Final Fantasy has left a huge imprint on the way RPG’s are conceived in our subconscious. The Playstation’s seventh outing of Square/Enix’s much lauded franchise is regarded as the best of the entire series, with numbers eight and ten fighting it out for second place. But what does the creator of a gaming phenomenon do when he ups and leaves the company that he helped save? He goes and sets up another one, of course, and through his new Mistwalker brand has given the western public the rather pleasant Blue Dragon and now a true throwback to the good ol’ days: Welcome adventurers, to Lost Odyssey.

The intro to this four disc behemoth is simply jaw dropping and also a lot darker than anything we’ve seen before from Hironobu Sakaguchi and his team (made up of the majority of coders that gave us the impressive Shadow Hearts series), which also includes renowned RPG music man Nobuo Uemantsu.

People get skewered, stabbed and downright mutilated by a powerful army during a fierce battle on the Highlands of Wohl. In and amongst all this is the story lead, Kaim Argonar, who we later discover (mainly because everyone apart from him dies when a huge volcanic fireball thingy let’s rip across the battlefield) is immortal. After this fracas, he’s summoned to the grand council to explain how he survived. He’s then given the task of heading to Grand Staff and examining the location to figure out how a freak burst of magic created the fatal inferno.

The adventure takes a fair while to get into, but once the story starts it really manages to grab hold and you can soon feel the old role-playing traits kicking in; late nights, wondering how you’re going to get to work on after only three hours sleep because you lost all track of time trying to defeat the big, winged boss monster.

When I first played this the graphics quite simply blew me away. Attempting to spot the moment when the game switches from an FMV sequence to the actual gameplay is nigh on impossible. There are so many eye popping moments in the first ten minutes that you spend more time sitting in amazement than telling Kaim to hit things - it truly is that amazing. Backdrops are lush, characters live and breathe and the action shots are nicely pulled off. Another nice touch is the 24-style picture-in-picture scenes where we see different angles of the same shot in the same instant, which adds a distinctly trendy feel to an already well polished visual presentation.

The music and audio leans heavily toward past Fantasy games, but that’s not a bad thing. Main melodies swoop and glide around you, giving you that illusive feeling of immersion that modern games covet. There is also a variety contained within these tunes that helps to keep everything fresh. Piano solos to big orchestral segments and even pan pipes; there’s never a dull moment for the ears here, and that’s what you want in a game of this ilk (oh, and as a footnote for all FF fans, there‘s even the usual cheesy bit after the end of each random battle, just so you know).

The best thing about Lost Odyssey is the gameplay and the way that it doesn’t try to change anything about what games have come before it. This concentrates more on the storytelling and the experience of games past, rather than trying to implement an all new battle system or instanced story mode. What we get is the return of raw, entertaining, random battles after their significant absence and I never thought I’d say this in a hurry, but I did miss them. There have been some critics of this way style of balls-out combat, but in a genre where fighting the enemy to level up your character is a necessity, these arbitrary skirmishes are a vital necessity. Formations are also back, and fit in quite nicely with all the new things that have been added.

There are two main upgradeable areas here. The first is the Ring Assembly section where you can create jewelry that can help to give you extra power and/or elemental attacks by timing your use of the right trigger button. The other new mode is the skill link. The immortal characters cannot learn magic and have to rely on the humans to do it for them. In order to attain the spells, characters have to link themselves to any one person to do so. This adds a neat twist to an already concentrated formula and does work pretty well.

All this stuff is fine and good, but there must be something wrong with it, right? Well, yeah, but it’s such a small gripe that it’s not worth crying about. Sometimes when there’s an awful lot of stuff going on, you will get a tiny drop in the frame rate, but it’s not that often and never lasts that long anyway. For such a visually impressive game, the very occasional and light stutter feels like a fair trade off, and effects the gameplay not at all.

Lost Odyssey is a game that winds the clock back a good number of years and harkens back to Final Fantasy 8 in particular. It has serious characters and a storyline to match, comes on four discs and was a damned good game – precisely like this latest addition to Sakaguchi-ans’s already impressive portfolio. Although it certainly won’t suit everybody (RPG games have always had that affect on gamers), if you’re an Xbox 360 owner and looking to get back into the RPG genre again, there is no better reintroduction than this.

Blue Dragon gave Mistwalker a great starting block to work from and sold well enough worldwide to produce a sequel that will be out later this year. I can only hope that Lost Odyssey gets the support it so richly deserves, as the quality is there for all to see. It also proves the creator of one of gaming’s most recognised names still knows how to convey a brilliantly cinematic interactive story.

Get stocked up on midnight oil. It’s going to be a wonderfully long night.