Lost Soul Aside

I want to like Lost Soul Aside more than the evidence lets me. Here is a game that spent over a decade gestating, started as a solo passion project by a single developer who caught Sony's eye, and arrived carrying the weight of everyone who watched those early footage clips and thought: finally, a Devil May Cry heir from an unexpected corner of the world. The combat, when it opens up past a slow prologue, is the real thing. Arena, your dragon companion, transforms mid-combo between four distinct weapon forms: the nimble One-Handed Sword for close-quarters pressure, the deliberate Greatsword for punishing slams, the ranged Poleblade for energy blasts and slash strikes, and the Scythe as the all-in-one, hardest-to-master choice. Chaining seamlessly between them without interrupting your combo string is genuinely satisfying, and the Burst Pursuit mechanic, which rewards timed button inputs mid-sequence for heavy follow-up hits, gives the system a layer of skill expression that keeps the ceiling high. There is no stamina bar draining your momentum either; the philosophy here is fluidity first, and the Fusion Gauge feeding into Arena-powered claw strikes adds one more resource to manage without ever feeling punishing. The skill tree is expansive, and weapon fragments collected across levels let you upgrade and tune each form independently, so the build variety does hold up across a full run. The problem is everything surrounding the combat. As an RPG specialist I care deeply about whether writing rewards a second look, and Lost Soul Aside does not. Protagonist Kaser is the genre-standard brooding young man in a long coat, guided by a dragon whose dialogue falls somewhere between endearing and grating depending on how forgiving your mood is. The Voidrax, the alien antagonists draining human souls, are a concept with potential that gets buried under lengthy, repetitive exposition monologues that feel like something lost in translation rather than intentional atmosphere. The central motivation, saving sister Louisa, is emotionally inert because the game never gives you enough time with her before the plot kicks into gear. Choices do not branch; the narrative is a corridor with spectacle painted on the walls. On PC specifically, launch reception was rough. Stutters in cutscenes, frame-rate hitches, and awkward menu performance were widespread complaints, though players with mid-to-high-end hardware reported smoother results after disabling ray tracing. A major free post-launch update in November 2025 added a 100-wave gauntlet mode, a prologue skip, and cutscene overhaul fixes, which meaningfully improved the experience for players returning after launch. The English voice acting remains a genuine liability; switching to Japanese or Chinese audio with subtitles is the near-universal community recommendation and, frankly, the right call. Boss fights are the high points: cinematic, large-scale, and designed with enough variety to justify the hours of corridor-fighting between them. Generic enemies in standard encounters are another matter entirely, functioning more as combo-practice dummies than actual threats. If you came up on PlatinumGames titles and are willing to trade narrative weight for a combat sandbox that actually rewards muscle memory, Lost Soul Aside has something real to offer once you push past the slow opening and lower your story expectations to the floor. If you want choices that matter, worldbuilding that breathes, or writing that rewards re-reads, go elsewhere. It is a sturdy action core wrapped in bargain-bin JRPG packaging, and the PC version still benefits from a patch check before you start.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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