It's strange to think that there's a full AAA turnbased jrpg made by the original final fantasy creators and that game is a xbox eclusive.
I liked the story, I tought it was ok until disc 2 then the characters,the world and their motivations grew on me and I ended up enjoing the game way more.and while for me the story is a bit weaker than the final fantasy games I played (5,6,7,8,9,10) and some scenes could have been made better, you can feel that this is a Sakaguchi game. It's obvius that some idea comes from these games and so does the music.Lost odissey soundtrack really remember FFVII sometimes but as always it'still very good like other Uematsu themes,but I'm disappointed that there isn't a music for the ship travel.

Gameplay is my main problem with this game, there are 2 problem. First EVERTHING takes soo much time, slow animation for doors,pots, chests, combat and every fight starts with a 10 second scene where the camera shows how good the arena is, then it show you the enemy, then moves on your part and then you can play. After you have to waste time on the "ring system", rings are just normal accessory but you have to do a stupid minigame everytime you attack to activate them.Second problem for me it's the turn system of this game. I dont know if this system it's unique to this game, I havent played a lot of turn based games but this is the first where I saw it. Basically you dont take turns with each character, but both you and the enemies choose each action for every characters at the same time and then the game choose the order of each action based on the characters speed and the speed of the chosen action. This system not only makes fights longer but it's a pain when you have to action like resurrecting and or using items. I'll show an example:

In a "normal" game you would do somithing like this
chr. [1] resurrect char[2]-> end turn
chr[3] heals chr[2] -> end turn
chr[2] does something -> end turn
Now chr[2] is healed and ready to fight,this happens with Mp items and status items etc.
In lost odissey the system works badly because every action must be chosed before following the state of the battle at the start of the turn.

-start turn
chr. [1] resurrect char[2]
chr[3] cant heals chr[2] because it's dead when you choose what to do in a turn
chr[2] doesn't do anything because he was dead when you choose turn's action
enemy attacks and kill chr[2]
-end turn

If the enemy doesn't attack it will do it next turn anyway, specially because normal attacks are higher speed than spells. Add that bosses like aoe attacks and some spells takes multiple torn and you have a game that I hated to play.The good thing is that this happens only in the first disc, which it's harder than the entire game. The skill system make the game easier the more you play it, and it's not hard to have 4/5 character in the party almost unkillable.

If I have to give you a reason why you should play this game the reason would be the Thousand Years of Dreams: A collection of past memories of the main characters written by japanese novelist Kiyoshi Shigematsu. You come across this memories in the game and are shown to you in (visual) novel form. The stories are all emotionally touching and give a hint of what "living" as an immortal means. I'll probably read some of his other works an I wish I could get a English version of the book that contains all these stories. And the character draw by Inoue are really cool even if I dont really like Cooke and Mack design.
Hopefully one day we'll get a remaster for this game, I had to get my old xbox to play this. Thankfully it's retrocompatible on new xboxs and goes on sale frequently.

I didn't really liked the original Extra, the combat was a pain, the pacing was horrendous and nothing happened until the ending. Now I'm angry because you need to play it to enjoy this gem.
This is by far a better game, better story, same characters but with better exposition, better pacing and while the combat it's still the same it requires far less farming.
The game has 2 routes, but it's probably better to call them endings. In short in the normal story you resolve a problem while in the CCC story you ask yourself how this problem came to be. I tought the game was ok when I finished the game the first time and it was obvius that you dint know everything that happened. In the CCC all those holes get explained but I dont like you need to do a NG+ to actually understend the whole story throught additional scenes that are possible to see un a new game but extremely hidden, it's still a 30ish hour game. I really liked my second run and it was worth it, a nice story about love and AI. Sometimes it gets a bit too quirky and eccentric but that's ok. Keep archer and Archer runs for the CCC ending.