Lost Soul Aside review: "We (don't) have Final Fantasy Versus 13 at home"

The very first thing Lost Soul Aside tells me, before I even start the game, is to "Press R2 at the right moment to perform a Burst Pursuit and deal additional damage to enemies". Hell, yes. I'm a big fan of character action games, and though at this point I don't understand what any of that means, I appreciate the upfront dedication to the love of the game – twitchy combos above all else. While Lost Soul Aside struggles to put its best foot forward, once you get your hands on a wide range of weapons and moves it becomes fun to hack and slash through. But it takes too long to get there.

It means I can almost forgive when wonky, awkwardly animated cutscenes can make it "unintentionally one of the funniest games of the year", such as when an evil imperial guard punts a child through a wooden crate in its opening moments. The problem comes from a clash when its presentation, aping the Final Fantasy style from its visuals to its narrative set-up, get in the way of its best combat moments – spending far too long forcing you to slog through an incredibly slow opening before trusting you with its tools… which it then locks behind massive skill trees.

While I do think Lost Soul Aside does get good – if not great – it's one of those unfortunate situations where it really does take several hours to get there, which butts heads with the usual immediacy of character action. Games like the sublime Ninja Gaiden 2 Black have you stuck in within minutes performing dazzling combos (if you don't get chopped to bits yourself first, of course). Whether Devil May Cry 5 or Metal Gear Rising, they start out feeling excellent to play and build from there. Lost Soul Aside, instead, feels like a trek before it even gets close to that starting point for the others, many hours in.

Leather soul

Kaser might rock an incredible black leather pants and jacket combo with a wonderful deep black ponytail, and be a dab hand at bonking imperials on the head as part of the Final Fantasy 7 remake Avalanche-like resistance group Glimmer – but otherwise he's just a guy. While some in this world are Gifted, utilizing super powers from an energy metered out by those with access to sources of it, that's not for Kaser. Until, that is, an act of resistance during a parade goes wrong, his sister's soul is stolen by invading Voidrax monsters, and Kaser's soul becomes entwined with that of an ancient dragon, Lord Arena.

Depowered from years of imprisonment, the abilities the wonderfully grumpy, sassy, deep-voiced Lord Arena can bestow as he floats around Kaser are limited at first – but being able to transform into a sword and allow Kaser to zip between enemies is still quite the power up.

Within those afterimages, you can clearly see the games that have inspired Lost Soul Aside across its lengthy game development – eventually catching Sony's eye and becoming part of its China Hero Project.

Obviously taking cues Final Fantasy Versus 13, the project that would be rebooted to become Final Fantasy 15, ideas from those early trailers are recognizable here in Lost Soul Aside with its story of empire and combat that focuses on flashy, ethereal weaponry summoned by the main character (which remained FF 15's Noctis' primary power). The execution of its narrative early on seems to take some cues from Final Fantasy 7 as well, with its resistance. Aesthetically Lost Soul Aside does a good job of emulating the look of modern Final Fantasy – at least in stills, as cutscene animation is otherwise pretty jerky outside of a handful of more action heavy sequences. It feels like some parts of Lost Soul Aside had a lot more time to develop than others.

In play and its structure, however, Lost Soul Aside is much closer to something like Devil May Cry. Kaser ventures out to different lands in order to collect soul crystal fragments, fighting through distinct levels and engaging in wave after wave of combat.

Yet the pacing is pretty uneven. Early on, as Kaser works his way through to the parade before encountering Lord Arena, it's slow and boring with simplistic combat. Then, the first part of chapter one is, for some reason, essentially four fairly basic boss fights back to back, at first making me concerned it'd be a boss rush closer to Black Myth Wukong than a game about styling on groups of foes – though this is quickly dialled back. It's not helped that throughout these fights you only have the sword and a handful of moves for it, meaning these boss fights feel especially dull.

Burst of energy

Lost Soul Aside begins to open up once you get the greatsword, a slow and hefty close-range-decimator to complement the nippier sword. With four weapons eventually available, you can swap between all of them on the fly mid-combo. Each manages to carve out a niche, feeling like essential bits of kit once you have access to them.

Mixing together light and heavy attacks, there's not a lot of combo strings themselves, but each weapon has quite a few moves to swap between situationally. You might throw out a spinning scythe to lock an enemy down as your stamina drains, then dodge to the side to activate your final spear-throw combo early, tapping out a burst combo to add a wider gust of air before closing the gap with the sword, then pummeling them with the greatsword before flipping them into the air, from where the scythe can be recalled for further hits.

When your moves flow one into another, Lost Soul Aside can feel really good. I love the aforementioned burst moves, which are activated with a squeeze of the trigger when Kaser glows blue partway through a combo, delivering an extra special move like you're plonking a sparkler candle on the icing of a combo birthday cake. It's a bit annoying that almost all of these need to be unlocked individually, like many moves in Lost Soul Aside – especially considering they're pretty vital. Whether it's throwing out a spiritual twirling sword or causing lava to gush forth from the ground, they're the key way to deal damage to enemies that can otherwise become quite spongy.

Adding to sponginess is the way most enemies don't feel like they react to much that you're doing. There's little sense of impact to blows, meaning you can feel like you're hitting sandbags most of the time. It doesn't help that the camera is zoomed quite far out making me feel pretty removed from the action, perhaps in order to compensate for the extremely particle heavy effects that means I still sometimes lose Kaser in the action. Perfect dodging is pretty overpowered, meaning Kaser is constantly disappearing and reappearing around clusters of enemies.

It's all part of a lack of connective tissue in Lost Soul Aside. Fill enemy's stun meters, and they'll be open to finisher moves but, oddly, Kaser will just activate a prescriptive combo chain right where he's stood, disconnected from the enemy in question – which means you can whiff but also reposition him to do a finisher on non-stunned enemies which just feels weird. Enemies will often just sort of drift around Kaser too, waiting to be pummelled. Combo chains can work well, but at times the gaps between each chain can be a bit awkward, leaving me fumbling to actually start my next intended chain of moves as Kaser just kind of stands there, occasionally dropping air combos altogether. There's a constant sense that something is missing.

Even so, Lost Soul Aside is a long game – filling plenty of time with cursory puzzles and an unwise amount of platforming challenges considering jumping around feels extremely stiff. After a certain point, groups of enemies you fight begin to blend together without a lot of variation in how each encounter feels.

Similarly, bosses feel like they get less interesting, many able to be felled with quite similar tactics. To counteract this, a lot of them end up having lengthy sections where they become immune to damage meaning you spend a lot of time sprinting in circles just waiting until you can bring the hits.

With the encounter designs making getting through the final hours a little dull, and a narrative that feels incredibly stiff (perhaps a localization issue – a lot of lines repeat things and feel like characters are talking past each other), it becomes almost as hard to power through to the finish as was to get through the tiresome opening hours. It's a shame as Lost Soul Aside's flashy weapons and skills, once you unlock them, do show promise – but they're stuck within a game that can't make the most of them. Not very SSStylish.

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