten about that song and when, when the final boss, uh, fight started, I was like, holy shit, what is this? 01:04:43.68 Ryan Yeah, yeah, it's like I got me. It's so funny because the final dungeon of this game is where I finally started feeling some real fatigue. And then that anthem kicks in or that boss theme kicks in. It's like, all right, I'm sitting back up again. I'm interested again. It does exactly what it's supposed to do, which is like, get your adrenaline up, get you sitting up. 01:05:02.45 Dave Mm hmm. 01:05:07.38 Ryan It's good. 01:05:09.18 Dave Absolutely. Yeah. So people will hear a lot of that music throughout the podcast. We're going to take another music break now. ah Come back and talk about what it's like to play Lost Odyssey. 01:05:22.87 Dave Gameplay in Lost Odyssey is turn-based combat. It is not the Final Fantasy ATB. It is straight-up turn-based with random encounters as you go through the dungeons. It will show you the turn order at the bottom of the screen and you can do a little bit of light manipulation. Basically, if you can put a status effect on something or kill it before its turn, ah then you will know it won't be able to act sometimes. So it's not quite Final Fantasy X levels, even though I think this combat system is fairly inspired by Final Fantasy X's turn-based system. 01:06:00.75 Dave um Pretty standard other than that, though, with what you can actually do in combat, fight ah skills and magic. I think the real juice to the combat here is in how you customize your characters before combat starts. 01:06:16.03 Ryan Mm hmm. Yes. 01:06:17.85 Dave ah But this is a classic turn-based system where you see the turn order at least, so you don't have to guess who's going to attack when. 01:06:27.81 Ryan Yeah, um I did so much thinking about this combat system because I think it is, in theory, incredible. And a few times they actually like to live up to that and then a lot of the encounters that they throw at you aren't worth how fiddly it can get. 01:06:41.82 Dave Mhm. 01:06:47.67 Ryan So like, okay. 01:06:48.16 Dave Mhm. 01:06:49.29 Ryan related to the turn order is magic and so this is this is not a game where you can just have everyone attack all the time you your attackers are attackers and your magic users are magic users um and different enemies have different strengths and weaknesses and so you really do have to pay some attention 01:06:57.28 Dave Mhm. 01:07:11.33 Ryan The coolest part of the turn order stuff to me is how magic works. 01:07:17.54 Dave Yeah. 01:07:17.84 Ryan Basically, the more powerful a spell is, the longer it will take to cast, sometimes requiring a turn and a half or two turns of warm up before it actually goes off. 01:07:23.42 Dave Mm hmm. 01:07:27.89 Ryan um You can also ah So an enemy can prepare a spell and you can see that, oh, this is going to go off at the end of this turn. But if I attack this enemy enough, then it will actually delay it into the next turn. That can also happen to your guys. And so your characters can get delayed by a whole turn if they're casting a long spell and they get hit. 01:07:44.09 Dave Mm hmm. 01:07:51.87 Ryan um What this does is um there are skills that allow you to speed up someone else's spell at a cost, and that also it means that healing items, which are always instant, they always happen as the first thing that happens in a turn, have some utility because it's like, oh, crap, do I want to wait for this powerful heal spell to go off or do I want to make sure that this person gets topped off very quickly? 01:08:00.19 Dave Yep. 01:08:18.43 Ryan And so items are never obviated. um And I think that's neat. um Unfortunately, because of the fact that it is slightly more difficult than a bog standard JRPG, but not so difficult that it's requiring important decisions in every single battle, coupled with the animations that you talked about earlier, 01:08:24.89 Dave Yeah. 01:08:46.50 Ryan um It makes the fact that you have to do a little bit of thinking and that each battle is going to take a minimum of 90 seconds. Really, it's like the encounter rate in this game is actually not that bad. But because the battles themselves take longer, it really starts to add up. 01:09:05.85 Dave Mm hmm. 01:09:09.96 Dave Yeah, they do give you a lot of at least interesting choices to make, where I think a lot of the time, like for example, you mentioned the skill, it's called casting support that allows a character to help another character cast their magic faster. 01:09:26.65 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:09:26.78 Dave A lot of times I was like, okay, Kaim's a very powerful physical attacker, but it's in my best interest to have Kaim help one of the mages get their attack off instead of having Kaim attack. 01:09:38.35 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:09:38.60 Dave So you're given those interesting choices and if you're right, it is in that weird middle ground where it's not the darkest dungeon, but it's also not, you know, mid game in Final Fantasy six where every single battle is exactly the same. 01:09:43.43 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:09:57.66 Dave But it's it's it's that weird middle ground where like I am making decisions, but it's basically like the same order of operations for a lot of fights. The only new thing that might come up is there's a new enemy type and I have to figure out what it's weak to or something like that, which is interesting. 01:10:13.62 Ryan Mm-hmm 01:10:15.66 Dave Like I'd rather those choices be here than not be here. ah But it does contribute to battles taking a little bit longer um with all those animations and stuff. And I feel like I have to be involved in the battles, but I wasn't challenged by the battles. 01:10:35.60 Ryan Yeah 01:10:35.80 Dave yeah So it is an odd middle ground to have. I would still rather have this, I think, with the unfortunate you know length that the battles take. I would still rather have this than I get into a random battle, I mash A 100 times and then the battle's over. 01:10:53.56 Ryan Absolutely. 01:10:53.71 Dave um Which you actually can do in this because you can set your cursor to remember what you did on your last turn. 01:10:54.47 Ryan Yeah. 01:11:01.18 Dave So if you're doing the same skills each turn, you can just sit there and mash A through them in certain situations. 01:11:07.82 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:11:09.42 Dave but um The other complication that it throws at you is a thing called the GC system. 01:11:15.12 Ryan Hmm. 01:11:16.74 Dave I think it's called guard condition is what that stands for, which is where your back row characters, because you have a front row and a back row, your back row characters are shielded from direct damage by your front row characters. And it is. making that into a mechanical system. Whereas in other games, it might just be like back row characters will take less damage or they will not be able to be hit by melee attacks, but they'll be weak to ranged attacks or something like that. 01:11:44.67 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:11:51.35 Dave In this one, the HP of your front row characters acts as a temporary shield for the back row characters. 01:11:57.69 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:11:59.68 Dave So if your front row characters are at full health, the back row characters will take almost no damage. As the front row takes damage, that shield gets weaker and weaker. And you have skills to restore this. You have skills to swap your position. There are some boss fights that will like mix up your party formation to fuck with your guard condition. 01:12:22.18 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:12:22.51 Dave um This is an interesting thing. I don't think I've ever seen this in another game like this. Front row back row is very standard in the genre, but not making it into a whole mechanical system like this. 01:12:36.72 Ryan I think it really started to sing when I found when I got skills that could restore a guard condition because then I actually, it wasn't just like a time limit on which I had to like kill everybody before my back characters were vulnerable. were vulnerable And so when it is singing, I think that it adds a tremendous like dimension of strategy and decision making to both sides of the fight, both. 01:13:07.72 Dave Yeah. 01:13:08.08 Ryan OK, how do I get the opponent's guard condition down enough that I can get at the back character who's actually like the really big damage dealer or How do I preserve my own guard condition? um So yeah, what when it works, it's one of my favorite things about this battle system. I don't think it always works. 01:13:31.04 Dave Yeah, if I forgot to mention, I'm glad you brought up that this works for the enemies too. The enemies always have this going on if there are multiple rows of enemies. 01:13:41.22 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:13:42.00 Dave um I think that this system is half good and half bad. And it's a ah literal like dealing with the enemy's guard condition is a fun puzzle to figure out in combat. And we already talked about how you'll get into a lot of fights with the same groupings of enemies. So like you'll have an order of operations for like, Oh, this group, I need to take out these first. Then I'll get to the ones in the back or like, I can take out two of them. The guard condition will be halved and then I'll be able to get like the back ones down. 01:14:17.74 Dave maybe before completely depleting the front row or something like that. So like the strategizing around that is pretty fun with the opponents. For your characters, I don't think the system's very good because in random battles, it doesn't really matter because you'll probably take them out before ah before it becomes a real consideration until maybe later in the game when enemies are just more powerful. 01:14:30.42 Ryan who 01:14:46.67 Dave where it should be a bigger factor is like, boss fights feel like they should be built around this. 01:14:53.71 Ryan Hmm. Hmm. 01:14:55.40 Dave And there are a couple that are, ah including the, it's like maybe the first or second boss that tutorializes this, where it's basically like, if you don't understand the guard condition, this boss is gonna wreck your shit. 01:15:10.37 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:15:10.75 Dave And you figure it out and you can beat the boss. but I found in most boss fights, my guard condition just got wrecked immediately, basically. 01:15:18.87 Ryan Interesting, interesting. 01:15:20.39 Dave So it wasn't really a consideration. um And like the skills that you get that can restore it would restore 1 eighth of the max GC when it's at zero. 01:15:33.51 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:15:34.29 Dave So like what good is that actually doing? It's probably better just to heal and revive people. than to try and rebuild the GC. Because the other part of it is, once a character falls in combat, if they get revived, that GC doesn't come back. It stays at zero. So like in those boss fights, I found my GC just went to shit immediately. 01:15:53.53 Ryan yeah um Yeah. 01:15:59.87 Dave So it was like, well, that's not part of my strategy anymore. I could spend six turns trying to rebuild it, but the boss is attacking the whole time. so 01:16:08.99 Ryan That's interesting. I think I had a different experience. I think that it really did factor in and I would be there. ah One character gets um an ability that then the Immortals can learn that um significantly restores GC. And I ended up using that a lot um just to keep the numbers up. 01:16:33.25 Dave I think I know what you're talking about. Yeah. 01:16:35.83 Ryan Um, but yeah, I, I, I see how it could go to shit so quickly that you're like, well, I'm just going to focus on healing and doing damage. But I, it was, it was a bulwark for me against some of the scarier enemies to kind of use, use the GC increasing abilities. 01:16:57.45 Dave Part of the reason that I think that you relied on this more than me is I think that I took advantage of the way that Immortals learn skills more than you did. 01:17:11.63 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:17:12.04 Dave um because So for those who haven't played, Immortal characters like Jansen learn skills as they level up, like Pokémon. immortal characters can copy skills from mortal characters and any immortal character can learn any skill from any immortal or no vice versa any immortal character can learn any skill from any mortal. 01:17:35.52 Ryan Yeah. 01:17:35.65 Dave So um you can also learn skills from equipment that you pick up. 01:17:38.71 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:17:40.75 Dave So ah what I did is there's an optional dungeon at the end of the game where it literally takes five hours. It's a massive fucking dungeon. I leveled up close to 20 times during that dungeon. 01:17:54.16 Ryan so 01:17:55.34 Dave um And by the end of that dungeon, I had enough skills and items where my immortal characters were basically invulnerable to everything. 01:18:05.74 Ryan Mm-hmm. 01:18:06.37 Dave So, Guard Condition in Disc 4 was not a thing anymore because my Immortals could not be touched. 01:18:10.32 Ryan Mm. 01:18:15.39 Dave They absorbed every elemental spell and they had defense boosts against physical damage. 01:18:15.47 Ryan Yeah. 01:18:22.85 Dave And then ah you end up with four immortal characters and you have five people in your party at a time. um And then my mortal character just had some ah items to help them out too. 01:18:32.20 Ryan Hmm. 01:18:35.60 Dave So um when you got to those scarier enemies that caused you to rely on the guard condition to keep your party alive, because I had put in that time in that super dungeon, my Immortals were basically like invincible. 01:18:51.40 Ryan Yeah, there is that. 01:18:51.70 Dave So there's that too. 01:18:54.64 Ryan That's so funny because ah basically on your anti-recommendation, that is the one piece of side content that I did not touch is that optional dungeon. The only reason I went in is I sprinted in there to get the last treasure hunt and I turntailed. I ran away from every encounter that I had in there because I was like, I don't want to deal with this. I just want to get the last treasure. um But yeah, I almost all of the time I was rocking three and two or two and three so that I had three immortals and two mortals or the other way around ah because I really liked spreading out, you know, because also there are times when your party will be split up and so you can't just rely on and also there is no passive experience in this game. 01:19:38.40 Dave Yeah. 01:19:44.52 Ryan the character has to be in the active party in order to get the ah experience points and the skill points. So um I was doing a lot of spreading out and I also, I finished the game where no one was above level 51. And I think your levels were in the 70s. 01:20:08.48 Dave Yeah, I was definitely around level 75 at the end of the game. 01:20:12.22 Ryan Yeah. 01:20:13.49 Dave ah Both times I played it. And I did the Super Dungeon because I remember doing it the first time I played and remembered how invincible I was at the end. And so I was like, well, I've got time before recording. I've got podcasts to listen to. Let's just throw those on. I'll follow a walkthrough because that that dungeon's fucking it would take 10 hours if I didn't have a walkthrough. 01:20:36.88 Ryan Yeah. 01:20:37.39 Dave to get through it. So I just yeah, that's what I did. um Just taking advantage of the systems they gave me if they didn't want my characters to be invincible, they shouldn't have made the systems this way. 01:20:48.95 Ryan Yeah, but honestly, I was like, so um the way that the immortal characters work is ah just elaborated on, they have a certain number of slots that you can equip with these skills that you're learning. 01:20:49.30 Dave ah So yeah, 01:21:08.40 Ryan And for the vast majority of the game, because of the amount of skill slots you get, like as consumable items, most immortals aren't going to be above eight. And then all of a sudden, at the end of the game, they give you um items that allow you to learn ah skills that attach dozens more skill slots to your Immortals. And I was a little bit disappointed. 01:21:34.68 Dave It's a lot. 01:21:37.29 Ryan I liked having to pick and choose, but the game was telling me like, hey, here's a slot plus nine, here's a slot plus 20, use these. and I was just like, all right, I'm gonna use them. And so now all of my Immortals are kind of everything characters. 01:21:49.53 Dave Yeah. 01:21:53.59 Ryan um it it It's odd the way that they just like, They restrain you for so long. And then when they finally let you lose, they let you really lose to just break the game wide open if you have the patience. 01:22:06.12 Dave Yeah, um I do agree with you that I think that 01:22:13.17 Dave Well, I wouldn't have missed it because it wouldn't have existed. But I think that they had limited your slots to like, you know, maybe 10 or 15 maybe at the end of the game. 01:22:20.39 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:22:24.46 Dave And like, like you said, early in the game, those consumable items that give you an extra skill slot are like the best reward for exploring or like poking around in corners and dungeons. 01:22:33.15 Ryan yeah 01:22:36.84 Dave ah Those are excellent rewards for exploring. um had they kept that and just been like you know you can get more of these by doing side quests or something like that but not let you turn your characters into these just you know unstoppable forces of nature at the end ah it would have made for a lot more interesting decision making for how to build these characters at the end because the way that my characters worked um my four immortal characters could basically do anything. um They were immune to everything. And especially my mages could do any type of magic you ever wanted them to do, ah in addition to never taking damage from anything. So ah for me, who took full advantage of these systems, um I found that 01:23:28.83 Dave For combat utility it made the mortal characters a complete afterthought. 01:23:33.98 Ryan Hmm. 01:23:34.22 Dave It was like My immortals are gods So we'll put all of them in the party and then I have to put a fifth party member in so One of the mortal characters can go in there and use items if they need to but they're not going to need to ah So they're just kind of there um Yeah 01:23:37.96 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:23:48.29 Ryan Yeah. what One of one of the mortal characters gets a double item skill that lets him use two items in one turn. And if I was using if I was rocking your setup, that would be the only person that I the only mortal that I use. 01:24:02.52 Dave Yeah, exactly. So um the good part is that I think that they they tried to make you avoid this at least for a long time by making the only way immortal characters learn those skills, least most of the good skills for a while is from the mortal characters and they have to be in the party together for them to learn those skills. 01:24:19.12 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:24:23.60 Dave So you can't just go all immortal characters for the whole game, basically only at the end. 01:24:27.98 Ryan Right. Right. 01:24:32.20 Dave So um another just a quick note about this ah this RPG setup here, and I like to shout out games that do this because this is my preference. Even though it did turn into everybody can do everything at the very end. For most of the game, this is a game where every character does have a defined role in combat. Uh, for example, Kaim and Seth are physical attackers. 01:24:53.65 Ryan Yeah. 01:24:58.10 Dave Jansen's a mage. Uh, you learn, you get two other party members. One can use white magic. One can use spirit magic, which is a buffs and debuffs type of, uh, magic in this game. Uh, so it is a game where everyone has a role and I always appreciate games like this because it lends more to their characters, uh, which. 01:25:20.66 Dave I think that in games where it's infinite customization from the beginning or for you know a majority of the game, I think the characterization suffers when that happens. 01:25:31.58 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:25:31.82 Dave And it is important in this game that the White Mage is a White Mage. It's something that plays into her side quests as you go along. 01:25:39.89 Ryan Yeah. 01:25:41.24 Dave Same with the Spirit Magic. ah It is important that ah Jansen is a mage. If Jansen were physically attacking, some of his ah character stuff would make less sense. 01:25:47.58 Ryan Yeah. 01:25:52.50 Dave So I always appreciate when games do this and like to shout it out. 01:25:56.30 Ryan I agree with you there completely. 01:26:00.35 Dave The happy medium here is to have the characters be in their role for most of the game to set in stone who they are as a character. And then at the end, if you want to go wild with your immortal characters in this game, go for it. 01:26:17.00 Ryan Yeah. 01:26:17.12 Dave They've lived for a thousand years. They should be able to use a little bit of magic, right? 01:26:21.20 Ryan I don't think we've talked about the ring system yet. 01:26:21.91 Dave So, yeah. um 01:26:29.53 Dave That's right. Okay, the other part about combat, and this is something that could keep you engaged or could really piss you off as the combat goes, depending on who you are and how you feel about this kind of thing, is the ring system. So anytime you do a physical attack in this game, ah which is important because Kaim and Seth are physical attackers, and they'll be in your party for most of the game, um Anytime you do that, you have a little timing minigame, a la, you know, a Super Mario RPG or something like that. ah The way that this is presented on screen is that you have a big ring that is closing in around a small ring. And when they overlap, ah you have to hold down the trigger when it starts and let it go. 01:27:17.65 Dave when they overlap and if you do that you'll do some bonus damage and depending on what items you have on your characters you might get some bonus you know status effect or extra elemental damage or something like that all of these items have special properties like this one's more effective against mechanical enemies or this one has the sleep status effect on it 01:27:37.45 Ryan Mmhmm. 01:27:40.47 Dave and often several of those. So building out your characters with what items you put on and then doing that timing thing in combat. um is really important for this combat system if you want to do the most damage that you can. And in tough fights can make the difference between this fight lasting 15 turns versus 14, which is a big deal when it's a tough enemy. 01:28:07.18 Ryan Yeah. 01:28:08.91 Dave So how do you feel about this? I have thoughts, but I'll let you go first. 01:28:13.19 Ryan It's weird. um be it's it it It has a lot in common with like Legend of Dragoon and with like Squall's Gunblade in Final Fantasy 8, but Field Plus, who was the studio that was in charge of the battle system because of the way that this game was made, where where Sakaguchi wanted to shop out the gameplay side of things a little bit, 01:28:36.10 Dave Mm hmm. 01:28:38.85 Ryan It was made up of ex-employees from Sacknoth slash Nautilus, who were the team that did Koudelka and then the Shadow Hearts games. And in the Shadow Hearts games, the Judgment Ring system the button presses become a lot more complex because the different sections that you can hit the button in all start to do different things and they're bigger or smaller or whatever. In this game, 01:29:10.33 Ryan The actual timing, you know, you can expand the timing with some rings of what constitutes a perfect hit, but for the most part, it's the exact same mechanic every single time, and it's just what it does when you get a perfect. 01:29:18.22 Dave Aha. 01:29:26.21 Ryan um ah So based on you know how robust the Judgment Ring gets in Shadow Hearts, I found that the mechanical simplicity of this was pretty disappointing. And then the other thing that was disappointing is that it is only the basic attack like command that this affects. And so spells and skills have no timing component and are not related to the ring system whatsoever. And so it's only going to be your front row characters who are hitting attacks that are that that need to have these rings equipped. And I think that that's kind of a half measure that that is 01:30:10.13 Ryan really disappointing in a game that has a lot of very interesting combat engine choices. 01:30:16.91 Dave Yeah, on one hand, it does make pressing attacks more interesting, both from you being engaged in what's happening on screen, even if it is kind of cheap, but also from like building your characters out where you're like, I'm fighting this boss, it's a robot. You can switch these in combat anytime with no penalty. ah So it's like, okay, let me switch in a ring that gives me more damage to mechanical enemies and now It might be in my best interest to not have Kaim use casting support because Kaim can actually do some damage to this thing. ah Whereas you know the mages can do their own thing. They can help out too. but like 01:31:02.97 Dave It makes pressing attacks more interesting in a couple of ways. The problem with this is, as you said, it's exactly the same for 50 plus hours in the entire game. 01:31:11.47 Ryan Uh huh. 01:31:13.19 Dave And the visual representation of what this is, I hate, I hate the ring closing in over the smaller ring. i It's very hard to like time out. Like I could get, a good or perfect every time but I couldn't tell you like why did I not get a perfect this time like and it shows you like a number on the screen and like there's some you know if you release the trigger when the the number reaches 34 or something and you'll you'll be closer to a perfect or something like that and like it does it just doesn't it's not intuitive uh and so 01:31:49.54 Ryan Yeah. 01:31:52.06 Dave I think the thing is that I like these timing based hit systems in a lot of games, like in Paper Mario or Sea of Stars or something like that. I like these. ah But what those games do is they mix it up. Every attack is different in those games, and it's the exact same in this game for 50 plus hours. 01:32:06.43 Ryan Yeah. 01:32:10.56 Dave So I like the mechanical like choices behind what rings you use but I don't really like using the rings uh by about like hour 30 I was very much over this like if I could have put a ring on that said you don't have to do the timing game anymore I would have just done that 01:32:24.72 Ryan Yeah. 01:32:30.25 Ryan Oh, yeah, absolutely. um And it's it it works against itself because um it's it's a it's a blessing that the game allows you to re-equip in combat without any turn penalty. 01:32:47.40 Dave Yeah. 01:32:47.53 Ryan Um, but like, you know, I'm going in and fucking with menus and equipping stuff for an additional 200 damage. 01:32:52.10 Dave Yeah. 01:32:56.21 Ryan If I get a perfect, like it's it, it becomes very diminishing returns. And yeah, exactly. It's like the the reason why I brought up shadow hearts is that the judgment ring evolving is that that, that evolution was key to keeping that interesting. And they just do not do enough to keep the ring system interesting. 01:33:12.71 Dave Yeah. 01:33:16.48 Ryan And I. I also completely agree with you that I think that I can tell where the perfect mini section in the rings are, but the rings move so fast and the timer counts down so fast it ah with input lag on LCD screens and input lag for wireless controllers and all of that. like I don't I don't know what the perfect timing is. It, you know, i again, yeah, i I never got bad after a certain point, because there are three ratings. 01:33:49.77 Ryan It's bad, good and perfect. But with the gun bleed, I was able to pull off a perfect gun bleed every single time after a while, and I was never able to pull off a perfect every single time. 01:33:59.84 Dave Yeah. 01:34:02.67 Ryan And so, yeah, it becomes rote after a while in a gross way. 01:34:09.14 Dave Yeah, agreed. 01:34:14.30 Ryan um So before we move to the spoiler wall, there are a couple of quick things that I want to touch on. um One is a point that we didn't really get into in the dungeon section, but I want to point out um these dungeons all have a gimmick and a puzzle like aspect to them that makes them each mechanically distinct, they all go on for at least two screens too long. 01:34:44.93 Ryan um And every single one of them, but they also all feel it's like, oh, this one is about, you know, making sure that the staircases get moved in a certain order. 01:34:45.10 Dave Yeah. 01:34:56.12 Ryan Or this one is about keeping a firefly with me so that I can see the hidden holes in the ground so I don't have to repeat sections of the dungeon. And I appreciated that because dungeons with mechanical interest are not a thing that a lot of JRPGs do anymore. I wish they were paced better, I wish that they were each only about two-thirds as long, but I enjoyed that there was something there for me to do in those dungeons. 01:35:27.31 Dave Yeah, I do appreciate that there's thought behind how you engage with the dungeon for sure. ah The problem for me is that if you fuck up in at least the two dungeons that are popping into my head, your punishment is you fall down and you have to run back up, do more random encounters and try that section again. 01:35:45.78 Ryan Yeah. 01:35:49.30 Ryan Mm-hmm. 01:35:49.91 Dave And so I don't love that, especially the one with the fireflies, like the, 01:35:54.61 Ryan Yeah. 01:35:56.29 Dave Backtracking that is put on you if you fuck up is a lot and it's like several minutes of running up hills and doing random battles just to get back to that spot and like Yeah Yeah, yeah the the dungeons are they were not my favorite part of the game for sure we'll say that 01:36:04.71 Ryan and And sometimes trudging through like ah things that slow your movement down, like sludge and wind to God, 01:36:21.26 Ryan Yeah. um i I am warmer, I think, than you, but I agree with all of your points about them. I just feel a little bit fond of them. um 01:36:32.00 Dave Yeah. 01:36:32.80 Ryan So another big thing that I want to do is two last things here. um First, there are tons of pickups in this game, maybe like close to 1000. 01:36:42.49 Dave Yeah. 01:36:45.75 Ryan Like on every screen, there will be like a couple of posters that are kind of hanging off of the wall and fluttering that you can tear down. Jars you can probe, ah chests you can open, um and so there's like a reason to explore every single nook and cranny of the game, which again slows it down, but is also welcome in concept. And beyond just more powerful weapons and healing items, some of them are components to build more powerful rings with the crafting system, which I think is mostly a failure because it requires so many rare items to construct these rings and it's so fiddly. 01:37:27.40 Ryan ah But then there is also... 01:37:27.63 Dave Yeah. 01:37:29.65 Ryan a ton of pickups that are part of very long game long quest chains ah and some like plot items for the game's various untelegraphed NPC side quests. So like there's just ah so that is good. 01:37:41.25 Dave ah 01:37:45.40 Ryan What is bad? And again, what is a part of what makes this game feel so long is that a lot of the context sensitive actions have canned animations that you can't speed up. and are very finicky until you'll be like running down a hallway and you'll see the green ah A button on the bottom right of your screen saying, hey, you can interact with something here. 01:38:00.73 Dave Yeah. 01:38:09.39 Ryan But if you take like a third of a step too far, then you have to like go back and try to find the exact right spot where you can probe the pot or the exact right spot where you can go up the ladder. And that just like both the constant repositioning and also the canned animations just makes it take way longer than it should. 01:38:29.83 Dave Yeah, i'm I'm playing the original Silent Hill right now and every time, every now and then I'll get in a situation where it's like, I'm trying to pick up something off of a countertop and I'm like, you know, I'm one step to the right too far and I, you just like won't grab it. 01:38:44.18 Dave It's worse in Lost Odyssey than in games like that. 01:38:45.71 Ryan Yeah. 01:38:49.15 Dave It's, there were some parts like, especially if you're trying to push a button or something, it is ridiculous how precise you have to be like, 01:38:58.31 Ryan yeah uh 01:38:58.46 Dave You have to be standing in the right spot and you have like a five degree, you know, range that you can be facing from left to right. 01:39:05.21 Ryan -huh yeah 01:39:06.63 Dave And ah for it to like pick up that you're, you know, able to interact with this thing. Uh, that was, um, that was rough. Uh, but sometimes it did make me laugh because, uh, I laughed every time it said, do you want to probe this pot? Which is a very weird phrase to use for something like that. 01:39:24.37 Ryan It is. um ah Finally, the last big generalities thing that I want to talk about is ah the towns are town ass towns. So this game has three major cities and then several smaller settlements. 01:39:35.63 Dave oh yeah 01:39:41.48 Ryan Each of the game's three major cities has a very distinct character and like a lot of different places to go. There are a lot of buildings you can enter. There are a lot of different sections to the cities. They're huge. And um the game will put you in these towns for long enough that you can actually get a feel for the politics and culture of each place. 01:40:02.24 Dave Oh, yeah. 01:40:04.08 Ryan And then when the world state changes, finally, in Disc 3 and like things that happen that are actively affecting the world, the dialogue will also change. 01:40:04.60 Dave Mm hmm. 01:40:16.95 Ryan to let you know about what the what the townspeople think of this of this new state of the world it's not quite the trail series amount of unique dialogue but i was pretty surprised and impressed by how much just new talking you can get and i would say about 75 of it is flavor and 25 is like the hint disguises conversation thing that a ton of the jrpgs otherwise have 01:40:23.66 Dave yeah Yeah. Yeah, I agree. It was a game where I liked talking to NPCs. there were There's always you know bound to be a few that don't have a lot to say, and you you feel like you wasted your time talking to them, but a lot of them do fill out the rest of the world, especially if you're interested in the political plot, which involves these three nations that are 01:40:54.46 Ryan Mm hmm. Yeah. 01:41:08.53 Dave you know, at the very least at odds with each other or just trying to, you know, figure out what the other one's plotting and stuff like that. 01:41:12.16 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:41:15.57 Dave um The NPCs do a good job of filling that stuff out for sure. 01:41:20.72 Ryan um I do love ah one little bit of ludonarrative consonants that feels very half-assed but is also very funny to me, is that a lot of a lot of the NPCs ah that live in houses, you talk to them and they'll say, I've got a bunch of trash in this house, go ahead and just like take whatever you find, so that it's like, hey, don't feel bad about being a loot goblin in this game, the NPCs want you to be. 01:41:39.26 Dave Yeah. 01:41:44.87 Dave Yeah. Exactly. Well, you're already in my house. You might as well take some of the shit that I don't want, right? 01:41:49.92 Ryan yeah Yeah. And then the last tiny little bit is that, uh, the, the town NPCs are also, they, they're named with an adjective before their name. So you know what they're about. So it's like lethargic Semel, or, you know, like it's smug soldier. 01:42:01.73 Dave Uh-huh. Yeah. 01:42:08.30 Ryan Those tickled me a lot of the time. 01:42:11.41 Dave Yeah, those are good. 01:42:14.33 Dave So, ah before we get into spoilers, as we do, we always like to answer the question for everybody. What type of person would you recommend to play Lost Odyssey after about an hour and 45 minutes of non-spoiler discussion? 01:42:29.59 Ryan Wow. 01:42:30.26 Dave um People should have a good idea of what this game's about, but if we can boil it down, what kind of person do you think should try this game out? 01:42:38.89 Ryan Gosh, um so people who are really interested in the historiography of games and like medical games as meta commentary, I think we'll find a lot to like in this game. But I think generally, Anyone who loves the 32-bit era of JRPG is kind of in the golden age of Sony Square JRPGs and wants a very pretty one. We'll find a lot of things to love about this game. It was, like I said, at the top, intentionally dated at the time and is even more dated now, but 01:43:12.36 Ryan It trucks in things that a ton of modern JRPGs are not that interested in anymore, and it does most of those things at least decently well. There is a lot of tedium, especially in the connective tissue of this game, but I feel like anybody who has a taste for it will find a ton of really like touching small moments and character turns 01:43:23.05 Dave Mm. 01:43:36.54 Ryan uh even when the big like the plot plot is disappointing and it and nails those emotional moments more than its peers do so if you're if you already know that you're kind of in the pocket for this type of game i think you're gonna love it if you can stomach a little or a medium amount of of of of genre tedium uh i think that there's there there 01:44:07.09 Ryan The whole is less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are so good sometimes. 01:44:12.77 Dave That's a really good way of putting it. Yeah, I don't think that this game. 01:44:19.50 Dave I think part of the reason this game is held up with a lot of the greats of the genre is that most people are not able to play it anymore, so the people who like it are the ones who talk about it the most. 01:44:27.10 Ryan me 01:44:31.31 Dave um That being said, I do think this is good, but this is one of those games that I revisited, a game that I loved when I was younger, and I revisited it for the purposes of doing the podcast, and it's just not as good as I remembered it while still being good. So like if I make a top five JRPGs list, it's not in that list anymore, we'll say. um And I think that like you hit on some stuff as far as recommendations go, if you like this genre, and you want one with a different tone, perhaps that's exploring a lot of 01:45:12.03 Dave sadder themes, then this is really good and you'll you know you'll find a lot of stuff to like in that. 01:45:16.80 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:45:18.97 Dave But if you don't like this genre, and especially if you don't like it because you think the games are too long, tedious, or slow moving, this is not going to change your mind. You have to be in for this type of game. ah So if you have the patience to get through it, I do think there's a lot to like here. ah It is just one of those games that didn't hold up to my memory while still being something that I still do appreciate the things that it does well. 01:45:46.63 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:45:49.85 Dave So ah qualified recommendations for Lost Odyssey and you know, qualify anytime you recommend a game that's 50 to 70 hours long, there's a ah qualification to that recommendation anyway. 01:45:54.35 Ryan Yeah. 01:45:59.61 Ryan For sure. 01:46:01.17 Dave But ah when we get in the spoiler section soon, there is going to be some really good story stuff that we discuss and there's gonna be some stuff that I think is kind of shitty. So we have a lot to discuss, but before we get into spoilers, we always do our housekeeping starting with the projects that the guest does. So as ah at the top, I mentioned that Ryan is a part of the Lightning Strikes Thrice podcast, ah which is a podcast dedicated to spending a lot of time and zooming way in on JRPGs. So tell everybody if they're not familiar, what is Lightning Strikes Thrice all about? 01:46:37.87 Ryan Yeah, thank you. So Lightning Strikes the Rice is, um it kind of like splits the difference between a podcast like this and um a ah extensive let's play. We go into fine detail on JRPGs. We usually spend about 10 episodes on each one. um And ah it's a lot of fun because we could really dig into really tiny moments and encounter designs and things like that that a broader podcast won't be able to get to. 01:47:15.43 Ryan um we It's called Lightning Strike Strikes because we did the Final Fantasy 13 trilogy as the very first thing that we've done. 01:47:15.49 Dave Yeah. 01:47:23.56 Ryan ah But we have covered um Final Fantasy 8 and Shadow Hearts Covenant and ah the Xenosaga trilogy, which ah is, I think, some of our best work. ah We just finished up Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter, which I think was um just so much fun to record about. ah Really criminally underlooked game. ah And right now we're doing a little, which should be a shorter season on Wizardry 4, which is not actually a JRPG, but ah you know, the Wizardry series was extremely influential for JRPGs and 01:48:00.25 Dave Yeah. 01:48:00.60 Ryan ah Four is kind of a hateful game, and so it's fun to dig into it with um other people who are sharing in our misery. ah And that is part of the Pitch Drop Podcast Network, um and we have a couple of shows on Patreon. 01:48:10.81 Dave Yeah. 01:48:17.98 Ryan If you go to pitchdrop.cash, um but one of my co-hosts, Chris Taylor, who is also on the Final Fantasy X podcast, he and I have a long ongoing podcast about Final Fantasy 14. Some of our hosts also host um ah shows about different anime and there is a manga ah podcast that releases occasionally as well. And so it's, you know, if you like going into detail about this stuff, I really recommend Lightning Strikes Right. And thank you so much for having me on. 01:48:49.93 Dave Of course, yeah, and I was going to say I recommend lightning strikes thrice as well. It's like you said, much more detail in like the fine ah things that happen throughout the course of playing a game than Tales from the Backlog will ever get into just the nature of the formats of the show. So if you ah listen to an episode of Tales from the Backlog and you think I wish that Dave would just take like 10 to 12 episodes and just you know talk about everything that happens as it happens. Well, Lightning Strikes Thrice is the place to go for that sort of thing. And you can bet I've got Final Fantasy 13 on my like list of like 01:49:28.19 Dave the next Final Fantasy game that I play might be 13 might also be 15 because I've you know it's been long enough since I played that where I started to have that that creeping thought of like was I wrong about Final Fantasy 15 maybe I should replay it it's a weird thing that happens in my head ah so ah it's a good companion to go along with games like that that you're playing so 01:49:33.16 Ryan Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. 01:49:52.05 Ryan Well, thank you. 01:49:53.05 Dave Give the recommendation, as always, for anyone who's interested in something like that to check the show out. And if you like 14, if you like, ah you know, anime and stuff like that, the Patreon is cheap. So ah you are encouraged to go check that out, too. 01:50:08.02 Ryan Thanks so much. 01:50:09.62 Dave I'll put a link down in the show notes so people can easily find the show. ah And then yeah, for me over here on Tales from the Backlog, we also have a Patreon if you want to support monetarily, you can do that at patreon dot.com slash real Dave Jackson for some bonus episodes every now and then I do a bonus. ah retro gaming series called Tales from the Way backlog. I also have um polls every month trying to remember what I do on my Patreon? Polls every month for a game that I play on the show. ah So if you would like to support, that's patreon dot.com slash real Dave Jackson. You can join the Discord server, which I think is a nice place to hang out online, ah talk about games and everything else going on in your life. 01:50:55.79 Dave Uh, you can listen to my other show called a top three podcast where we do top three lists and ratings and reviews. Yes. If you've enjoyed the episode and you haven't, uh, done this before, it's really appreciated. If you could leave a rating and or a review on Apple podcast, Spotify podcast, addict, YouTube, uh, likes and subscriptions and stuff like that, that helps. It helps people find the show and that's what we want. So. ah With all of that, that's a lot of ah plugs at the end. We're gonna take a music break, we're gonna come back, and we'll get into full spoilers for Lost Odyssey. 01:53:18.76 Dave All right, we're back and it's full spoilers for Lost Odyssey upcoming and this is not gonna be a chronological walk through the story. We're gonna spoil ah things that are revealed late in disc four in the first bullet point here in the spoiler section. So again, if you don't wanna be spoiled, this is not the place for you. 01:53:38.03 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:53:42.10 Dave Please consider playing Lost Odyssey and come back ah or I don't know, go go read what happens or something like that. 01:53:46.23 Ryan Mm 01:53:48.33 Dave Go play the game, it's interesting. So, um The first thing I wanted to talk about and just kind of like setting up what factors into the decisions at the end is we should talk about why the immortals are there in the first place. 01:53:53.39 Ryan hmm. 01:54:02.92 Dave So we have our mortal characters, Kaim, Sarah, Seth, Ming, and Gongora, who as it's explained, ah they don't remember why they're here at the beginning because Gongora wiped their memories, but they're originally sort of, 01:54:16.24 Ryan me sort of. So they all came, they all came without their memories as part of the transfer system. 01:54:26.75 Dave Yes. 01:54:27.35 Ryan And then they lived 970 years and then Gongora locked their memories of the last 970 years. 01:54:34.82 Dave Right. Yeah. So as we pick them up, they have lost their memories because of what Gangora did, but they also don't remember what their mission was at the beginning. 01:54:38.50 Ryan Yeah. 01:54:42.58 Ryan Yeah. Mm hmm. 01:54:48.00 Dave So They're not from this world. They came to this world. ah They came to this world because there is a virus, they call it, that's plaguing their world. ah And the cause they found was in this world that the game takes place in. And we find out they're not actually immortal. They ah Time just passes super, super slowly for them here, which doesn't explain why Kaim can get hit by a meteor. 01:55:16.16 Ryan Yeah. 01:55:17.27 Dave But it explains why they don't age I suppose Yeah Yeah Right so What's revealed is they? 01:55:19.02 Ryan i It's that part is I was like, yeah, okay, because he yeah, he gets hit by a meteor, he and Sarah get like, you know, ah blown up in a train and then frozen. Like, yeah, they die again and again. And yeah, they're like, Oh, well, they just can't age. That doesn't make you right. That doesn't get all the way there. But that's fine. 01:55:47.53 Dave came to this world to call to find the cause of this virus. The virus, as they call it in their world, that's kind of like killing their world, is the emotions from the people in the game world, if I'm remembering that right, which is a very JRPG thing to do, ah to have emotions do this sort of thing. 01:56:01.58 Ryan Mm hmm. Yes. 01:56:09.41 Dave ah So their mission was to, to put a stop to it basically. ah Now they forget all about that shit for most of the game. 01:56:17.04 Ryan Mm hmm. 01:56:18.46 Dave Gongora is the one that remembers all of this, but instead of working toward a cause of all of this, ah Gongora decides that he wants to use those emotions to make himself more powerful. Like he can turn them into magic energy to make himself more powerful. 01:56:37.36 Ryan Yeah. 01:56:37.53 Dave ah And then he's gonna cut the link between 01:56:40.58 Ryan Hmm. 01:56:41.52 Dave his world and the game world, which I guess would solve the problem if it's not fucked already on the other side. ah Yeah. 01:56:49.56 Ryan you Maybe? It's very ambiguous, and that's part of it. That's part of the ending, which we'll get to in a second that I really like, actually. But yeah, him being like, oh, well, I would rather be a god in this world than just a normal person in my home world is kind of his motivation. And 01:57:09.40 Dave Yeah. 01:57:09.83 Ryan um it's it it's only interesting because like the cosmology of like what is this energy MacGuffin is such a big part of a lot of JRPGs and this one magic energy kind of sprouted up just 30 years ago where there was always sort of this latent low-lying magic energy and it was actually the home world 01:57:31.65 Dave Yeah. 01:57:37.07 Ryan reestablishing the connection to this world and starting to ask the immortals to return home. That is the thing that amplified the emotions into magic energy. And so it's like they lived, you know, almost 1000 years without Gongora being able to become a powerful sorcerer. 01:57:49.02 Dave Yeah. 01:57:55.91 Ryan And then he was like, wait, I can become a powerful sorcerer right at the end. That's it. Yeah. 01:58:04.90 Dave And so the thing with this is that I gave the whole explanation for what's going on. 01:58:11.47 Ryan Right. 01:58:11.76 Dave But what you just said right there is the explanation that's given to someone playing Lost Odyssey if they don't go poking around in Gongora's house. 01:58:21.09 Ryan right 01:58:21.57 Dave in an optional side mission in Disc 4. 01:58:23.93 Ryan Right. 01:58:24.20 Dave If you don't do that, you just get the, Gongora wants to be a god and use the emotions turned into energy to fuel these magical conduits, to bring the energy to him so that he can become like a truly immortal god. 01:58:40.21 Ryan Yeah. 01:58:40.64 Dave That's what you get. If you go to Gongora's house, And I cannot stress how inconsequential it feels to make the decision to go to Gongora's house in disc four. Like you have no indication that important things will be there. 01:58:53.70 Ryan Yeah. 01:58:58.27 Dave I didn't go there because I was like, why the fuck would I go to his house? You know? 01:59:01.87 Ryan Well, it's so it's um it's weirdly part of Tolten's like, get my get my kingdom back site. 01:59:12.03 Dave Right. His, his side quest. 01:59:13.56 Ryan which like, you know, Tolten is my least favorite of all of the player characters. 01:59:13.78 Dave Yeah. with 01:59:18.62 Ryan And so there was this big like, I don't want to restore his ass to the throne. Like, I don't care about that. 01:59:24.08 Dave Is that like, is there one of his magic seals or something like that in Gongora's house? 01:59:24.10 Ryan and 01:59:28.64 Ryan That's yeah, so it's in the backyard of Gongora's mansion, and it is what seals his underground lab where you find all this stuff. 01:59:30.89 Dave Okay. 01:59:37.16 Dave Okay. Yeah. So I, again, my immortals were gods in combat. So I was like, I don't need Tolten to be good. I don't need his ultimate weapon. I'm not doing this side quest that takes me to, you know, nine locations around the map. And because I, we talked, we talked about how long it takes to do anything in this game. 01:59:51.86 Ryan Yeah. 01:59:56.53 Ryan Yeah. 01:59:56.77 Dave So the prospect of going to get all of these things, I was just like, nope, I'm not doing that. So no indication that I would ever go to Gongora's house. And so you miss out on the interesting part of his motivation. Because like, 02:00:14.65 Ryan Right. 02:00:16.18 Dave v the but The part that's given to you, Gongora wants to be an immortal god because he found out how you know how good it feels to be powerful or what the fuck ever. like That's like the least interesting thing that a villain can be. 02:00:28.93 Ryan oh yeah 02:00:29.48 Dave unless you're Kefka, like it just you can't live up to that, right? 02:00:34.49 Ryan So, and this is, yeah, this is the thing about Gongora for me. First of all, the visual design of Gongora is bad. I think that it he, he i it um I saw a YouTuber describe him as as Guy Fieri as an evil sorcerer, ah but to me, he he's like if someone ran Kefka through a Chad filter, 02:00:45.56 Dave Yeah, it's boring as hell. Yeah. 02:01:03.86 Ryan um He just he he just he he looks like some just like a generic Military dude and he is supposed to be this like nihilistic megalomaniacal evil sorcerer and he looks nothing like an evil sorcerer He just looks like a fucking guy and it it it it makes that that incongruence just clang really hard and 02:01:23.51 Dave Yeah. 02:01:29.52 Dave Yeah, the two things that I think help Kefka is over Gunghora because they're both Mad for power, they both do horrendous shit to the people in the world. 02:01:39.90 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:01:41.64 Dave Ah Kefka's design, like the court jester, is interesting for someone to have this turn. And Kefka is just chaotic evil. 02:01:51.22 Ryan Yeah. 02:01:52.27 Dave Gongora is a plotting politician type of evil while also having access to like this incredible destructive magic, basically. 02:01:54.95 Ryan Yeah. 02:02:01.83 Ryan Absolutely, yeah. 02:02:02.99 Dave So 02:02:05.43 Dave I do think that the explanation for what's going on with their home world and why Gongora might choose to stay here is more interesting than like, I just want to be a God, but you don't get that. 02:02:19.08 Ryan Right. 02:02:21.56 Dave It should be part of the main story. I do like, I do not understand at all why this is in optional content. 02:02:23.52 Ryan Yeah. 02:02:29.63 Ryan I completely agree. 02:02:29.68 Dave It should be in the main story. 02:02:32.73 Ryan And then also, it should be more fleshed out. It's so clear that the people making this game just didn't care about this stuff nearly as much as the character moments, which in a vacuum is fine. 02:02:37.03 Dave Yeah. 02:02:47.20 Ryan but um What I'm about to lay out is not just optional, but it is also not laid out in explicit text. I think it is present within the text. I think that this is stuff that is true about the game. I don't think that I'm reaching for a meaning that I made up and then grafted on. 02:03:08.69 Dave Mm hmm. 02:03:09.00 Ryan but okay so the the good thing he does is he massacres thousands of people and he manipulates people and like he is an evil guy it compared to a lot of JRPG villains but 02:03:16.14 Dave Mm hmm. 02:03:25.58 Ryan The difference between this world and the other world is something that the game calls the virus of feeling or the virus of emotions, which suggests that the home world is a lot more stoic And without memories of that home world and without anything to connect you to that home world, why would you want to go back to it? 02:03:48.42 Dave Mm hmm. 02:03:48.47 Ryan And this virus of feeling infects the five immortals who were put here in different ways. Ming starts to feel a tremendous responsibility towards the people she rules. Kaim and Sarah forge attachments and connections with like low level mortals that show them that this poison of emotion is actually what makes life worth living. And part of this virus of emotion that Gongora talks about is avarice and greed and lust for power, that is also an animating force, a very emotional force in this world. 02:04:23.71 Ryan And that's what he got drawn to. 02:04:23.78 Dave Mm hmm. 02:04:25.97 Ryan And so the other four got drawn to the other parts of humanity and he got drawn to, oh, it feels so good to be powerful. And 02:04:38.43 Ryan if that was in the game in or it isn't the game but like if that was in the game in a way that you could not ignore it i think that's neat but it's just literally nowhere you have to both go to this optional section and then also do some deep thinking about what he's saying and then it's like oh oh but yeah you're totally right for the most for most of the players it's just going to be oh this guy's power hungry cool he's already an immortal like mega mage why also need to be power hungry come on and 02:05:14.12 Dave Yeah. 02:05:17.14 Dave Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting. Like I said early in the game or early in the podcast when we were talking about like the the thousand years of dreams that the main story I think spends too much time focusing on political maneuverings and 02:05:34.15 Ryan Mmhmm. 02:05:35.82 Dave you know, treaties and, you know, construction of a new grand staff and mutually ah assured destruction, which is interesting, like the way that Gongora goes about tricking the people and like the leaders of these nations to kind of not necessarily always go along with him, but just to you know, not interfere with him so he can go along, go and do everything he wants to do. What this game should have been focusing on is it should have made you really understand if the point of it at all was how these emotions connected with the immortals the whole time. 02:06:10.86 Ryan Mm-hmm. 02:06:12.08 Dave It should have really spent time making you understand. I think it does it most with Kaim and Sarah. 02:06:17.78 Ryan Yeah. Yeah. 02:06:19.03 Dave But what is Seth's real connection to this world other than her kid? That's that's basically it. 02:06:24.83 Ryan That's it. 02:06:25.07 Dave like she has a kid we like Ming is connected with her ah 02:06:25.11 Ryan Yeah. 02:06:31.08 Dave her subjects as the queen, she feels a responsibility and she is a just ruler or she wants to be of them. But we don't like to get as much time dedicated to the immortals, how they interact with this world and how they feel about their immortality. Gongora and Kaim are the two that we get the most about. 02:06:58.21 Ryan Yeah. 02:06:58.52 Dave Kaim's is in the Thousand Years of Dreams. Gongora's is in this, is in the, in Disc Four when you find out what his whole deal is. 02:07:03.10 Ryan Yeah. 02:07:07.21 Dave But like you have a big scene like with Cooke and Mack when you first meet them and you do the funeral and stuff like that. And that cracked Kaim's shell a little bit. 02:07:19.29 Ryan yeah 02:07:20.37 Dave And then you have like most of disc two, all of disc three, and then most of disc four where these are not really, the theme of immortality is not really explored a whole lot outside of the thousand years of dreams. 02:07:33.39 Ryan right right and also the the the ultimate theme of the both the thousand years of dreams and also the ending of the game is that history is gonna happen there will be wars there will be death that shit is going to repeat civilizations will rise and fall new hatreds and loves will be forged what matters is the people you connect with and i love that in the thousand years of dreams and also the ending but it undercuts a lot of the plot of the game because 02:08:06.49 Dave Yeah. 02:08:21.18 Ryan The point of those sections is, yeah, world-changing events are gonna fucking happen. People are gonna die. Life goes on. And all we're witnessing in the main story is one particular permutation of a crisis point that life will eventually move on from. 02:08:43.98 Dave You talking about with, um, with Liram and Cooke and Mac. 02:08:49.47 Ryan um Yeah, both with Lirimkook and Mac and and also just like the whole like, you know, how ah say the Eastern tribe ah is already a civilization that utilized magic and it ended up destroying them, the spirit magic. 02:09:07.02 Dave Hmm. 02:09:08.79 Ryan um there it's It's this idea that all this stuff happens in cycles And mostly what people do is live through them or not. um And so, yeah, this that's why the small character moments work so much better is because I think the thesis of The Thousand Years of Dreams is that the main plot of Lost Odyssey is just another repetition of the same thing that life always does. 02:09:19.43 Dave Mm hmm. 02:09:36.79 Ryan And so it's just sort of like, yeah, OK, whatever. 02:09:40.16 Dave Yeah, I mean, you basically could condense the storyline with Mac and Cooke and them grieving the loss of their mother. 02:09:49.26 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:09:50.38 Dave that could be it is almost like a thousand years of dream story blown up into an entire storyline basically um and it that's the one they focused on because those are characters that are closest to Kaim although i think there is at least one thousand years of dreams that's about a past family that Kaim had ah before before this family 02:10:09.17 Ryan Yeah. Yeah. 02:10:12.27 Dave um But those ah those characters are there and that storyline is there I think to ah crack Kaim's shell a little bit and give him something to care about because he's just kind of wandering before they meet them. And even like Kaim and Seth and Jansen get sent off together but Kyme's just like, whatever, this is just another fucking thing I gotta do and you know I'm gonna do it because I don't have any, what else am I gonna do? 02:10:36.86 Ryan Yeah. 02:10:40.64 Dave yeah I can't die, so we're gonna go do this. 02:10:41.62 Ryan Right. 02:10:44.06 Dave And then um he finds his grandkids, Cooke and Mac, and he finds his daughter, Liram, who is on her deathbed. And it's important because one of the first memories that Kyme remembers is he remembers a small girl jumping or falling off of a seaside cliff as he looks on helplessly. 02:11:06.49 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:11:08.78 Dave And then it's revealed that's Lirum. So he thought she was dead, but he finds her on her deathbed. They reconnect for a little bit. And then they have this wonderful sequence where like you meet them, they reconnect, she dies, they have a very long funeral sequence. 02:11:27.22 Ryan Yeah. 02:11:27.59 Dave there. That's really, really good. It's one of the best story parts in the game, ah where you're getting to know Cooke and Mac, and then you go through this funeral procession. And then like I really like how this shows you the difference between how Kaim would view death in these thousand years of dreams that you've probably read several of by now. And you get the sense that he's fairly detached from all of this. 02:11:58.80 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:11:59.19 Dave And then you get brought back into the mortal world and how people who don't experience this over and over and over again react to it with Cooke and Mack. 02:12:08.08 Ryan Yeah, and I agree with that. And the other I mean, the other thing that it does is it's important that. Gongora. He. 02:12:22.75 Ryan basically lied to Kaim and made it seem like Lirim was already dead as a way to ah break his spirit, to say to you lock his memories away. 02:12:28.42 Dave Yeah. 02:12:35.90 Ryan And every time that Gongora does something where it's like, okay, these other immortals can't die. How can I hurt them? Oh, I manipulate things so that they have to witness the people who they love dying. And so he does that with Kaim and Sarah by pretending to kill Liram and then hiding her away from them. He does that with Seth ah in which we only find out through her dreams. 02:13:01.77 Dave Yeah. 02:13:07.32 Ryan He does that with Ming with her people. And that Those are the times where I was like, oh damn, Gongora, he sucks. We got to take care of him because he's doing things that are actually affecting the characters emotionally. 02:13:16.16 Dave yeah Yeah, for sure. 02:13:31.74 Dave So I got the sense like in this, this is pretty early when you need Cooke and Mac, like I got the sense, okay, Kaim's got something to care about again. 02:13:42.12 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:13:42.52 Dave But the one thing that you're taking from the thousand years of dreams that you're reading is that Cooke and Mac, they're mortal, they're going to die. And so part of it is like, Kaim is setting himself up for more heartbreak down the line in some form, you feel like, right? 02:14:04.66 Ryan Yeah. 02:14:06.25 Dave um And this is something that like plays into the choice at the end of the game, ah which is, you know, the Immortals are given the opportunity, or at least not not like on screen given the like the choice or something, but they're presented with the idea that they might not they might not belong in this world. And even if they felt like they belong in this world, do they wanna keep going through this over and over again? Because you're introduced to these characters. 02:14:39.72 Dave Kaim and Sarah get Cooke and Mac to care about. 02:14:43.98 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:14:44.38 Dave Ming eventually falls in love with Jansen, which we could talk about if you want to. 02:14:48.61 Ryan Yeah. 02:14:49.08 Dave um And Seth is reunited with her son, Sed. 02:14:53.70 Ryan sir Oh, my God, he is a fucking mechanic genius who pilots an airship. 02:14:53.90 Dave Sed. Not Sid, because it's not Final Fantasy, but it's Sed. 02:15:02.96 Ryan Oh, my God, I just put that together. 02:15:03.57 Dave Yep. 02:15:05.84 Dave Yeah, so what I think the game is doing so it introduces to you through the 1000 years of dreams, how much living for 1000 years would really fucking suck. And then it gives all of the immortal characters somebody to now care about a mortal to care about again. 02:15:20.76 Ryan Yeah, and it's saying that it's worth it anyway. And I think that that is part of the meta text of this game is is Sakaguchi looking back on all of his own heartbreak and how much it sucks to get older and watch people that you love die as as part of aging and and being like, yeah, This pain is why the joy that we feel is is so powerful, and so it's all worth it. And it's it if I really do think that's beautiful. like i i I think that the ultimate like the ending choice of the game, even though it didn't have enough like runway outside of the Thousand Years of Dreams, it was very affecting for me to to watch them all make this choice to continue to live in the world. 02:16:12.38 Dave Okay, let's just talk about the ending then since we've we've you know brushed up against it a couple of times. So I got the sense that what this game was trying to tell me was that if given the opportunity that this should end, that like 02:16:35.95 Dave basically that they shouldn't be here for all of this, like again and again and again and again. I got the feeling that what the game was saying was that immortality is a curse and that when given the choice at the end, Kaim's initial idea to leave is the correct one for him. 02:16:54.67 Ryan Hmm. 02:16:55.89 Dave um Now, the issue with that that I'm kind of seeing now is, and you brought it up earlier, we have no idea what the other side is like. 02:17:05.46 Ryan Yeah. 02:17:05.92 Dave If they were to return home, they'd have been away for a long time. I actually don't know how long it is like their home years, but, okay. 02:17:14.34 Ryan About a year is what Gongora says in one of his audio diaries. 02:17:20.43 Dave Okay, so it hasn't been that long, but ah there has, you know, that that world was dying and for a year then of their time will have continued to decay based on all of the emotions going on when Gongora, you know, kills an entire nation and all of that stuff. 02:17:26.15 Ryan Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 02:17:39.24 Dave um So that that's the issue, I guess, is I thought the game was saying that the correct choice would be for the immortals to leave and ah like rest, basically. um Even though I guess you're you were right that we don't know what's on the other side. It could be worse. 02:18:01.60 Ryan It and I think that the fact that you took that as a takeaway and I kind of took the opposite is baked in. I think it is supposed to be deliberately both ambiguous and bittersweet. 02:18:13.94 Dave Yeah. 02:18:14.01 Ryan um It. 02:18:14.96 Dave Well, they tell you at the end, like what you took away from it, Like the reason that Kaim decided to stay and Ming and Sarah all decided to stay is what you said. 02:18:20.86 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:18:26.59 Dave They all made that choice. So like it's obvious that that's what the game is saying, no, the characters made this choice to do this. 02:18:33.28 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:18:34.76 Dave It just, to me, seemed a little bit like the game was preparing you for the whole time to just be like, look at all of these 50 examples of why being immortal would fucking suck and these characters deserve a break. 02:18:44.78 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:18:50.21 Dave And then at the end, when given the opportunity to finally do that, they don't. 02:18:56.01 Ryan Yeah, it is it like, and it's okay, would you rather live forever but have the ability to feel or go back to your home world that is maybe way more emotionless and, you know, live out the rest of your natural life and die, but, you know, and rest, but it it is the the the wrinkle 02:18:56.46 Dave And yeah. 02:19:24.21 Ryan that it is emotions that are foreign to this other world um ah really throws a wrench into a lot and it is very much like well 02:19:37.33 Dave Hmm. 02:19:37.76 Ryan They were alive for maybe 35 years in their home world and then a thousand years in this other world without any memory of the home world. Why would they choose the home world? But you're right that it does suck to be immortal and there's a lot of pain, but there is also so much humanity. um you know, there are a ton of tender moments in the thousand years of dreams and he and he does become a more emotional creature after he meets Cooke and Mack and has young people to follow and live for. 02:19:58.96 Dave Yeah. 02:20:17.67 Ryan So yeah, I do think that it is a double-edged sword, and um you know there it's not necessarily satisfying for them, for three of them, because um Seth sacrifices herself and in order for Gongora to no longer be a threat. So the three that are still around you know ah making that choice, it doesn't feel good, but it does feel right to me. 02:20:40.24 Dave Yeah. 02:20:50.12 Dave It's 02:20:53.96 Dave So the way, yeah, the way that you've laid it out, it does make more sense to me now why they would choose it. They choose the romantic option at the end, right? 02:21:01.78 Ryan Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 02:21:03.52 Dave All of the pain and the pain that's upcoming, again, cause Jansen, Mac and Cooke are all mortal. They're all going to die and that's going to fucking suck. And then we're going to go, we're just going to keep going through this because I think 02:21:14.74 Ryan Mm-hmm. 02:21:21.71 Dave I think the link got severed. Like I think this is a permanent choice, right? Yeah. so they are basically signing themselves up for more of this. They they know what this choice means, but it's it's the the more romantic choice rather than the practical choice, which I i got the sense in like ah after Seth sacrifices herself, there was like a brief moment on the boat afterwards where I was like, Kaim's kind of jealous that she like put an end to all of this. 02:21:39.89 Ryan Yeah. 02:21:50.11 Ryan Mm hmm. Yeah, you're right. 02:21:53.60 Ryan He has a little bit of like, should have been me. 02:21:57.17 Dave Yeah, or just at the very least, like, son of a bitch, like, we're okay, we're doing this. 02:22:00.60 Ryan Yeah. 02:22:03.36 Dave So it did seem like it flew against like the main theme that I was taking from the game. But ah when laid out that the homeworld is more emotionless. And so like, that's where they're finding the value is in like the emotion, the love, all of that. um And the fact that if they got memory wiped when they came here, they would get memory wiped when they go back, right? 02:22:34.29 Ryan Yeah, yeah. 02:22:35.36 Dave So like it's not like they're taking the knowledge and love and experiences with them. I think maybe they would understand that and that plays into their choice. 02:22:45.62 Ryan Yeah, yeah, it, it, it, um, 02:22:51.21 Ryan I have a ton of respect for the ending of this game for not being easy. And what complicates that is that it feels easy and cheap if you didn't do enough of the side content to understand why it is not the easy choice. And that, again, I think it's like, you know, you need to have enough of the thousand years of dreams. You need to like, you know, talk to enough people in the world. you know I really enjoyed going and beating the super boss that's in Sarah's old sorceress mansion like that is built out of her lingering sadness and rage. 02:23:27.20 Dave Oh, yeah. 02:23:31.35 Ryan like you know there's 02:23:31.82 Dave Yeah. 02:23:32.97 Ryan there's there's but it's not just mechanical stuff that's optional like we've talked about. It's also just like a huge chunk of themes and stuff. and so It it it might have been that I also would have been like, oh, I think I think I just got rug pulled if I wasn't. If the ending was not playing on the stuff that I found in the game, that is what kept me really connected to it, I think I would have been like, huh, instead of like, oh, yeah, woof. Yeah, huh. It really is. Yeah, I dug it. 02:24:13.70 Dave Again, ah all of that is like ground that that your take on the ending is standing on the ground that that optional content provides, which should not be optional content. 02:24:25.81 Ryan Mm hmm. Mm hmm. 02:24:29.24 Dave And so like, I think that if you miss that again, you might be even more baffled by this choice. And so I i agree with you, I respect the um 02:24:40.79 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:24:41.10 Dave I even respect the idea, if this is your idea, that these characters made the wrong choice at the end. If you think they made the wrong choice, that's still an interesting ending to the game. I came into this recording with the idea that they made a choice that doesn't line up with the themes that the game was setting up. And I think that that's still the case, but now I understand more of the rationale for their choice. 02:25:01.75 Ryan Mmm. 02:25:08.99 Dave where I was coming into this being like, this doesn't make sense to me. like This goes against what the game was trying to say up until this point. And now it's more of a, I understand, I still think they probably made the wrong choice. 02:25:18.54 Ryan Yeah. 02:25:24.45 Dave I think that Kaim deserves a rest after all of this. 02:25:26.31 Ryan Yeah. 02:25:28.03 Dave ah And so does Seth and Ming and all of them. ah But it does make a bit more sense. The question, um to me now is do you think that the game set this up adequately to like prepare people that this might be the choice that they made? 02:25:46.84 Ryan No, no, I don't because I think the main plot is the what and the thousand years of dreams and some of the optional content is the why. 02:25:59.53 Dave Hmm. 02:26:00.21 Ryan you need the why for what to hit. um And I think that by bifurcating it like that and making basically all of the emotional content of the game except for Liram and like her funeral and stuff, her death and funeral, by making all of that stuff optional, you make it tough to connect with. And it makes some of the setup seem very incongruous. So yeah, to answer your question simply, no, I don't. And it's only because I was diving deep into this game for a podcast, you know, where it was like, all right, I have to take notes. I have to do some deep thinking about this game. I enjoy that mode. But I had to make this game homework in order to get as much as I got out of it. 02:26:52.04 Dave Yeah, that makes sense. And you also have to, I guess you also have to make that leap . I think that given the choice, before he meets Cooke and Mack and Liram, Kaim would have gone, given the choice. And you also have to make the leap that this is enough for him to change his mind. 02:27:16.34 Ryan Yeah. 02:27:19.04 Dave And I think that when it was when it was presented that they might leave, um 02:27:22.12 Ryan Mm 02:27:27.46 Dave I think Ming was always on board that she wanted to stay because she wanted to be the queen and she wanted to take care of the people and ah because she loves Jansen. 02:27:29.56 Ryan hmm. 02:27:36.62 Dave And I think Seth was down to leave but wanted to finish business with Gongora first. 02:27:42.78 Ryan Yeah. 02:27:42.94 Dave And then Kaim was also on the side of we should leave because we don't belong here. Our presence invites turmoil and chaos here. 02:27:55.71 Ryan yeah 02:27:56.15 Dave um So I think he said that there are things in the world that he'll miss, but that he was looking at it in a more practical way. 02:27:57.15 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:28:05.92 Dave And then he changes his mind. And um hey, that's what people do when they are ah emotional, right? If emotion is a theme here, ah when people are emotional, they make decisions that might not be the most practical, right? 02:28:13.99 Ryan Yeah. 02:28:17.50 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:28:21.51 Dave So, here we go. ah Real quick, before we talk about Thousand Years of Dreams, I know you wanted to talk a little bit about Jansen and Ming, and so. 02:28:29.11 Ryan yeah uh basically i think that it has one of the worst setups for a romance ever uh which is this like sniveling little ladies man who does dirty jobs for gongora and is and only changes that when he realized that he has also been manipulated by gongora but he goes and he drugs and kidnaps a 02:28:36.55 Dave I agree. 02:28:55.32 Ryan thousand-year-old queen because he thinks that she's really hot and then it turns out that she she's an incredible judge of character and she let herself get drugged and kidnapped by this guy to measure if he was a good person or not and it's like Ming his actions make it sound like he's not like just on the surface. 02:29:18.57 Dave Yeah. 02:29:19.92 Ryan And then they have big eyes on my love song. 02:29:27.81 Dave Oh my God. Yeah. I forgot about that shit. Jesus. 02:29:30.83 Ryan The song is so bad. It's like 10 times worse than Eyes on Me, which I already don't love. 02:29:32.73 Dave ah so so It's yeah. 02:29:35.96 Ryan ah But if you didn't have any backstory, like any relationship building between her being like, ha you think that you're a slimeball, but I know that you're a good man. And then there's nothing in that relationship. And then we get this big romance scene. And then eventually on the deck of the white boa, they kiss and he gets all flabbergasted and stammering. He's like, but but but but I'm not a good person. I've been trying to show you that I'm not a good person. I didn't expect you to fall for me for real. And she's like, well, I fell for you for real. And he's like, but I'm going to die. It doesn't make this relationship bad and she's like letting me decide that. 02:30:20.71 Ryan That scene worked so hard on me and I don't know why because I hated their romance for the first two thirds of the game. And then that one scene I was like, oh, that's sweet. Okay, I like that. And I'm trying to reconcile that because I don't think they do enough groundwork to get there. But once they got there, that scene in itself is well acted enough and well written enough where I was like, okay, they work for me now. but it was after they had the love ballad scene. like it was The timing and the pacing makes no sense, but ultimately I was like, all right, i'm I'm on board for them, even though I was not on board for most of the runtime. 02:31:02.76 Dave Yeah, and so I think you're right. I think that the sequence of them getting together is like the least believable you know couple origin story ever, right? 02:31:18.44 Ryan Yeah. 02:31:19.37 Dave But once they are together, especially what you said, um where Ming's mind is, you know ties in with how she views immortality and her relationship with mortals and things like that. And ah what she values out of the experience and just shows that she is not afraid of this, or maybe she is afraid, but she thinks that it's worth it. 02:31:32.31 Ryan Yeah. 02:31:35.88 Ryan Mm 02:31:41.87 Dave And so when Ming decided to stay at the end of the game, that made more sense to me because she'd been doing this 02:31:49.29 Dave She'd been setting that up for a while. 02:31:51.14 Ryan Yeah. 02:31:51.56 Dave Um, but yeah, their origin of like, why name fell in love with him. It's not, not great for sure. 02:32:00.18 Ryan Yeah. 02:32:01.27 Dave And then, yeah, special shout out to that song. It, it's terrible. It's out of place. It's like, it happens at one of like the most desolate and bleak parts in the story too. 02:32:12.60 Ryan Yeah, it's where everything just fell apart like everything. 02:32:13.57 Dave Like, yeah. 02:32:19.26 Dave it's it's worse than any song in Final Fantasy X too. So if you you like this part, play Final Fantasy X too, you'll like that. 02:32:22.33 Ryan um for 02:32:27.82 Dave Whew, yeah. Anyway, um we we had talked a lot about the motivation for Kaim and Sarah to stay behind, but not a lot of the motivation for Ming. And Ming's is the one where I was like, it does make sense that she's staying for sure, because she said that a while ago. 02:32:42.42 Ryan Yeah. 02:32:44.32 Dave Like she's set on this. 02:32:44.35 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:32:46.49 Dave ah There is a, I think it's one of her memories where she basically talks about a few times where her trusted advisors become people who try to stab her in the back as the queen. 02:33:02.46 Dave And it's it's just this cycle of like the person who helped me put down the previous coup attempt then attempts the next coup as they you know get power hungry and stuff. And like she, she's made peace with the fact that this is just how it works. 02:33:17.75 Ryan Yeah, yeah. 02:33:18.40 Dave on that angle. And then that scene with Jansen, where she's like, you know, this is my choice to be with you, despite the fact that you're mortal. um I've made peace with that. So you know, you let me worry about that. So her motivation to stay was well grounded, I think. 02:33:32.49 Ryan Yeah. 02:33:36.20 Ryan um As I um I'm glad I'm glad you agree with that um as a side note, just on her character being the queen. 02:33:43.30 Dave Yeah. 02:33:46.96 Ryan One thing that is a little disappointing to me about this game is that it is very overall skeptical of power structures and people who seek power. 02:33:59.15 Dave Yeah, for sure. Yeah. 02:34:04.34 Ryan It also has a noble queen who has been ruling for a thousand years as like the best ruler in the game. And one of the big side quests is to get this naive, easily manipulated, failed son of a royal restored on the throne in a way that makes him feel like he deserves the throne. So there are two like, royal restoration fantasies in this game that does not think very highly of royals overall. 02:34:34.80 Ryan And I think that's a little bit hypocritical and kind of disappointing. 02:34:35.13 Dave oh 02:34:39.21 Dave It's interesting. I don't agree about Ming because Ming never had aspirations of power. Ming 02:34:45.58 Ryan Yeah. 02:34:47.36 Dave Ming got memory wiped by Gongora, and when she woke up from getting her memory wiped, Gongora was like, you're the queen of this place. And she was like, okay, I'm the queen. And she's apparently a good person, so she's just a ruler. But her rise to being the queen wasn't because she desired the great power of being the queen. so 02:35:08.71 Ryan The yeah. 02:35:09.64 Dave When you compare her with Gongora, who's the biggest example of this, but also with Tolten, and I guess there's that other leader in the other nation who, yeah. 02:35:14.31 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:35:20.44 Ryan There's the king of Goza, who I really love that sub story, and I don't think it was done justice in the end because it's kind of pushed to the side, but yeah. 02:35:28.88 Dave Yeah, it doesn't really matter in the end. 02:35:30.29 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:35:31.57 Dave um And that's part of the like part of my issue with that whole like political plot line in general. like There's a lot of maneuvering and there's a lot of like, this is the king of this nation and we're going to set up this treaty. But that doesn't really matter. like It's all about Gongora amassing power and once he has the power You could forget the names of the countries if you wanted to that doesn't matter at all later on um But yeah It is yeah Yeah 02:35:58.89 Ryan yeah yeah ah I like how devastating it is. like if you know it It sounds edgy to say, I like how many people die, but I like that there are actual consequences to this collapse. And one of the things that disappoints me so much is that, so the King of Gotse, I don't remember his name, but he is someone who actually was rescued, was his life was saved by Kaim and Sarah long, long ago, and they tried to instill in him the values of being just, 02:36:25.88 Dave Mmh. 02:36:31.19 Ryan And he realized, oh, I have to compromise some of those values because my life is finite. And if I want to do the best possible work that I can do for my subjects, I'm going to have to live in a nobility sometimes. And I thought that was an extremely good theme to chew on. And then the game does not chew on it. It just presents it and then moves on. and Yeah. 02:36:57.62 Dave And he dies pretty quickly after you like to learn his whole deal, too. 02:37:01.63 Ryan yeah 02:37:01.91 Dave yeah yeah I agree with you. like The game's overall stance on people who desire power is not great. And it's like the game does not think highly of that, for sure. the Because the main person you see that through is Gongora. I did not do Tolten's side quests because I didn't give a shit about Tolten as a character. 02:37:24.09 Ryan Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 02:37:25.15 Dave And ah again, we talked, I said it before, but like also the time aspect of how long it would take to go find all those seals. 02:37:33.14 Ryan Yeah. 02:37:33.80 Dave I wasn't interested in that. But I also like if I really cared about Tolten, I would have done it, but I didn't. 02:37:39.27 Ryan Mm hmm. Mm hmm. It's ah with Ming, I think you're right that she's different because she does not desire power. But personally, I'm just upset that it's a monarchy again. You know, it's like monarchies. 02:37:52.06 Dave Yeah. 02:37:55.01 Ryan I, you know, I don't. I don't believe in them. So when a game does ah when it's also skeptical of power, I'm always like something isn't squaring for me, but you are totally right that like she is a just person who used to hide from the fact that she was more powerful than others. But then she was like, oh, I can use this power to protect people and get them to live well. And that's what I'm going to do. And I think that is very different from Tolten or Gongora. 02:38:19.73 Dave Yeah. 02:38:23.52 Dave Yeah, for sure. Let's finish this out by talking about our favorite thousand years of dreams sequences because we've already talked, you know, about how these sequences inform how we should feel about the character's choices at the end. But I do wanna shine a light on some noteworthy sequences in here because they are really, really good. And um even if we have already discussed like the lessons you might take from them, ah there are you know just a lot of quality things in here. So ah what were some of your either takeaways about them in general now that we can say anything or specific stories that you enjoyed? 02:39:06.28 Dave in particular. 02:39:07.98 Ryan I really so by and large they are meditations on war and loss and it's usually time talking to someone who is mortal and is in the middle of some fight or some you know conflict 02:39:16.69 Dave Yeah. 02:39:29.42 Ryan And I really enjoyed the moments of humanity within that war because I think one of the big themes is that history doesn't remember the reasons why people grow to hate and kill each other. ah hatreds will be forgotten, the world will change, new hatreds will show up in their place. 02:39:49.91 Dave Hmm. 02:39:49.96 Ryan ah it So it becomes kind of cynical about the arcs of grand history while being also very humane in its perspective. It values relationships over history. And it's either about Chaim showing kindness to somebody and gaining humanity through that connection or Chaim witnessing 02:40:01.73 Dave Yeah. 02:40:11.13 Ryan other kindnesses being dealt with and so it's like kind of you know if one of the themes is immortality sucks it's because the other theme is the finiteness of life is what makes it worth living and its precious and temporary nature is what makes it powerful. And so just for a couple of examples, um I think the one that devastated me the most that made me like that gut punched me the most is Bright Rain, where a kid is isolated on an island. 02:40:46.64 Dave Yeah. 02:40:59.49 Ryan okay um so yeah uh the the one that hit me the hardest in a gut punch way was bright rain where a child who's been like isolated on an island his whole life um is fascinated by these clouds and he's like and he thinks it must be so beautiful outside the island and kaim knows that it is artillery fire uh that is going to come for this island. And ah the kid has no idea what it's about to be like. And the artillery fire, you know, the the rain of blood happens way sooner, and the kid runs out in it. 02:41:40.08 Ryan and thinking that it's like this beautiful rainstorm and it's obliterated. um That one wrecked me. 02:41:44.02 Dave Oof. Yeah. 02:41:47.02 Ryan um But then the two, I think the three that made me go like, oh, the most ah in terms of just like, oh my gosh, there was like some real powerful human stuff here. um The bread of Grandma Cotto, where this woman refuses to move out of her farmhouse, even though there's war happening all around her, and it's because she just needs to make bread for her son, and then her son dies, and Kaim is the one who eats the bread. 02:42:04.20 Dave Yep. 02:42:16.59 Ryan um the ranking of lives where Kaim is like a military police and is in a society where there is a horrible illness but there's only a finite amount of pills and this soldier is going to dess desert and run and give give the pill to his son but then a girl on the street is like my my my brother is dying and he decides to give up his son's opportunity at life and then The tea house owner in, I think it's called The Stones of Destiny, um The Stones of Something, but um he's very cynical because he's like, he they people go on a pilgrimage to this river that makes people, this waterfall that makes people hallucinate as stones rain down on their body. And if they get scared and jump off, they freeze to death in the lake. 02:43:09.87 Ryan and ah this guy sets up this tea house at the bottom of the lake to pick up the broken ones basically and sees someone falling and dying and ends up sacrificing himself in order to save the life of one of these quote-unquote weak people. Those all spoke to 02:43:28.44 Dave Mm. 02:43:34.02 Ryan people wanting to help each other and share things with each other and ah despite the bleak dark world that they found themselves in, finding moments of connection and moments in which like these people who are violent are able to retain tenderness really affected me. 02:44:01.62 Dave Yeah, two of those are what I had ah written down to as like, particularly affecting one's bright rain, I think is, is probably the most like, shocking and fucked up and like, interesting to read of the ones that I got to. 02:44:13.70 Ryan Yeah. 02:44:17.07 Dave Um, the bread of grandma Cotto is good in that other direction. Um, and it's interesting, you made a really good point that like, I think the Thousand Years of Dreams is there to show you all that Kaim has seen and like lived through and how much it would suck to basically go through this all the time. It's also interesting to me that in most of these, Kaim is a mercenary of some kind. So it's like, this guy can't die, he's immortal. 02:44:46.69 Ryan Yeah. 02:44:49.90 Dave What is his place in the world? He's just gonna go fight forever, basically. 02:44:53.82 Ryan Yep. 02:44:54.64 Dave um So, that That was interesting to me. but like So they're showing you how being immortal would suck through these. But they're also, like you said, showing you these very zoomed in connections, often just between Kaim and one other person. in this grand scale of like a war or something going on but you have an even bigger perspective because the framing of these thousand years of dreams is this is a tiny memory in time's immortal life so you already have this big perspective that 02:45:32.05 Dave This is a drop in the bucket of Kaim's life experiences here, but we're going to zoom in so close to either show you how much this fucking sucked or how much ah or how like close or how tender it can be. That's why I like the bread of Grand Makoto so much because that's one where Kaim makes a very quick, like, we'll say short lived connection with somebody. 02:46:02.22 Ryan Mm hmm. Mm hmm. 02:46:03.96 Dave ah But Kaim goes out of his way to try to get her to evacuate, she doesn't do it, she refuses to. um And he goes out of his way to try and steer the fighting away from her house, or Just try to like, maybe if he knows that she's gonna, her house is gonna get, you know, rampaged over at some point soon. ah Just, you know, be there and and ah give her someone to talk to because her son died in the fighting. 02:46:32.09 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:46:33.50 Dave um Another one like that was there was a story about like, I think it's like, it's called the loose-lipped mercenary or something like that. And it's about a mercenary on Kaim's side. It's like the night before a battle and everyone thinks that they're gonna die. And so everyone's like really quiet. Nobody wants to say anything. And there's this new recruit who's super nervous and just won't shut up. 02:46:58.13 Ryan oh Oh, yeah. 02:47:00.38 Dave And um like time could if these also show that time could become this ultra-callus person who doesn't give a shit about anybody because they're all going to die tomorrow. I'm not going to die. So why would I take the time with these people?" um And he basically talks to them and helps the kid defect ah to live another day. He's not going to last ah much longer, but just having that like perspective and like those those close relationships. 02:47:35.84 Dave ah So that was a good one. The other one I wrote down, ah which is kind of the opposite. 02:47:38.51 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:47:41.30 Dave It's not kind of a connection with a person. It's just kind, it's just there to show you his perspective. and how people are so consumed with short-term stuff. And obviously, Kaim's not going to worry about short-term stuff, right, which is the tragedy of the Butcher General, which is this general who is just going through raising the countryside and just killing everybody who might possibly rise against him in the future. 02:48:01.39 Ryan Oh, yeah. 02:48:14.23 Dave You know, not satisfied with killing the soldiers, but any witnesses because those witnesses are going to grow up and hate me. 02:48:14.37 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:48:21.14 Dave ah So we need to kill them too. And so like he basically just butchers everybody. And then it turns into this really fucked up body horror story. 02:48:29.73 Ryan yeah 02:48:30.61 Dave with him where he has plants growing out of his skin and shit. And I was like, that's awesome. And I like that message that is the way to... I mean, you shouldn't be killing all these people anyway, but the most incorrect way to do this is to kill everybody to try to stop uh, someone for rising up against you before it can possibly happen. Cause it's just going to make things worse. 02:48:58.19 Ryan Yeah. 02:48:58.62 Dave Um, and that's what Kaim knows and Kaim can't convince him of this. And the guy eventually gets consumed by these plants and it's really fucked up and cool. 02:49:06.88 Ryan It is. I'm really glad that you pointed that one out because I think that it shows how not one note these dreams are. ah That is it, you know, there is room for some dark comedy in there. 02:49:16.21 Dave Yeah. 02:49:20.57 Ryan There's also room for some like very good morality tale body horror. Like, yeah, it's reading the descriptions of all the plants growing out of his body and how they were all screaming. Like that was deeply fucked up. I loved that one. I totally agree. 02:49:34.28 Dave Yeah. Yeah, that one was fun. um There's another one, another one that just kind of shows you Kaim's immortal perspective that I liked is when he's locked in prison. And he 's like, you're in this country that has like this caste system, basically, and you have all the losers that they call, I think they actually call them the losers in the town who are locked up in jail and they all want to break out and stuff like that. And Kaim just kind of knows that this regime is not going to last because he's lived through these kinds of things before. 02:50:08.40 Ryan Yeah. 02:50:11.96 Dave And so it shows you his perspective. um You get into a little bit of politics, you eventually see this revolution happen. They're the ones that break him out of jail at the end of it. And they are the ones who were put down by this society, but during the revolution, during the riots, they show kindness toward people in need when they could have just been bloodthirsty at the end of that. 02:50:39.73 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:50:41.14 Dave So I thought that was a good one too. 02:50:42.95 Ryan That yeah, I felt complicated about that one because I agree. It's really, really good and beautiful. And also that was the one where I was like, OK, this works in allegory and story, but not in real life, because if I were a political prisoner who was just going to go from the child prison to the adult prison, 02:50:57.26 Dave Yeah. 02:51:03.77 Ryan and I had an opportunity to break out, I would not go put myself back into prison just to convince the people who were not in prison that I'm actually a pretty good person. 02:51:14.38 Dave yeah that Yeah, you're right about that for sure. 02:51:14.46 Ryan like But as a story, I thought it was beautiful. 02:51:16.50 Dave Yeah. 02:51:20.92 Dave Yeah. Well, these are all beautiful, these thousand years of dreams. 02:51:23.00 Ryan ah 02:51:24.92 Dave And I don't know if you have others that you wanted to bring up. Those were just a selection of the ones. There's 33 of them. um And I went to look through some of them on YouTube earlier today to refresh. And yes, they're quite long. You could easily spend several hours just reading these. ah But these are really good. I didn't want to do the spoiler section just kind of like glossing over here's what we learned from the thousand years of dreams because they are also different like There's a lot where Kaim's a mercenary But even within the ones where Kaim's a mercenary he interacts with different types of people 02:51:52.17 Ryan Right. 02:52:05.44 Dave There's different types of takeaways about it. So ah these are great and like big credit to Shigematsu and J. 02:52:08.42 Ryan Yeah. 02:52:12.94 Dave Rubin for um I mean, these are kind of like the soul of this game. ah and It's really interesting. 02:52:18.14 Ryan Oh, yeah. I totally agree. I think, honestly, this might have been my introduction to visual novels ah because that's kind of what they are, that's kind of what they are. 02:52:27.02 Dave Yeah. 02:52:29.46 Ryan um And yeah, I do. I agree. I think that the heart and soul of this game and. um 02:52:38.40 Ryan None of my takeaways ah that are, you know, about how beautiful this game can be would be there without those stories and in this game. 02:52:48.10 Dave Yeah. Um, it is interesting, like trying to think like, so if they didn't do this, how, how they would have gotten these themes across in the main game, like it would have been tough with, they would have had to change how the main game works. 02:52:56.61 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:53:05.85 Ryan It would have had to. Yeah. Yeah, it would have had to have been a completely different game because, yeah, the call closest we get is the Liram Cooke and Mac stuff and that stuff is so much more tied to Kaim as a character than these anecdotes of him making these brief connections. Oh, the shoemaker one, too. I love the shoemaker one. 02:53:33.04 Dave Oh, yeah. 02:53:33.93 Ryan ah But yeah, no, I like it. I cannot even say it's such a weird thing because they are so separate from the main game. But I could not imagine this game without them. It's it's I i don't I don't it would have been a totally different beast. 02:53:46.45 Dave Yeah. Very interesting, like a decision. So if you think about how they designed this game from the ground up, like when the decision was made that we want this to be how we teach people about our character and you know really dive into the themes that we want to talk about. And it's almost like They said, okay, well, the thousand years of dreams are going to deal with all of these things. 02:54:19.42 Dave And like, I think, as you mentioned earlier, we're going to show you the value of connection, human connection here in these thousand years of dreams. 02:54:25.37 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:54:31.48 Dave And then the main plot is going to focus on the politics of it. 02:54:31.66 Ryan Yeah. 02:54:34.87 Ryan Yeah. 02:54:35.09 Dave And I think it would have been tough to merge those together if it wasn't broken out like this. 02:54:41.04 Ryan It makes me wish that we had more than just two for Seth and one for Ming. 02:54:48.53 Dave Yeah. 02:54:48.78 Ryan It I and you know, it's like um 02:54:51.52 Dave Seth's is really fucked up too, like I really enjoyed it. 02:54:52.79 Ryan Yeah, yeah, it's so sad what happens to her. um But like it is, it does such a good job of making time so three dimensional, especially when at first he's so like an old squall. um But yeah, I, I If, you know, if I were able to give this game like a redo, I would get more dreams from the other immortals. 02:55:26.35 Ryan I know that kinds are like our main character, but the little bits that we got from Seth and Ming were great. And also like we could maybe not get any for Sarah because she never fully regains her memories on screen the way that she remembers that she kept a thousand years of journals. I would have loved to have read a couple of those journals as well. 02:55:43.40 Dave Hmm. 02:55:46.72 Dave Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. It is interesting that, um, yeah, we have all the other characters with, you know, likely a thousand years of interesting memories too, but, uh, kinds are the only ones that we get like a significant dive into. 02:55:58.69 Ryan Mm hmm. 02:56:03.01 Ryan Yeah. 02:56:03.63 Dave So, all right. That's Lost Odyssey. 02:56:08.25 Ryan Yeah, I could if I really wanted to talk for another two hours with you about this, but that is a good place to end it. 02:56:16.85 Dave Yeah, there is a, there is a lot of stuff. There's a lot of stuff in the notes that I did not, uh, bring up here in the spoiler section, but I, the things that I really, really wanted to talk about, we did get into those. 02:56:26.33 Ryan Yeah. 02:56:27.90 Dave Um, and I, I appreciate the conversation as always. 02:56:30.62 Ryan Yeah, it was really great to talk to you today. 02:56:33.67 Dave Yeah. Uh, maybe Lost Odyssey would be a good candidate for lightning strikes thrice at some point where, uh, that level of detail can really, uh, breathe. 02:56:38.95 Ryan Yeah. 02:56:43.13 Ryan uh-huh it's it's gonna be a while ah i so um our next big project since we've done two trilogies already is um after the next couple of seasons we are going to do the Xenoblade trilogy and that is going to take us a long time 02:56:46.55 Dave Yeah, yeah. 02:57:01.58 Dave Ooh. 02:57:04.85 Dave Yes, it is. Those are much longer games than Xenosaga games, yeah. 02:57:08.04 Ryan Yeah. Although you can just like yada, yada, yada. A lot of them, uh, thankfully, but yeah, it's, they're, they're big, they're big guys. 02:57:19.74 Dave Yeah, well, I'll be looking forward to those. um i I'm always like half considering replaying Xenoblade Chronicles because it's been so long. So maybe that'll be the kick in the pants to ah to play along with you all when you get there. 02:57:32.90 Ryan Yeah. 02:57:33.10 Dave but um But yeah, again, much appreciated taking three hours to talk about Lost Odyssey with me and appreciated that you were willing to replay this game for the podcast because it's not a small time commitment. So I appreciate you and thanks again. 02:57:48.05 Ryan Thank you. And yeah, thanks for asking me on here. I love talking about games with you. And it was good motivation for me to pick it back up instead of just letting it live in my memory, even though it ended up being difficult because it was a hard game to play with my broken rib. 02:58:01.06 Dave Yeah. 02:58:05.79 Ryan And so I could only play a little bit at a time. But so thanks also for being accommodating as all that happened. 02:58:10.72 Dave Of course, anytime. And if you'll come back, we'll be looking forward to the next time, the next game to have you back on here. and So yeah, thank you everybody for listening as well. 02:58:19.02 Ryan Absolutely. 02:58:23.36 Dave If you made it all the way to the end of the podcast, you are, as always, my hero. And don't forget to check down on the show notes for links to Pitch Drop, including Lightning Strikes Thrice and everything that they have going on. over there and as always tune in next week for the next game to come out of the backlog.