Rumor: Lost Odyssey sequels on the way

I didn't think this was actually news. There's an interview with Sakaguchi-san in an edition of Edge Magazine that is about 3 months old where he reveals he's down for doing a trilogy on the 360. That said, I got the feeling from some of his responses and tone in the interview that he was less than happy with the system (and the splitting of the game over 4 discs) but how he was intrigued (and challenged) to see if he could drive sales of the 360 in Japan. Also, as a burgeoning Japanese speaker I know things do get lost in translation. (In other words this is not an attack on the 360 before I get flamed).

When I get hope I'll dig out the edition and post up some of his comments. Copyright laws be damned!
:)

@scott:

"it's certainly logical to assume that Microsoft would want to extend the life of one the 360's few JRPGs."

Granted, there's still only a handful of JRPGs on the system, but your phrasing really feeds the false perception that the 360 has the same RPG problem as the original xbox. Of the current gen systems, the 360 has the most RPGs (of both Japanese and Western variety).

I bought it today and have loved every minute of it so far. I miss the old Final Fantasy style gameplay, and Lost Odyssey has not only thought me how to properly spell the word "odyssey" without putting the s's and y's in random places and hoping for it to spelled correctly, but it also brought back the feeling of playing the old FF games which I loved (FF7 ftw!)

All was going well until my 360 froze and refused to reboot :(

Great!!! Lost Odyssey is one of the best JRPGs I've played in a long time. I'm looking forward to this!

RPGs are about story. If it has a good story and characters, it doesn't matter if it's a bunch of stick figures where you push A once per minute for combat, it'll still be awesome.

Likewise, Lost Odyssey looks amazing, has excellent voice acting (compared to the typical English VA's anyways, still not as good as the Japanese track) and, most importantly, one of the best storylines in recent memory.

If there's a direct sequel / prequel, and not a 'reimagining' like Final Fantasy every iteration, I'd like to see the text based stories, which were incredible, voiced or possibly semi-illustrated like some Japanese light novels (basically a picture to spruce up every so many pages).

Also, I'd like to see the combat improved slightly. I like the traditional combat they use, but there are some tweaks that could be had. The boss battles are excellent and require some actual strategy other than "hit attack / use best spell, cast group heal when needed" and I'd love to see the individual fights require more strategy like this.

Load times are servicable, but I'd love to see them cut in half for any sequel. I've seen worse load times, but that's no excuse for 30 seconds on average.

Oh, and a Chrono Trigger-like enemies on screen / avoidable fights, but still maintaining the traditional combat model would be cool.

All in all, a very good game that was judged harshly on load times and not being Final Fantasy are the only reason this didn't score in the high 8's, low 9's range. Any RPG fan should play this game and a sequel could only be better.