Quote Originally Posted by Dreddz View Post
Both XI and XII were vastly different from previous entries, and even if you didn't like them you hadn't played anything quite like them before in the series.
Firstly...your mentioning XI? Honestly? It's an online game, of course it would be different from the rest of the games. I don't even see how or why you would use this as a comparison. It's the equivalent of saying WoW is vastly new and different from War Craft 3. Their 2 entirely different genres of gaming require everything to be vastly different.

And guess what, they were made after Sakaguchi had left.
Well that would explain why they forgot to write a story for XII then. It was about 50 hours of grinding followed by a few hours of plot. I hardly think creating a lot of new game play by sacrificing the story is a fair trade off.

I think you misunderstand me, I'm all for innovation, but at the cost of the story and characters, no. RPG's simply put are about the story and characters, not fancy graphics or gameplay. It bothers to me to no extent when games try and one up themselves and others in terms of graphics and gameplay so they can 'redefine the paragon of RPG excellence' when it was just redefined last week. There's honestly only so much rehashing of 'new' ideas before it's all crap rehashed again.

I'll agree that from a gameplay perspective, Lost Odyssey doesn't exactly offer innovation in any substantial form, but it was never meant to. The turn-based combat system was, however, relatively solid.
I'll disagree, I think Lost Odyssey was innovative in itself by NOT trying to rewrite how RPG's are played and being probably the first RPG in close to a decade to go back to the very roots of RPG's and do turn based combat. I think it was pretty brilliant just for the fact that they didn't feel the need to spend years creating a new system of something we've "Never seen exactly but kinda sorta have already but not really the same as the game before" that so many other games are doing.