What Is Last Odyssey?

Last Odyssey is an FRP about magically empowered protagonists who travel from place to place, resolving quests, learning Lore, solving puzzles, and defeating their opponents in combat. It is heavily inspired by the so-called “JRPG” or Japanese Role-Playing Game genre of video games, which encompasses titles such as the Final Fantasy games, Dragon Quest, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and others. It also draws inspiration from a great deal of tabletop games, from other TTJRPGs such as Ryuutama and Sword World to games like The Burning Wheel and Chuubo’s Magical Wish-Granting Engine. It should be noted that, while Last Odyssey is aesthetically and mechanically inspired by JRPGs (a reductive term to begin with), it is most closely in dialogue with the Anglo-American roleplaying tradition, as its author is an American living on the West Coast. You should see this game as an attempt at dialogue with Japanese roleplaying and an attempt to reinscribe it into a pen-and-paper context, rather than as a faithful reproduction of any other work, living or dead.

Hyper Fantasy

Every FRP requires that participants agree on the principles of a shared world, and Last Odyssey is no different. There is no fixed setting that all games of Last Odyssey are required to take place in, but it is written to facilitate certain kinds of settings more than others. The intended setting of a Last Odyssey game is what the author calls hyper fantasy. In hyper fantasy stories, everything is exaggerated. Emotions are loud, battles take ages, and powerful characters loom hundreds of feet tall. The “fantasy” part of hyper fantasy refers to stories that prioritize mythological and emotional logic over hard fact. Magic, resurrection, good and evil spirits, and other things that are not present in the real world all exist in a fantasy story. As for the “hyper” part of hyper fantasy, think of how many Japanese video games handle their settings. In a game set in a bleak, medieval world, the protagonists might ride airships, shoot fireballs from their hands, or prance around in glittering dresses, while a game set during World War 2 might have a 10-year-old girl with a rocket launcher as one of its protagonists. Put these two elements together and you get hyper fantasy.

Danger, Combat, and Antagonists

In Last Odyssey, the players fight on the side of good against the forces of evil. Major villains are known as Antagonists, while minor villains are known as warriors. Every session of Last Odyssey will see the players facing down challenges that they will overcome with their own ingenuity and by leaning on their characters’ innate abilities. They will also find themselves solving puzzles, fighting off opponents in combat, and exploring the larger world. It is the GM’s role to create these challenges, and it is the players’ role to overcome them. The point of these challenges is not to guarantee that the players will win or lose, but rather to empower the group to create an engaging story.

A Game About Storytelling

You may have noticed by now that nothing has been written about what it means to win or lose at Last Odyssey. That’s because, unlike a lot of the board games and video games it’s based on, Last Odyssey is not, strictly speaking, a finite game. There is no score, no end goal, and no opposing team. Instead, the purpose of Last Odyssey is to facilitate collective storytelling. Each Last Odyssey campaign will tell a unique story whose outcome is determined by the interaction between the participants’ imagination and the rules of the game. There is no fixed point at which a Last Odyssey campaign must end. Indeed, even when a character reaches their maximum mechanical potential, their player could pick up a new character and keep the same story going for as long as they wanted.

In recent years, FRPs have been used as a form of collaborative theater known as Actual Play. Actors will gather together to play games on camera for an audience that experiences the emotions facilitated by play as they happen. Introducing an external audience to an FRP adds another layer of priorities that are not present when the game is played “alone.” Improv is entertaining, and there is nothing wrong with liking these shows or taking inspiration from them to bring back to the table, but play at your table will have a lot of aspects that aren’t immediately intelligible to outside observers. To be absolutely clear, the intended audience of a game of Last Odyssey is its participants. You are not accountable to anyone except the other players of the game (including, as often goes unacknowledged, the facilitator). That being said, if you’d like to use this game as a vehicle for public storytelling, or if you’d like to document and share your campaign online or through some other medium, you are more than welcome. If you’d like to post a video of yourself playing Last Odyssey on your YouTube channel or publish writing based on your campaign, just be sure to credit the author and her game when doing so.