Lost Odyssey - Development

Development

Lost Odyssey's "A Thousand Years of Dreams" were penned by an award-winning Japanese short story writer, Kiyoshi Shigematsu, who worked directly with the game's producer Hironobu Sakaguchi on Kaim's backstory, while Sakaguchi alone wrote the game's main story. The memory sequences were translated into English by Jay Rubin, a respected Harvard professor who also translated the works of novelist Haruki Murakami. While Rubin originally objected to what he perceived as "adding to the world's supply of senseless violence," he relented after viewing the material and being "shocked" at its pacifist message and "vivid imagery". The short stories in the game were presented in a format similar to visual novel games.

Japanese manga artist Takehiko Inoue headed the game's artistic team, while famed game composer Nobuo Uematsu was recruited to create a more contemporary soundtrack. Mistwalker developed the title with cooperation with Feelplus, a subsidiary of Microsoft created specifically to aid Mistwalker. Feelplus is made up of around 40 former Nautilus/Sacnoth developers, most famous for the cult favorite Shadow Hearts video game series. (Sacnoth was officially announced as being dissolved in 2007.) Former Square (now Square Enix) employees at Microsoft are also involved.

The president of Feelplus, Ray Nakazato, commended Shigematsu for "really good" storytelling, and the character and creature production staff for creating high-quality content without any delays. Game design progressed smoothly due to the team's experience with the genre. However, he also felt that there were several things that could have been done better during development. Starting development with a large staff caused aspects to be changed upon release of the Xbox 360. The three separate teams that created battle, adventure, and cut scene components ran into "various issues" while combining their work, causing him to consider "seamless" development for any later projects. Little-used parts of the environment were given an extensive level of detail, resulting in a waste of money and time, and concept art was given the same extensive level of attention. Off-the-shelf motion capture was used in some cutscenes, while choreographed motion capture was used in others, resulting in "inconsistent" quality.

The game ships on four dual layer DVDs, more than any Xbox 360 game to date. It was the first RPG developed using the Unreal Engine 3.0, a decision that allowed development before the 360 was even released, but the Japanese development team had trouble keeping up with the engine's regular updates and had trouble reading the requisite manuals. This caused technical setbacks such as long loading times.

A playable demo of the game was shown at the Tokyo Game Show 2006, and was made available with the November issue of Famitsu.

On July 11, 2007, an English trailer of Lost Odyssey was shown at E3 2007.

According to Peter Moore and Microsoft's E3 press event Lost Odyssey was to be in stores worldwide for the 2007 holiday season, although it was actually released in February 2008 in both the US and Europe.

On November 19, 2007, at a special Blue Dragon/Lost Odyssey concert held in Shibuya, Tokyo, it was announced that the game had gone gold and was ready for its Japanese release date of December 6, 2007. According to a special bloggers event at which selected people were invited to play demos of the game from the very beginning, it was confirmed that English/Japanese voices were selectable in the Japanese version.

An issue regarding the packaging has led to several complaints from consumers. Since the game could not fit onto a standard DVD, it requires four discs. In Japan and Australia, the solution was to use an oversized case with two disc trays to store the discs. In the United States and PAL territories, however, the first three discs were held on a single 3-disc spindle inside the main game case. The fourth disc came packaged in a paper sleeve. The concern is that the method used for the American and European versions could result in scratched discs.

Another fault of the packaging during shipping resulted in many complaints. Reactions between the underside of the disc and a substance on the paper sleeve caused the fourth disc to be almost unplayable. Various methods exist online to remove the added layer from the disc, with the most common being recommendations of multiple uses of disc cleaners or pouring boiling water over the disc and wiping the residue off. Installing the disc to the console has also been touted as a way to fix the issue, which is known to cause disc-reading errors or freezes.