When Mistwalker released Lost Odyssey in 2008 the developer was lauded for crafting a traditional Japanese RPG while dismissing the traditional JRPG hero. It seems as though all the pundits have agreed that the protagonist Kaim is not Japanese but could he be Greek? Lost Odyssey, the title itself reads like the long lost chapter in the story of Odysseus and conjures images of the Greek isles replete with the usual cast of heroes, villains, Gods and Titans. The story as well would not seem completely out of place among the pantheon of Greek mythos and within the game no single quest seems more appropriate to the likeness of its storytelling forebears than the DLC, “Seeker of the Deep”.

I was recently reading (and by reading I mean scanning the headline) of an article claiming that eventually every person divides their life into two distinct segments. The first is “youth”, the place from which goodness flows like Niagara Falls. Of course, as any person who has tried navigating the falls (in a barrel) could tell you, the beauty of the rushing crystal blue water is simply a false façade perpetrated by the river to hide the ugly truth that lies waiting underneath, a collection of horribly stubborn rocks borne with the sole purpose of destroying any would be river-barreler.  Poorly spun metaphors aside, the crux of what I’m saying is that if one were really to take a hard look at memory lane it would appear more like the imagined Rockwellian dystopia of Tranquility Lane in Fallout 3 rather than the cherry topped sundae one may wish to recall. However, this is precisely why people divide their lives in the first place. At some point an advancement or debasement occurs in a person’s life that manages to turn everything that person once knew on his or her ear. Suddenly everything that has happened to the person and the world around them before the incident in question becomes “The good ol’ days” and everything that comes after this point becomes “humanity’s decent into the River Styx”. The two eras are separated only by a matter of moments, a rather thin division but then again so was the Berlin Wall, so the significance is better off left to hyperbole.