A Long-Awaited Release
Welcome back to another blog, the show where we give you some straight-up gameplay and our first impressions of the latest games releasing. Hi folks, it’s Zaid, and today we’re looking at “Lost Soul Aside,” an action RPG that’s been in development since, I kid you not, 2014, and it started as a one-man project. It’s one of those long-gestating games that seemed very ambitious when it was first revealed. One of those too-good-to-be-true games that a lot of people assumed would never actually come out, but we have played it, and it is the real deal.
First Impressions and Comparisons
Sometimes a long-gestating game like this comes out and surprises everyone. I’m thinking of something like “Wukong,” a game by a relatively unknown developer, but they managed to pull it off with a game that’s stuffed full of content, looks stunning, and plays well. “Lost Soul Aside” is basically trying to be the “Final Fantasy”-inspired version of that, but does it pull it off? I don’t want to give you this answer, but unfortunately, the answer is no.
Combat and Gameplay Mechanics
“Lost Soul Aside” is impressive in a lot of ways, especially for a game originally started by just a single developer before eventually building up to a team of about 40, which is still pretty small, and there is a certain amateurness to a lot of the way “Lost Soul Aside” is built that kind of betrays its relatively indie origins. The passion’s clearly there, but there’s some problems. The combat is fun but rough. The visuals swing wildly between pretty amazing in some areas and very out of date in others. The story is a total flat-line outside of the intriguing opening, but the worst thing about “Lost Soul Aside” is it’s just kind of a slog to play after a while, which shouldn’t be how I feel about an old-school action game like this with RPG elements.
It’s not a Soulslike; it’s not even close to a Soulslike. It’s much closer to something like a Platinum game crossed with “Final Fantasy XVI,” which is kind of a Platinum game crossed with “Final Fantasy.” Combat’s a spectacle. It’s fast and intense, generally pretty forgiving, though, with a focus on fun over challenge. That’s a welcome breath of fresh air right now, where it feels like every action game needs to have some “Souls” DNA. But this is a throwback. In a lot of ways, it plays like a lost Xbox 360-era game, and also sometimes it looks like that.
RPG Elements vs. Action Game Reality
Make no mistake, the trailers and the pre-release information emphasize the RPG part of “Lost Soul Aside,” but it’s not an RPG. It’s got some RPG elements. There’s weapons to collect, trinkets to equip, skill tree to unlock, but it’s not an RPG. It’s an action game with all the functions we have come to expect from action games. There’s perfect dodges, perfect blocks, weapon swapping, pull off ridiculous combos, a stagger mechanic. You can perform special attacks by holding on the left trigger and pressing one of the face buttons. There’s a Devil Trigger. It’s got all the action game mechanics you know about. It doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, but all of this stuff does mostly work as intended, so that’s good. Not necessarily very good or great, but those elements are good.
Structure, Exploration, and Pacing Issues
There’s the occasional ally that tags along on certain missions, but you don’t really have a party in this game. There aren’t any quests. There’s very little exploration. The game is mostly just arenas connected by hallways and the random platforming segment or light puzzle, that kind of stuff. They try to break things up so the game isn’t just nonstop fighting, but it feels like that anyway, and it starts to get tiring after a while. It’s hard to say this, but there’s just too much fighting. There’s too many bosses stacked back to back. Normally, the nonstop spectacle is something I would be all over, and in isolation, a lot of this stuff is actually really fun, but “Lost Soul Aside” is terminally lacking in chill. It cannot let up and let things breathe, and when it does let up, it’s boring. It doesn’t know how to let… (chuckles) It doesn’t know what let up should be.
Certain levels stretch on for an absolute eternity, with multiple well-conceived but ultimately pointless boss encounters with too much health that they force you to fight multiple times in a row.
Story Setup and Narrative Shortcomings
Here’s the thing about “Lost Soul Aside.” The game isn’t short, but it somehow manages to feel rushed anyway. Part of that comes down to the story, which at first seems to be interesting, establishing a sort of “Final Fantasy VII”-inspired dynamic where you’re plucky rebels taking on a Magitek empire, but all that quickly gets pushed into the background for a basic treasure hunt where you collect five crystal doodads to save your sister and the world. (groans) Never heard that one before.
Visuals, Music, and Presentation
The music, I will say, is especially “Final Fantasy”-inspired and easily one of the best parts of the game. It’s fantastic; it feels pulled right out of the “Final Fantasy VII Remake” in a good way. And like I said, I do think the initial setup is intriguing, but the game does not make a very good first impression. You immediately start with a walk-and-talk where they don’t lock down your movement or adjust speed of things to make it feel natural. You’re just walking either a little too slow to keep up, or you’re sprinting ahead way too fast with nothing in between, and it’s weird.
The first combat encounters feel a little lifeless and awkward. You’ve got some flashy moves, but the controls are not as tight as, well, a game that is similar but developed by a more experienced team, which is actually kind of crazy to say ’cause the team has at least 11 years of experience working on this damn thing. When you finally meet Lord Arena, the game’s answer to Grimoire Noir from “NieR,” because he’s essentially the same character except swap a book for a dragon, that’s when things get a little more interesting, and the game does start clicking, but it takes a while for that to set in.
For the first few hours, I was wondering what exactly this game was directly. Is there more to this? And yes, there is, but not necessarily as much as I’d like or probably a lot of people would like. There’s sort of a hub area. Between missions, you return to the docks, where the game starts, that acts as a hub area. Pretty bare-bones, though; kind of feels like filler. There’s no side quests. All you can really do is run around, rub up against the game’s many invisible walls, and awkwardly collect items that are mostly useless.
Weapon Variety and Customization
The game’s one sort of innovative idea feels kind of pointless. There’s a system where you can apply various upgrades to your weapons in the form of weapon accessories, which actually physically appear on your weapon, and you can customize where they go. These things pretty much always look awkward, and that’s when they don’t just look flat-out dumb. You can have the accessories float in the air around the weapon, or make them too big or tiny, or overlap with each other. It always looks awkward, but it barely matters ’cause you never see the stuff anyway with the zoomed-out camera and the frantic gameplay.
The rest of the character-building stuff is pretty standard, but I do like how they slowly unlock an arsenal of weapons. You get multiple weapons to play around with that all have unique gimmicks and abilities associated with them, and to their credit, each weapon does feel unique to use. It’s not one of those games where all the weapons are essentially the same with few modifiers. The sword feels entirely different from the Greatsword, which is nothing like the Poleblade. You can swap weapons at absolutely any time, and when you put everything together, you can string together some truly ridiculous combos, which you will have to do because at a certain point, everything you’re fighting takes an obscene amount of punishment to bring down.
Boss Encounters and Combat Fatigue
By the time you get past the prologue, the game’s throwing boss-level encounters at you practically nonstop. In certain missions, it feels like almost every other encounter is a boss fight, and while it’s normally a good thing for an action game, the more unique encounters, the better; it starts to get old in this one. They’re throwing one boss after another at you before you’ve even gotten your bearings. It feels less like an exciting series of encounters and more like the game designers just have no chill, like they’re trying to get all their shit in as quickly and early as possible, except the game is not short, and there is a lot of shit to get to. They could have spaced out all these fights to make them feel like they matter a bit, but by the end, you start to feel like they’re just all the game has.
Static Dialogue and Missed Story Potential
It flirts the idea of a story at the start, but by the time you’re headed out to collect the second magic crystal thing, basically all pretense of a narrative is out the window, and it’s just fight, fight, fight all the time. Which again, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s an action game, but it would be nice to have something to attach to. Like, okay, I love combat in action games, I love combat mechanics, but a large part of why you want to engage with those mechanics is you feel invested in the characters and the overall quest or narrative or development or whatever.
And outside of the flashy boss cutscenes, there’s really barely any cutscenes. Once in a while, you get a scene of some bad guys commiserating in their various evil lairs, but the vast majority of the story is told through completely static dialogue sequences where you and the person you’re talking to stand rock-still and exchange in text boxes, which is, I mean, fine in 1996, but even, like, retro games don’t do this anymore. It’s not engaging narrative presentation, and it slows the dialogue segments to a crawl. And that’s part of the problem here.
Pacing Problems and Genre Identity Crisis
“Lost Soul Aside” just cannot seem to pick a lane. It needs to be more of an RPG if it wants to jam story and this many characters into the thing, but it all is ultimately underutilized. But if it wants to be an action game, the pacing needs to be a little faster. The general flow of the combat needs to be tighter. Like, in some ways, it needs to slow down, and in some ways, it needs to speed up. This game is in an awkward middle ground that just kind of drags everything down.
Here’s the thing, though, it’s not a bad game. It is a flawed game, yes, but not a bad one. There’s a lot to like here for people looking for this kind of experience. It feels like a lost gem from the early 2010s, and if that’s when it came out, it probably would be considered an action game classic that was maybe a little rough around the edges, had its heart in the right place, and maybe would’ve gotten a re-evaluation and maybe a sequel that was a lot stronger. That’s happened more than a few times in the last few years.
Enemy encounters and boss design, it’s mostly really strong. The many, many boss fights feel pretty unique when the game isn’t making you fight the same guy again for the third time in a row. And when the game finally decides to open up once in a while, the levels are actually pretty fun to run around in and explore. Exploration is always limited, though, even in the rare area that’s designed to be more open. But when they give you something interesting to do or throw in a unique platforming challenge, it’s really just not all bad.
The game just falls back on tedious action game design cliches too much. Levels can drag on for what feels like an absolute eternity. Certain stages are these hour-plus slogs that the environment just doesn’t change much throughout the whole thing. It’s just one fight after another, and that’s the progress that you see. You don’t really have anything to look forward to at the end of these areas. Your treasure hunts for the crystals, they end with a trip to the sub-dimension, which is inevitably another hour-long level, except it’s just a bunch of polygons floating in an empty void. This may be underselling it a little, but these levels are the least visually interesting of the game.
They’re too long, and the main antagonist always pops up in these things like a “Power Rangers” villain to ineffectively taunt you before getting chased off to the next sub-dimension. This rigid adherence to formula makes an already tedious game feel slower. It’s supposed to be exciting when you get one of the plot coupons, but instead, you’re kind of left with dread, like, “Oh, I gotta get three more of these. Yay.” That’s not what should be going through your head when you’re playing a fun video game.
But the stiff combat and the massive health bars just wear you down after a while. I’ve played a lot of other games with bosses that have huge, probably too-long health bars, and was fine with it. The problem with “Lost Soul Aside” isn’t that bosses have a ton of health and that there’s so many of them, it’s just that the combat never manages to feel quite as good as it should. Inputs feel jerky and stiff a lot of the time. Dodging and blocking, they’re kind of mushy and sometimes inconsistent.
The game does basically nothing to tell you when you’re about to die, which leads to most of your deaths, ’cause you just won’t notice that you’re in the danger zone, ’cause there’s no onscreen notification that you’re close to death, which is frankly common in these fast-paced action games. The game has one thing going for it, and that’s the combat, but unfortunately, the combat doesn’t feel as good as it should. It’s not bad, but the polish isn’t there. And for a game that was in development for 11 years, that’s a problem.
Visual Inconsistencies and Lack of Polish
And it’s a problem that you could extend to pretty much any other aspect of the game. It’s lacking in polish in a lot of key areas that all come together to make it look amateurish in places. Some locations look absolutely incredible, but others look really drab and lacking in detail. Like the docks area, the central hub in the game that you go back to all the time, is inexplicably one of the ugliest parts in the game, and you easily see it more than any other place in the game.
Simple stuff like collecting resources from plants feels wrong because you have to swing your sword to cut plants to get their resources, but when you do that, nothing happens. The plant just disappears awkwardly, and you get a resource pop-up. There’s no animation of any kind; it just awkwardly disappears. The same thing happens to characters who teleport around. It’s almost like certain effects are just missing from my build of the game or something.
Even something as basic as a save point has polish issues. So you talk to this character to save, but for some reason it first zooms in to initiate dialogue, and then you have to select whether you want to enter the save menu. Then it zooms out and zooms back in again before actually showing you the menu. I do not understand what’s going on here. It’s just an extra step for what seems like absolutely no reason. Weirdness like that is all over. It’s not, like, terrible, but it’s the sort of thing more experienced developers avoid. Which, I’d say that none of them are really a big deal on their own, but they bring in a lot of unnecessary friction that takes you out of the game in a way that’s hard to come back from.
Bugs, Crashes, and Technical Friction
The game is also buggy, at least on PC, which is where I played it. I experienced a few crashes, some enemies just stopped moving altogether, there’s a lot of awkward jumping physics, and at least a certain amount of stuttering when you enter a loading zone between areas. One time, an enemy just froze and didn’t do anything.
It was mostly tolerable outside of the crashes, which are also quite annoying because the game is fairly unforgiving with its checkpoints. Not all the time, but enough of the time. Like, it doesn’t save mid-boss, no matter how long and drawn out they are, and you don’t get any checkpoints during the set-piece moments either. So if you miss a jump, you just have to redo the whole thing all over again. Once again, more stuff that an experienced developer does a little different.
Combat Depth vs. Execution
I do feel like I’m ragging on the game, but believe it or not, it’s because I think there’s a lot to like. Once you get the flow of the combat, it’s easier to overlook the jank factor, and some of the boss encounters are just suitably; they’re very epic. There’s a whole lot of them, too. So if you love a good “Devil May Cry”/”Bayonetta”-style boss encounter, wow, are there a lot to chew on here. And there is depth in the combat system, too.
The problem is that the combat’s really all the game has going for it, and because of that, it should be better. And also, this game is exhausting ’cause it just drags on for so long. It goes on with these overly long stages. They try to break things up with new gimmicks, platforming, random light puzzle elements, but it’s all so slight that it just barely registers. The only thing that really matters in this game is the combat, and it’s just not quite good enough to prop everything else up.
Final Thoughts and Recommendation
So, would I recommend “Lost Soul Aside?” I think for a certain breed of action fan, there is a lot to like here. As long as you can get past some of the more shaky elements, and you aren’t afraid of a real slog every once in a while, there are some legitimately cool locations, the enemy variety is excellent, and there’s some actually really great bosses here. It’s a game that looks really great in a trailer and probably looks pretty decent when you watch it, but when you play it, you’re gonna notice something feels off.
It’s really up to you whether you’ll be able to adjust to the jank factor or not. For me, there are plenty of games I’ve enjoyed that have a slightly rough combat system, and I still really enjoyed them ’cause of excellence in other areas of the game. But with “Lost Soul Aside,” it’s the fighting that carries it, and it’s, again, I wanna say it has depth, it feels good, but it doesn’t feel good enough. The story is not interesting enough to make up for that. The exploration is dull and very limited. The environmental design is often way too big, way too spaced out. It’s like tedious travel, even though it’s mostly a straight line.
Like, it’s the fighting that they’re relying on here to carry the game, and it’s just not quite there yet. Especially around the midway point, where the game just starts going nuts with bosses who are invulnerable until you break their stagger gauge. It’s not like this game doesn’t feel tedious and drawn out enough; now you can’t even hurt these bosses, who already have massive health bars, and they somehow find a way to make it worse when enemies have both invulnerability shields and can fully heal themselves. ‘Cause that’s super fun.
If they’d cut out the bloat, tightened the gameplay, and gotten rid of the tedium, maybe cut the bosses’ HP in half, we’d maybe have an all-time classic action game here. And to be honest, like, they could still do that. There’s nothing stopping them. But as it is now, it’s too flawed to give a full-throated recommendation. It’s not terrible. There is impressive and fun stuff here. It does show real potential, too. But yeah, man, is there a lot of tedium.
Outro
That’s all I’ve got to say here, though. What do you think? Leave a comment, let us know. And as always, we thank you very much for reading this blog. I’m Zaid. We’ll see you next time, right here on Aura Riot.
