Lost Odyssey: I feel LOST all ready!

So I've been out of the console reviews/news game for a while. Probably around 1-2 years in essence. So when we relaunched Hades Times way back two or three months back I had a lot of catching up to do. Which is a pretty large amount of titles to catch up on. But I didn't catch up completely. I simply went through a bunch of the top rated titles or games that people suggested to me. One of those titles was Lost Odyssey. I just got around to playing this game last night. The game is a locked perspective game like Devil May Cry. It has a tendency to lock up and has lots of instances where there SHOULD be some background downloading and there doesn't seem to be any. It definitely has the capability to hit the hard drive; but I guess it just wasn't coded to do so.

The game is interesting where combat is concerned. I like the ring system that makes sure that the player is actively playing through the random combat instances. I also like being able to create my own rings that give a bonus during combat. But the game in and of itself is broken.

The stuttering while it is changing scenes and the fixed camera with only the most minimum amount of camera movement is insane. It even appears that the game needs to load for EVERY RANDOM encounter and item find. The backgrounds are painted, so it isn't like there is loading going on for the backgrounds either. I think Odin Sphere probably uses more memory than this game should. There are no story choices, everything proceeds like a movie. There are no choices except the choice to pick up items out of chests and jars or not to do so. So where is all the memory going? I don't know, but this game definitely is showing it's age. I'm just a little confused as to why a title that is only probably one level upgraded from Final Fantasy X is having such a problem running on the same system that will run Fable 2, which basically loads up regions of a living world with a timeline and an economy.

I didn't get anywhere near the main part of the story and considering the absolutely awful presentation which is SO integral to the RPG experience is SO BAD, I had to stop playing. It's basically the old adage of, “Hey man, I have a lot better games to play than this.”

So this isn't a review, it's more of a WTF? How could this game, made by such a prestigious company(Mistwalker) with such a good publisher(Microsoft) be SO HORRIBLE? Perhaps it is simply the Japanese sensiblity but in general I really love JRPGs and for most of my life that's all I played. So unless I've been wholly destroyed by Western RPGs; I don't understand. After all, I love just about everything that comes out of Atlus, so who knows... Please SOMEONE tell me, does this game; at some point get SO GOOD that all the rest of this stuff doesn't matter? And what is it?