Oh boy, where to begin with this. Ok well, I think probably the best thing to do is not to bury the lede – so I’ll just say this to kick things off, Lost Soul Aside is hands down one of the most eye-rollingly uninspired and technically messy games I’ve played in years. And I do feel somewhat bad stating that too, not least because the combat is actually really quite enjoyable, the boss fights are epic and, well, Lost Soul Aside began life with just a single dude developing the whole thing by himself until Sony stepped in as part of the Sony Hero China Project. So sizable props are certainly due for that, at least.
Anyway, the origins of Lost Soul Aside, I think it’s also important to clearly describe what Lost Soul Aside is, as well as what it isn’t. From the top then, Lost Soul Aside arguably has much more in common with something like Capcom’s Devil May Cry – even though it’s clear that developer Ultizero Games brazenly wears its love for Square Enix’s marquee Final Fantasy RPG series on its digital sleeve.
Lost Soul Aside PS5 Review
Enjoyable Combat Isn’t Enough To Save This Uninspired Technical Mess
What you end up with ultimately is that the main character, a slender, darkly overdressed lad by the name of Kaser, looks 110% like he is an honorary member of the Noctis Final Fantasy Emo Club and even boasts many of the signature abilities of Final Fantasy XV’s front man too, including rapid-fire, sword based melee attacks and the ability to teleport around the battlefield.
In terms of its plot and setting, Lost Soul Aside is very ho-hum and hackneyed to say the least. With a nefarious holy empire encroaching across the world just as a mysterious interdimensional force known as the Voidrax appears and snatches the soul of Kaser’s sister Louisa, everything is set in motion for a world-saving tale of vengeance that I feel like I have seen a hundred times before. One aspect of the narrative which does feel at least somewhat interesting, is Arena, a god-like being that sticks to Kaser like a Venom-style parasitic limpet and in addition to talking smack to him throughout the game, also allows Kaser to leverage his powers to embolden his combat prowess and evolve his physical form.
There are two aspects that really undercut the story of Lost Soul Aside though. The first is that the exposition is clumsier than Andre the Giant drinking 30 pints and trying to walk a tightrope. This is thanks to a mind-numbing over-reliance on notes and documents that just so happen to be strewn around these magical looking worlds and enough monologues to destroy a small island made of granite. Put simply, I couldn’t care less about the lore of this world because the way it was fed to me made me want to run into the nearest wall, repeatedly, out of sheer boredom.
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The other aspect which kicks the story of Lost Soul Aside squarely in the crown jewels is the terribly stunted dialogue and often equally terrible voice acting performances that go along with it. In fact, the English language voice acting is *so* bad that the still-not-great-but-tolerable Japanese voice acting track is the only way to go. Though I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the character models are fully lip-synced to whichever language dub you choose, which is a nice technical touch, albeit one nowhere near significant enough to address those aforementioned two really rather major flaws.
Of course, the upshot of all this is that I ended up not really being invested in the various folks or their plights because in addition to being the sort of cookie-cutter genre plot I have seen variations of for years, the whole thing is executed entirely without verve – and that’s a shame because from a presentation standpoint, Lost Soul Aside is capable of impressing from time to time.
Nowhere does Lost Soul Aside impress more from an audiovisual standpoint than with its soundtrack. A thrumming mix of orchestral and heavy metal beats that deftly oscillate according to the on-screen action, the soundtrack of Lost Soul Aside at once echoes the frenetic likes of Devil May Cry, all the while bringing the grander, more epic beats of Final Fantasy VII Remake to the fore and there’s even more than a dash of Studio Ghibli infused influences in here too, with Lost Soul Aside’s quieter moments being gently underscored by the sort of delicate orchestral arrangement one might associate with Princess Mononoke.
Visually speaking, Lost Soul Aside can impress, albeit not consistently so. While the environments look detailed enough – especially in reflection heavy areas, the character models look somewhat retrograde and could plausibly have been plucked out of a mid-gen PS4 title, rather than seeming as if it belongs to the visual makeup of the games belonging to the current generation of PlayStation hardware.
By far the strongest aspect of Lost Soul Aside’s visual make up however, are the epic boss fights which never seem to lack in sweep or scope. Indeed, the boss fight choreography in the various real-time cutscenes are often extravagant displays of very much over the top, high-octane athletic conflict which did a good job of reminding me of the hyperkinetic action seen in many of the cutscenes in Devil May Cry 5.
Exploration-wise, Lost Soul Aside is very much a linear affair and there’s nothing at all wrong with that – especially in this era of bloat-afflicted open world experiences. Though there are some larger areas later on in the game which permit some free-spirited wandering, otherwise you’re mostly going straight from point A to point B with precious little dawdling in-between. Oh and don’t be thinking about any side quests because, well, Lost Soul Aside doesn’t really have those either outside of specific fighting and timed traversal challenges. There are also many telltale signs that Lost Soul Aside very much belongs to a much earlier era of PlayStation gaming, with these pretty but ultimately empty environments which barely react to the player and in which invisible walls abound throughout, effectively hemming you yet further into an already constrained game world.
Speaking of traversal, Lost Soul Aside has players doing a rather substantial amount of platforming and while that normally wouldn’t be a problem, controlling Kaser evokes a markedly floaty feeling which makes the various jumps and double jumps feel a little more imprecise than they should. Further into the game though, this becomes a larger issue when Lost Soul Aside starts forcing mandatory timed platforming challenges down your throat and it’s here that sometimes clumsy platforming can really become quite frustrating in short order.
Where Lost Soul Aside fares much better though is the combat, which is certainly one of the best things about the whole package. Clearly exhibiting an obvious kinship to Capcom’s Devil May Cry, combat in Lost Soul Aside is fast, frenetic and compelling for the most part, with our protagonist able to string together a range of melee combos, juggles and more in line with the sort of thing you would expect Dante or Nero to pull off in Capcom’s demon busting series. Spicing up this whole arrangement, Kaser can also perform perfect dodges and blocks (though such actions are tied to a stamina bar), with the former allowing him to zip straight back with an instantaneous strong attack and the latter absorbing damage and stunning the enemy for a brief moment.
Bolstering the combat further, is Arena himself, who can not only augment Kaser’s attacks with his own, but can also provide scalable elemental attacks based on the bosses that Kaser has bested previously. Throw in additional weapons and a stagger system for stronger enemies and bosses and all in all I really enjoyed the combat in Lost Soul Aside and in motion it’s supremely easy on the eyes, it’s just a shame that Ultizero Games debut effort falls short in so many other areas.
Sadly, I also have to report that Lost Soul Aside suffers from a number of frustrating and annoyingly poor design decisions too. For a start, the save system needs a heap of work, as it is tied to saving at a specific NPC at all times – which means that when you beat a boss, you don’t get an auto save and if you want to stop straight after (as many folks might want to do), you’ll continue your game from the last NPC you saved at (which just so happens to be a 1000 year old cosmic being inside the body of a 13 year old girl, but hey ho).
A much more egregious transgression however from a design perspective is how the upgrade system is handled. Basically, you need to speak to a very specific NPC early on, otherwise the entire skill-based upgrade will not unlock rather than, you know, such a key progression system being made available automatically. You read that right. This happened to me on my initial playthrough and because of it, I was getting absolutely rag-dolled by many of Lost Soul Aside’s stronger enemies (though a handily scalable amulet is provided should you die too often, which softened the blow somewhat, but still). It’s crazy to me that this could even happen and yet, here we are. Really, really, really not great at all – as others have also evidently found out, much to their own chagrin.
There’s no getting around the fact that Lost Soul Aside feels like it belongs in the mid 2010s and honestly that would be fine were it not the fact that the game feels so compromised in so many other aspects of its design that it’s difficult to shake the feeling that it just feels outdated, rather than a heartfelt love letter to the past. Though the soundtrack is frequently excellent and the combat reliably exciting, neither are enough to save Lost Soul Aside from tumbling into a deep abyss of rank mediocrity, which is a shame; especially considering the sheer amount of graft that has gone into the game since its inception all those years ago.
Lost Soul Aside is out now on PS4 and PS5.
Review code kindly provided by PR.