Lost Soul Aside™

I went in wanting to love Lost Soul Aside the way you love a scrappy underdog - because that origin story is genuinely remarkable. Developer Yang Bing posted a solo-made gameplay teaser back in 2016, Sony eventually came knocking, and nearly ten years later a full studio shipped this thing to PC and PS5. The pedigree of the ambition is real. What landed, though, is a deeply uneven package that asks you to be patient in ways character action games should never have to. The combat is where Lost Soul Aside earns its keep, and I want to be specific about why it works when it clicks. Your companion Arena is a dragon who doubles as your entire arsenal, transforming into four distinct weapons - Greatsword, and several others - each with its own skill tree and distinct combo DNA. There is no leveling system in the traditional sense; instead, you earn skill points per weapon and spend them on new moves, with no respec available. That sounds restrictive, but it quietly pushes you to diversify. Swapping weapons mid-combo via a time-slow select screen is satisfying, air launches borrow liberally from the Kingdom Hearts and Devil May Cry playbooks, and the Perfect Block parry mechanic - telegraphed by a blue circle on enemies - adds a readable but rewarding rhythm layer. Arena Powers (equip three at a time, build them through combat) like Crystal Blast, Frost Blast, and Purgatory Dance weave into your combos for burst windows, and the Fusion bar lets Kaser go white-haired and temporarily catastrophic when fully charged. Burst Pursuit prompts are the flashy QTE seasoning on top. At its ceiling, the system genuinely approaches the complexity of its inspirations. Post-game challenge content and the Hard and Nightmare difficulty modes give combo enthusiasts a proper test after credits. Here is where my enthusiasm stalls. As an RPG specialist, I cannot pretend the writing earns a pass just because the swords are fun. Sister Louisa is sidelined within the first hour and serves almost entirely as motivation furniture for Kaser. The villain Aramon is stock evil. The hub town sections where you trudge slowly through NPC conversations to advance the plot are the game's lowest points - exactly the kind of filler quests I find indefensible in 2025. The cutscene direction is genuinely rough: cameras tilt erratically, audio drops mid-scene, and there are untranslated shop entries that slipped through localisation QA. The relationship between Kaser and Arena that develops through mid-combat dialogue is the one genuinely warm thread in the narrative - it does more storytelling work per line than most of the scripted scenes combined, which makes the missed potential sting harder. Reviewers across the board landed somewhere between cautious and disappointed on the story front, and based on what I played, that consensus is fair. Visually the game holds up better - environments are varied, character designs are strong, and performance on a modern PC rig is generally solid, though crashes have been reported and at launch the audio mixing needed manual intervention to stop dialogue from drowning under effects. Post-launch patches have tightened up invincibility frames on Kaser's roll, adjusted Greatsword responsiveness, rebalanced boss difficulty across all modes, and added cutscene skipping - so the version on sale now is meaningfully cleaner than day one. The roughly 18-hour campaign is aggressively linear, with side paths rewarding little beyond crafting materials and the odd trinket. If you are the kind of player who wants to replay chapters chasing higher combo grades, the absence of a style-meter system like DMC5's will frustrate. Replayability leans on difficulty escalation and the Dispersed Dimension post-game content rather than any structural variety. Lost Soul Aside sits in a peculiar spot. As a character action game with RPG dressing, its combat punches above expectations for a studio this young. As an RPG with character arcs and worldbuilding depth, it falls well short of what that Sony logo on the box implies. Fans of Ninja Gaiden Black-era spectacle or anyone who just wants 18 hours of escalating combo expression will find real value here. Narrative-first players, though, will find the story a cliffnotes sketch rather than a told tale, and the lack of any real choice architecture means this does not live in the same conversation as the RPGs I actually replay. Monika, Scout Team