Lost Odyssey

How Sakaguchi’s clash of past and present created a true final fantasy

- Jon Bailes

The Upstreamers, we learn, are followers of a nomadic religion. In a land where a powerful airstream only blows east to west, they spend their lives trekking headlong into the harsh, unceasing winds. Believing they can one day reach the source, generations move against the flow, birthing new members who will continue the journey in their place. Kaim, the hero of Lost Odyssey, remembers meeting Upstreamers on his travels – always, of course, heading in the opposite direction. One he encounters as a young girl; again as an adult, temporarily settled in a village; finally, after many more years, he witnesses her funeral back on the stream. He appreciates the desire for endless travel that burns within these people.

There are many such tales in Lost Odyssey, the fragmented memories of amnesiac immortals who have lived for a millennium, combined into a collection called A Thousand Years Of Dreams. They’re short stories of glimpsed lives and inevitable deaths, often beautifully written, poignant and strangely captivating. Why strangely? Because of how they’re delivered in-game: slowly, by text, an old-fashioned method that takes longer to resolve than the cutscenes we so often resent.

Yet A Thousand Years Of Dreams sparkles by returning to tradition, a little like Lost Odyssey itself: a classical JRPG released when the genre’s stream was heading in other directions. Helmed by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, developer Mistwalker embarked on a quest to keep the old form alive, passing it from (console) generation to generation. In time the studio would have to rethink, moving towards mobile development, but not before creating one final fantasy of its own, of the kind Square Enix had left behind.