Director of the award-winning Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has once again showered praise onto Hironobu Sakaguchi's Lost Odyssey, an overlooked classic made by the father of Final Fantasy.
Sandfall Interactive's Guillaume Broche recently appeared on an episode of Jeux Vidéo Club, which is kind of like the Criterion Closet for video games, where the director picked a few classic games from the archives and discussed how they influenced his own work.
The Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 director has many times cited old-school JRPGs as huge inspirations, but he dived deeper than ever into Lost Odyssey, a stone-cold Xbox 360 classic that came out after Sakaguchi's departure from Square Enix. It was essentially a Final Fantasy game in all but its name, and it didn't quite get the attention it deserved as a genre masterpiece at the time.
"It really was an exceptional game," Broche says. "It's a bit of an old-school game, very linear. There were random battles too, just like in the old Final Fantasy games. Everyone said, 'What is this game from another era?'... So it got torn apart even though the game is exceptional."
"The story is amazing. It's the last game that made me cry. The villain isn't that great. That's the only downside for me. But overall, I highly recommend it to anyone who loves Final Fantasy. It's one of those games that really left a mark on me - not just because it was fun, but emotionally. Every now and then, I think back on it, I listen to the music and immerse myself in it all over again. It's truly one of the most powerful, emotional experiences of my life as a gamer," he adds.
"Something that really stood out to me was that it was one of the last somewhat ambitious turn-based games with realistic graphics. Since then, we've had a lot of turn-based games - there are still plenty, like Octopath Traveler, Persona, even Yakuza - but turn-based games with dramatic, ambitious stories and realistic graphics haven't been around since Lost Odyssey. It was the last one."
It was the last one... until Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, that is. "It holds a special place in my heart because, for me, Clair Obscur is sort of the successor to that in a way - it was my favorite kind of game, and nobody was making them anymore," Broche continues. "So I said to myself, "Let's go." It's one of the best games in the world."
Lost Odyssey discs are still going for pretty cheap, though it's also available digitally on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.
