The story behind Lost Odyssey, Mistwalker’s next installment in the RPG genre after this fall’s Blue Dragon, has always been a bit…well, esoteric. Up to now, all that we’ve known is that the game focuses on a warrior named Kaim Argonar — a fellow who’s been alive for a thousand years, has no real memory of what’s come before, but yet still endures with plenty of kick-assery to prove it. The months following this revelation have been spent more learning about the game’s turn-based battle system and the various other “immortals” and mortals you’ll join forces with on your path to discovering just who Kaim is…

…until now. We had a chance to go completely hands-on with the English-localized version of Lost Odyssey and clear up some of the mystery surrounding Microsoft’s next entry into the J-RPG category.

First off, Kaim isn’t the only “immortal” in town. In fact there are several others of his kind that he’ll stumble across during his travels; the first of which is a female named Seth Balmore, who has the same memory-impairment problems as Kaim. Why have their memories gone all pear-shaped? Hard to say, and that’s the central focus of their collective quest.

The bulk of our hands-on time was spent about five hours or so into the game — right after the opening scenes in the Wohl Highlands where Kaim takes on a slew of mechanical enemies (the video demo is available on Marketplace for download) and the fight-tastic train ride from the battlegrounds to the metropolitan hub of Uhra. It’s here that the story really takes off, introducing you to a body of politicians who dictate how and where your adventure heads.

It seems that Kaim’s ability to withstand a comet strike (!) has branded him as the go-to guy for dangerous missions, and soon enough, we were off to investigate a prison reportedly leaking magic essence — which the political council of Uhra believes to be the cause of the comet in the first place.

But before you traipse off to fight giant worms and other beasts, your time tooling around town can be spent searching for hidden items (you’ll be prompted with the A button, à la Blue Dragon, when something is searchable), visiting different merchants, or simply exploring the massive town of Uhra. There is no standard RPG overworld that connects different locations, where you’ll hoof it from city to dungeon and back — instead you’ll pick new locations from an onscreen map and you’ll be simply transported to the entrance of the new area. According to Microsoft, you’ll also gain access to new vehicles throughout the game, though the map will work exactly the same — point to point with no exploratory wandering in between.

And though Lost Odyssey’s battle system is turn-based, this is no simple rehash of Blue Dragon’s class-focused brawls. The rhythm of each fight may be similar (enter in actions for each character on each turn, etc.), but instead of relying on swapping up classes,  Lost Odyssey incorporates the concept of both “rings” and “skills.” Rings are equipped to individual characters (to increase certain stats or battle skills), but they also enable a timing feature in battle. When you choose to physically attack an enemy, a narrowing circle will appear on screen that you must time holding down the R Trigger in order to execute a “bad,” “good,” or “perfect” strike. Getting the timing down is a little tricky at first — and by the end of the demo we were still practicing as much voodoo science to our strategy as real skill — but the difference in damage to the enemy is worth the effort.

Skills are something innate to mortals, not immortals like Kaim or Seth. So in order to access these skills (like black magic, white magic, etc.), you must have a mortal in your party, then link to them through your stats menu. This way, you’ll be able to learn their skills through the number of battles you participate in. It’s a different approach, but it does encourage you to always rotate your battle party, of which you can only have five at any given time (though you can in fact have ten total characters in your travel party).

While we’re not exactly sure that Lost Odyssey will blow the minds of anyone with an adverse reaction to traditional, turn-based J-RPGs, we do know that if you’ve ever hoped for something reasonably close to the single-player Final Fantasy experience on Xbox 360 — Kaim & Co. may be exactly what you’re looking for come February.

SIDENOTE: At Lost Odyssey’s main menu, you’ll be able to access any of Kaim’s “dreams.” In the game, you’ll have plenty of dreams that roll out like cinematic cut-scenes and hint at where Kaim came from and possibly where he’s going. But you’ll have other ones, too. These are text-driven screens penned by Japanese author Kiyoshi Shigematsu and give much weight to Kaim’s future and past.