Lost Soul Aside Digital Deluxe Edition

I went in expecting the RPG depth to match the spectacle, and Lost Soul Aside did not give me that. What it gave me instead was something narrower and more honest: a combat-first action game built by a solo developer who clearly grew up worshipping Devil May Cry and Final Fantasy XV, and spent nearly a decade teaching himself how to replicate that feeling. The result is messy, uneven, and occasionally brilliant in the ten-second window when everything clicks. The core hook is Arena, a dragon companion who doubles as Kaser's entire arsenal. Arena transforms into four distinct bladed weapons mid-combat: a heavy greatsword, a quick one-handed sword, a poleblade, and a scythe, and you can chain weapon swaps seamlessly without dropping your combo. The Combo Burst system rewards timed button presses during chains to spike your damage, and the Fusion Merge ability lets you crash through packed enemy groups in a single cinematic motion. Boss fights are the highlight, demanding that you break an enemy's stance before unloading your biggest combos, which gives the better encounters a satisfying push-pull rhythm. Optional stage challenges, a boss rush mode, and harder difficulty tiers give the combat loop a genuinely decent lifespan for players who want to drill deeper. Where Lost Soul Aside stumbles is almost everywhere outside those combat windows. The story follows Kaser on a mission to save his sister Louisa from dimensional invaders called the Voidrax, and on paper that has the bones of something I could care about. In practice, the writing is shallow, the character bonds feel thin, and the pacing between fights drags long enough to test patience. The English voice acting compounds the problem badly enough that switching to Japanese voices is the near-universal community fix. For a game with RPG in its genre tag, the RPG systems are surface-level: weapon accessories that nudge your stats by small percentages, a skill tree that unlocks abilities at a decent pace but rarely forces meaningful choices. If you're coming from Disco Elysium expecting branching dialogue or from BG3 expecting build depth, you will be disappointed. This is closer to a character-action game with light RPG scaffolding than a proper role-playing experience. PC performance is the other genuine problem at launch. Stuttering is reported widely, especially in cutscenes and during particle-heavy fights, and ray tracing in particular seems to cause hitching on a wide range of hardware. The game was built on Unreal Engine 4, and the optimization work does not yet match the visual ambition. Players with mid-range rigs are advised to drop ray tracing immediately and accept that some hitching may persist until further patches arrive. A free demo is available on Steam covering the opening and two boss fights, which is the smartest way to pressure-test your hardware before committing. For RPG fans like me who need narrative payoff to carry the non-combat stretches, Lost Soul Aside is a frustrating proposition at full price. For action game fans who eat combo routing for breakfast and can tolerate a melodramatic anime plot as background noise, the combat ceiling is real and the boss fights earn genuine respect. It is the product of one person's obsession scaled into a full release, and that origin story is visible in both its strengths and its seams.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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