Lost Soul Aside Review
"The Rule of Cool" — a term often associated with tabletop RPGs — is the idea that if something is really cool, you just let it happen. To hell with consequences or what the rulebook says. Lost Soul Aside, a highly anticipated game from the China Hero Project initiative, feels like it tries to apply that rule everywhere and dial it up to MAX COOL. Unfortunately, the result feels like a disjointed and over-stimulating collection of RPG tropes, homages, repetitive combat, and moments that feel as though they were added after a discussion that started with “wouldn’t it be cool if…”.
In Lost Soul Aside, you play as Kaser (rhymes with laser or blazer). After discovering an ancient, powerful dragon creature named Arena in a hidden lab, you are thrust into a quest to collect some crystal fragments, save your sister’s soul, and prevent the return of a big bad evil guy, Aramon, who was sealed away thousands of years ago. Throughout the 13 or so hours of game, you will encounter various supporting cast, such as Selene, head of the GLIMMER resistance group trying to take down the evil empire, Seleria who fought alongside Arena against Aramon, and a handful of others that the game wants you to care about, but then doesn’t really give you enough time with any of them to do so.
Even from the very get-go of LSA, I felt like I was dropped into a game at about the four-hour mark, that I was missing much of the setup and real introduction to the characters and the world that I was trying to save. The main character was returning to the capital, from where I couldn’t tell you, and judging by the responses of some NPCs, this was a big deal. This feeling of disconnect never really went away, with many moments feeling unearned, or that didn’t make much sense in the context of the moment. Why did this evil general magically know my character's name, or me his? Why is this guy suddenly helping me when the last time I saw him, he was trying to kill me? Why should I care about this character's sacrifice when I’ve only interacted with them once before?
Lost Soul Aside really wants you to care about certain moments, but does very little setup to make anything feel impactful or earned. Even your main character's sister, with her soul getting sucked out, I never felt much attachment to, because I had only spent maybe 45 minutes with her at that point. Most of that 4 minutes was her just awkwardly calling me "brother". It felt like the game was missing these large chunks of story or setup to make me care about these characters, and instead, I was just going through the cliffnotes of the big story beats.
Out of all the aspects of LSA, I enjoyed its combat the most, with its four different weapons, each with its own skill trees, and the part of the title that feels the most refined.
Swapping weapons is done with a button press that slows time to a crawl, and a flick of the joystick will swap the weapon Kaser is using. It works well enough, but I never found it to be a smooth enough process to really incorporate swapping weapons during my combos. The special Arena abilities - powerful moves that you can bust out when their bars fill - can’t be utilized in combos at all. The Burst attacks, strong follow-up attacks can be used directly following different attacks, but the indicator for these attacks is a slight blue glow around Kaser, which unfortunately easily gets lost with all of the other particles and effects going on. Normally, I would just avoid these altogether or just mash the R2 button, and sometimes something would trigger.
For fans who love to dive deep into learning, there is enough here to play around with and have a good time, but I feel like with a couple of subtle tweaks, it could have been something special. If there were combos that seamlessly shifted the weapon you were using, or even if just a flick of the joystick would swap in real time, and making the visual indicator for burst attacks more noticeable would help make the combat stand out even more. That said, I don’t know if even those improvements could have saved it from the repetitive enemies or bosses that just soak up the damage and quickly get old during the playthrough.
Each level follows the same general formula - learn about where you need to go by speaking to someone in the Empire “hub” city and then take a boat there, play through said location to find the entrance to the Alternate Dimension, play through the Alternate Dimension to get a soul crystal fragment, and repeat. The main levels you visit all have distinct looks, from an icy kingdom, green fields, and a Chinese-inspired hidden village of warrior monks, and it all looks pretty great. The Alternate Dimensions themselves also look pretty neat, but unfortunately, those all look fairly similar to one another with a spacy Tron-esque vibe, with the only real differentiation being the color palette.
Despite taking place in visually interesting locations, my time actually spent in these places was repetitive and dull affairs that saw me running from one small arena of enemies to kill to the next, with the occasional mini-boss thrown in. After a fight, you have maybe 45 seconds before you stumble into another area that forces you to fight the same sorts of enemies, again and again, for the duration of the levels, which can last upwards of an hour or longer to complete, and you aren’t able to escape. There is the odd occasion where a brief platforming section drops in, giving you an extra minute before the next encounter, but even for as much as I may have enjoyed the combat, I grew tired of it by the end.
As I touched on moments ago, aside from the odd graphical or lightning issues I encountered, LSA has a rock-solid aesthetic going for it. The Voidrax creatures are fearsome and could have easily been pulled from a Final Fantasy, the environments do a great job invoking that fantastical vibe, and Kaser, along with Arena, look pretty badass. This is a game that doesn’t try to hide where it gets its inspiration from, with Kaser cutting buildings in half like Cloud Strife, summoning his blade like Sora, and dropping through the Alternate Dimensions made me feel like I was playing Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance again. At all times, I felt like LSA was cranked up to eleven, doing things that really made no sense in the context of what was happening, and was simply done because it would be neat.
Cutscenes are bombastic and fast-paced, so much so that sometimes I lost track of what was actually happening. Just fast camera moves, particle effects, and Kaser flying around. It was a bit of a bummer, too, that things would happen in the cutscenes that you couldn't perform during actual gameplay, creating a bit of a disconnect. It all ran smoothly on my launch PS5, at least.
Then, there were other things that Kaser would do that baffled me a bit. One little thing that immediately comes to mind is how Kaser launches to far-off platforms. After jumping through a launch point, Kaser will sprout Arena’s wings for a few seconds, before the wings turn into a floor that Kaser runs on as if he does a loop-de-loop, before the floor becomes a self-propelled surfboard moments later, before returning to the dragon wings. It was neat, sure, but why? It just seemed random, and I think had it been a cool little secret to discover instead, where you press a button and Arena changes.
While the designs, aesthetic, and performance were generally solid, teetering into impressive, I still encountered game crashes, untranslated & broken shops, and characters that looked like they were being lit differently compared to the environment around them (along with some lighting straight up not working altogether). When I see the PlayStation Studios logo, I expect a certain amount of polish that I didn’t find with Lost Soul Aside. Things like abrupt cuts to black between scenes and audio cutting out were commonplace, and there were scenes where the voice-over simply didn’t play that felt messy; something you wouldn’t expect to find in a game that has (at least to some extent) been in development for so long.
Lost Soul Aside wore on me pretty quickly, with its repetitive arena-to-arena flow, characters I never spent enough time to care about or what happened to them, and unpolished issues and quirks. Except for the aesthetics and decent combat (which had their own drawbacks), I can’t really point to a part of LSA that I can say I genuinely had a good time with. While I wasn’t someone that has been eagerly waiting with bated breath for the game, I still was hopeful and intrigued by what the final game would turn out like after being worked on for so long, and it's disappointing how much it fell flat for me. Sometimes being cool just doesn’t cut it.