Lost Soul Aside Review – Fantasy Faceplant

Lost Soul Aside Review

If you’re a fan of action RPGs, you know that you’ve been living in a golden age. Elden Ring, Black Myth Wukong, Lies of P, Stellar Blade, The First Berserker: Khazan, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, the hits just keep on coming, almost all from Japanese, South Korean or Chinese developers. Next in line: Lost Soul Aside. I wanted to take the game aside and say, “don’t screw it up.” Alas, I never had the chance.

Lost Soul Aside has been in development since 2014, when solo creator Yang Bing envisioned something akin to an homage to the Final Fantasy franchise. In 2016, Sony officially threw its support behind it through its China Hero Project initiative. Since then, a small development team has been pushing the game closer to release. Although it’s no longer a solo project, Yang Bing’s Ultizero Games studio is still a small, indie-size developer working on a very ambitious project. 

Imitation Isn’t Always Flattery

Lost Soul Aside is an action-RPG very much in the wheelhouse of games like Devil May Cry and Final Fantasy. Despite the title, it isn’t a Soulslike, though it does lean heavily into perfect dodges and perfect parries. The majority of time, combat consists of using flashy combo strings and special attacks. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Action RPGs are almost always power fantasies. Your character – and by extension, you – should eventually feel like a badass. Struggle, initial failure and increasing mastery leading to triumph is the template. Developers need to nail those mechanics, but also put them in the context of a story and world in which they matter. If one or the other is absent, the experience falls flat.

By this metric, Lost Souls Aside takes an immediate, embarrassing and painful faceplant. Starting with the very first walk-and-talk snippet of the story, several things are clear. First, character movement is awkward, unrefined and just plain weird. Second, the writing and voice acting in English are atrocious, easily the worst I’ve heard in a game this year. They’re so bad that, only a few hours into release, internet memes featuring especially painful snippets were already in circulation. Changing to Japanese or Chinese doesn’t solve the terrible writing, only the cringe-worthy acting.

Not an Embarrassment of Riches…Just Embarrassing

The game’s narrative is cobbled together from fantasy RPG cliches. You play as the most bland central character in recent memory, Kasar. He and his little sister Louisa and several other NPCs are members of GLIMMER, a resistance movement fighting against the ruling authoritarian regime. At the same moment, mysterious interdimensional monsters called Voidrax are invading the world and capture Louisa’s soul. Kasar’s journey is first to rescue Louisa. Though honestly, she’s so annoyingly written it would have been a more satisfying choice to leave her to the monsters. 

Kasar has one of those never-shuts-up allies in the form of a dragon named Arena. He was a fearsome Voidrax but is apparently on the “making amends” step of recovery. Arena takes the form of a dragon-like swirl of energy. He can both articulate repetitive battle commentary and transform into special attacks. Sometimes he sounds like Alan Tudyk’s character in Resident Alien, sometimes Scar in the Lion King.

So, to recap: terribly dull story, super annoying characters, painfully bad voice acting. Add to that sound design that is poorly mixed and completely buries the dialogue. Which, to be fair, might be a blessing.

A Glimmer of Light

If Lost Soul Aside was a meal you’d be tempted to send it back and boycott the restaurant for life. But what if there was something on the plate that partly redeemed the otherwise unpleasant taste?  In the case of Lost Soul Aside, it’s combat.

If you’ve played Devil May Cry or Platinum games like Bayonetta, you know what Lost Soul Aside is going for. Kasar uses strings of combos and flashy special attacks, some of which come courtesy of pairing with Arena. There are genuinely engaging moments of combat when Kasar’s moves are really flowing. He can be acrobatic and switching between weapons is seamless. Speaking of weapons, there is a pretty good arsenal to unlock and upgrade via special powers slotted into them. It’s clear that combat was Yang Bing’s vision, and everything was an afterthought. 

Lost Soul Aside bills itself as an action RPG, but the roleplaying elements are rudimentary. It’s really akin to a boss rush game, in the same structural wheelhouse as Black Myth Wukong. Boss follows boss, with very short sections of exploration, awkward puzzle platforming or combat against groups of weaker enemies. Opportunities to save only come prior to a boss. So whatever you do, don’t just quit when it’s, you know, convenient for you.

Some of the bosses are fun or interesting, a few are annoying and some are just dull. They all have multiple health bars, but their second or third phases often don’t add anything new. The lack of down time, an engaging narrative or genuine exploration in between bosses eventually makes even the boss battles repetitive. Lost Souls Aside is entirely linear, and there are no side quests. That’s probably a good thing.

Then Darkness, Again

Visually, Lost Soul Aside has a few impressive moments balanced against some extremely bland stretches with little interest in texture or detail. A lot of the environments look stolen from other fantasy games from years past. What’s noticeable is that the world design – architecture, geography, iconography –  just defaults to generic fantasy. There’s no sense of a coherent vision. 

Here’s something positive, though: although it gets halfway buried in the mix, the game’s music is strong, usually much better than the game it serves. Though it, too, sometimes becomes repetitive and there are virtually no transitions.

Despite 11 years in development, the game has an unpolished feel. Movement – especially platforming – never feels dialed in. Outside of combat, animations are rough and amateurish. On PS5, there were pop-in issues and framerate stutters pretty consistently in performance mode, though no outright crashes. Sadly, Lost Soul Aside comes with a $60 price tag, making its flaws that much harder to overlook. 

I don’t enjoy dunking on bad games. Games are hard to make, and harder to make well.  While acknowledging the 11-year-long commitment that finally brought the game to release, there are simply too many serious problems to ignore. Lost Soul Aside’s sometimes excellent action is undercut by flat characters, cliche story, terrible writing and rough mechanics. 

***PS5 code provided by the publisher for review***