The expected lifetime sales of this title seem quite high to me. It's unlikely to do more than 200K in Japan, about the same as Blue Dragon which leaves 1.2 million copies sold between Europe and NA, which I think is a little bit optimistic going by the perfomance of Blue Dragon in the west.
@kspraydad, kinda confirms my intuition on that one: seeing gameplay footage I was very surprised at how empty and uninteresting the fields appeared which can't be good news in terms of production quality. I'm afraid this may not be *the* title to convince japanese rpg players that xbox360 is the place to get jrpgs.
In the six hours that I've played so far, Lost Odyssey has been a technical mess, with framerate problems in just about every cinema and on most maps, an animation system that looks like it was ported straight from a PS2 engine, and frequent, inconsistent load times accompanied by visual stuttering as new data loads in.
In Microsoft's pre-TGS conference, Hironobu Sakaguchi announces that Lost Odyssey will be "out in Japan on December 6th, then in North America in February 2008.". This is contrary to earlier reports of a simultaneous worldwide release.
When Microsoft announced that they were partnering up with Hironobu Sakaguchi and his new development studio, Mistwalker, Xbox fans let out a collective cheer. After all, Sakaguchi-san is the genius who unleashed the monumentally popular Final Fantasy franchise to millions of gamers worldwide. Following Blue Dragon's recent release here in North America, Mistwalker studios is prepping for another big RPG release, this one entitled Lost Odyssey.
Not only were we impressed by the visuals in Lost Odyssey, but we also left the demo with the confident feeling that we will be more in control of the combat which is never a bad thing.
2