17/11/2018

Lost Sphear Demo: Dreadful


I'm not gonna go all dramatic and cry that Square Enix have lost their touch, that their glory days are long gone and that they couldn't produce a good RPG these days even if they had the manual. Instead, I'm simply gonna say this: playing Lost Sphear fills me with a dread that I can hardly put into words. I usually enjoy playing even the most mediocre of RPGs, simply by sheer virtue of them being, well, RPGs; but not so with Lost Sphear. This is simply the dreariest, most depressing and disheartening RPG experience I've had in a long time maybe ever. Here's a list of the things that made me give up on Lost Spear's demo before it was even over and oust the game from my To-Get-My-Paws-On List for all eternity:


— The graphics are disgusting. I'm usually not too finnicky when it comes to that particular aspect of video games; but the combination of Lost Spear's cheap, plasticky phone(y) game art style and pukish, shitty colours really offends my retinas. (Don't trust the pictures here: the game looks much worse when you're actually playing it.) On top of that, the sprites are ridiculously tiny, especially on the word map. I have the sharpest eyesight and never had any problem with sprite size in any game, ever; and yet I have to squint to keep track of Lost Sphear's characters.


— The fighting system is horrendous. In a nutshell, it's Hyperdimension Neptunia's fighting system done wrong. HN reaped all the good points of all three main RPG fighting systems while neatly ousting their bad points; Lost Sphear, on the other end, racks up all the bad points of said three fighting systems and lets none of their good points in. Lost Sphear's (sorry excuse for a) battle system has the tension of real-time combat (you lose your turn if you don't spring into action quick enough), the slowness of turn-based combat (you still have to wait for your turn) and the fastidiousness of tactical combat (you have to position your character properly to land an attack). I swear, it's like Squeenix went out of their way to create the most cumbersome and tedious fighting system ever; this is not an homage to retro RPG by any stretch of the imagination, no matter what Lost Sphear's promotional blurb claims. I kid you not: this is the first time ever I found myself actively avoiding battles in an RPG after a mere ten minutes of play. 


— The level design is boring. Empty space is strong with this one, ooh yes indeed. Big empty corridors that could accommodate regiments of sprites, vast stretches of (waste)land filled with absolutely nothing: I feel like I'm playing an early 3D Playstation game here, not a retro-heavy JRPG crafted by the two former companies that single-handedly built up the genre.


— Last but not least, the pet peeves. The demo starts in medias res, with people throwing orders at me and my whole party lounging around lv.20; this gives me the unpleasant impression that I'm playing someone else's save file not to mention that this also probably means that you cannot import save data from the demo to the full game. Also, I hate the whole mecha gimmick. And I also hate all those dumb, outdated little hindrances such as the long animation for climbing ladders and the fact that you cannot climb said ladders with the mecha suit.


In a nutshell, I'm not buying Lost Sphear in a million years. Playing that demo was a lifeless, tedious and pitiful experience, and I honestly cannot fathom how Square Enix could go from the sheer retro brilliance of Bravely Default to the utter dullness of Lost Sphear. That's two Switch demos down, and I can only hope that the last two will prove better. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!

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