Lost Soul Aside is a fun character action game, despite its jumbled, misdirected jumble of disparate, badly realized ideas that alternately lay up rakes for itself to step on. I’ve enjoyed battles and boss fights, but far too frequently in between, I’ve had to endure a monotonous plot with unmemorable characters, awkward platforming in the levels, and puzzles that would make the shape-matching tasks you’d give a toddler seem easy, all wrapped up in a misleadingly ostentatious package.
In games, where concepts and advancements conflate craft, technology, business, and art, originality is ephemeral. This is particularly true in the expanding genre of expensive fantasy action games with dazzling combos and minimal role-playing components. Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem; even a good character action game that draws inspiration from games like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry is likely to offer some lighthearted, unoffensive entertainment. To its credit, Lost Soul Aside is a really good action game.
However, by blatantly stealing and making worse concepts from several recent Final Fantasy games in particular, it isn’t trying to implement a concept of its own that didn’t work out; rather, it is doing something terribly that begs comparison to games that successfully implemented the same concepts, some of which were released almost ten years ago.
That was the thing that really irritated me during my game. The game I’ve been playing seems more like the result of boardroom discussions a week following the release of Final Fantasy XV or VII Remake, when the focus was on how to build on their popularity, than a team’s passion project honoring those titles. Between the story’s setup feeling eerily familiar, the main character (Kaser), who we have at home, and the structure and scale of each level that resembles a scaled-down Final Fantasy VII Remake, with all of it peppered with boring extra puzzles and platforming challenges, I found something new to sigh at around every corner. And believe me, that’s not because I was falling hard for the bad-boy protagonist.
Does it sound familiar? If it doesn’t, you ought to switch to Final Fantasy 7.
Lost Soul Aside begins with a prophecy that humanity would soon face its worst days and that a savior would step up to the plate. The story takes place in a sci-fi/fantasy planet where an all-powerful kingdom has been fueled by a mysterious extraterrestrial energy. Then, you’re thrown into an introductory scene where you learn about an underground resistance group operating out of a low-income area of the capital city and engaging in a public act of rebellion against the empire. Does that sound familiar? You should play Final Fantasy 7 instead if it doesn’t, as it’s done better there, and this retelling doesn’t provide anything unique or intriguing.
The plot is extremely repetitive and is primarily told through much less spectacular, awkward dialogue sections, with sporadic, dazzling, action-packed cutscenes. A simple, black-and-white story that doesn’t seem to be about anything other than wanting to be like other RPGs takes the place of every chance for a twist or a change in tone. The roughly 16-hour duration of Lost Soul Aside is not used effectively enough for any character development. Rather, it bombards you with proper nouns in the hopes that one of its numerous supporting characters will stick out. However, the pace of this plot is too fast for anyone to be more than a cartoonish caricature. It’s possible that their distinctive qualities were lost in the translation into English, but it’s also possible that they were never present in the first place.
Hours of simple, over-the-shoulder speech portions are interspersed with clumsy visuals and largely flat voice acting, giving its various story moments an equally odd meter. All of it is presented by characters who frequently fit into derogatory RPG clichés (such as a sexy woman who appears and behaves like a teenager but is actually hundreds of years old, or a rough, emo lead who would blend in with a boyband, has a mysterious past, and enjoys kicking ass) without experimenting with or developing these concepts in any way.
Better localization, more animated voice acting, or a greater dedication to the scene would have allowed Lost Soul Aside to capture the same campy, B-movie-style fun that the action games so obviously drew from. Rather, it’s in some ways both overly serious and clumsy. Eventually, Kaser and his dragon-like sidekick Lord Arena share a few moments that make me grin, but it takes so long for them to click that by the time their dynamic clicked, I was mostly distracted from the plot and only interested in the action.
The main attraction of Lost Soul Aside is its fighting system.
In Lost Soul Aside, combat serves as a palate cleanser for the dull plot. Kaser uses the genre-standard light and heavy attack buttons to hack and slice through adversaries with a fashionable flair. Combining the two in a different order and time can create new combos, and you may use skill points to complete branches on a skill tree to unlock even more. Each of the four weapon options—sword, greatsword, poleblade, and scythe—has a unique playstyle and skill progression. Additionally, altering them mid-combo allows for a more expressive and diverse tree of strikes that may be tailored to different playstyles.
For instance, the polearm performs well at long range, whereas the greatsword is most effective at delivering powerful, satisfying hits. However, the normal sword was my favorite; it’s a versatile, fast, and nimble weapon with strong melee and ranged strikes, and it’s been my go-to weapon for slicing up hordes of invading Voidrax creatures throughout my playthrough.
Lost Soul Aside’s combat system is the main attraction, supplemented by other mechanics like the combo-extending Burst Pursuit that lets you throw out big finishers after a combo or the Witch Time-like perfect dodge that gives you a different, powerful attack for each weapon, the necessary but deftly restrained parry, and the Arena powers that let you throw out big, area-of-effect attacks that are good for resetting the battlefield. As Kaser and Arena’s dazzling animations glistened during longer sequences, I’m really enjoying playing with different combos and powers, even against mostly unmemorable enemies.
Even more fashionable encounters are created by boss fights that cut off portions of each stage. Some opponents are more agile and fight to the death against opponents the size of humans, while larger opponents use scale to launch huge, arena-sweeping attacks. Almost every fight has a thrilling conclusion. Each battle was a brain-tickling, exciting showdown, with just the right amount of toothy challenge. I dodged and flowed between blows, then wailed on their stagger meter to deal a special Sync Finisher on my stunned opponent.
When Kaser takes damage from some lesser swings, there isn’t enough input, which is an unexpected pain point I saw in several of these encounters. When I look down at my health bar when I’m screaming at a villain who seems to be doing well, I see that it’s far lower than I had anticipated because I was unaware that I had actually taken any damage. Fortunately, you’ll hear about it once your health is pretty low because Kaser and Arena are talkative, and their barks stick out from the monotonous battle noise.
Sadly, Lost Soul Aside isn’t just a boss-rush battle gauntlet, and the action in between battles isn’t nearly as interesting. The majority of the levels consist of a monotonous, straight sequence of hallways with sporadic “open” spaces that provide one or two additional platforming “challenges.” Nothing I’ve seen so far has really justified its existence beyond dull padding between battles, but sure, there might be a simple puzzle or treasure chest around a corner (though I used almost none of the crafting materials accumulated during my playthrough because the rewards didn’t improve my stats enough to bother with).
Simple, uniform non-combat tasks and empty chambers that throw a few unrewarding pickups at you, apparently only to keep things interesting, are hidden behind its high-fidelity, visually detailed spaces.
This is understandable given that the majority of the level progression and exploration consists of dull, straightforward courses that primarily consist of walking forward till the next combat, interspersed with the occasional easy puzzle. Nothing offensive was said until the platforming showed up.
I was jumping through platforming sections of Lost Soul Aside on several occasions, which could have made even the Chuckster and Plinko levels that make up the leftovers of Super Mario Sunshine seem like a lot of fun. I am genuinely amazed at the awful platforming I had to go through to move from fight to fight, plagued with clumsy running and walking, floaty jumps with lag-feeling animations, poor feedback, a cramped field of view, and a barely perceptible shadow. Even though some of it was optional, I still had to put in a lot of work to finish each level.
Verdict
If Lost Soul Aside hadn’t made the extra effort to do anything else, it would have been a fantastic character action game. The storyline of the Final Fantasy cosplay game is uninteresting, and the performers portraying the unmemorable cast of (often derivative) characters aren’t given much to work with. Painfully bad 3D platforming scenes and incredibly simple riddles abound in this dull level design, which is at best merely following the rules and at worst irksomely unskippable. Really, it should simply stick to battling the next time.
