Lost Soul Aside

Steam Reviews

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• Recommended Posted November 10, 2025 on Steam It's a Chinese Devil May Cry game with a modern Final Fantasy art style. It is entirely linear and isn't particularly long unless you make it artificially hard. If you're into that then buy the game. If you're not, then don't. It generally works fine but it's not entirely free of bugs and crashes. I'm not sure why I get a prompt about PlayStation SDK every time I launch the game, seems like a pretty major oversight. But all in all I think the people that are whining had unrealistic expectations. Some of them were waiting 8 years since when Bing Yang first released a trailer, so they were expecting some 500 hour epic quest that is perfect in every way - story, characters, combat, environments, voice acting, art, perfect realism of physics, etc. That isn't what this is. If that's what you want, your wait for something like that continues. What this is is a Chinese Devil May Cry clone with modern Final Fantasy art style. If you can enjoy that, then by all means get it. If not, then don't! It could use some updates to deal with some of the most prominent bugs. But I think the whining and review bombing isn't warranted. People had insane expectations. Those of you complaining that it's too easy - take off Seleria's Keepsake and it's immediately harder. They give you that item after you die a few times, it is clearly an item intended to exist in place of a difficulty slider. If you want to keep the game challenging, just don't equip it. Personally, I think this is a "buy it on sale" title. Perfectly decent as a $30 or $40 game for you to burn some 30-ish hours on. Not something to break bank over though, at full price it's a bit much. Thank you for reading my pointless review.
• Not recommended Posted September 17, 2025 on Steam So what do you think about Lord Arenas power, huh? Lost soul aside if a video game I was heavily looking forward to. It is a game that I also cannot recommend in its current form, at the full asking price. I had a decent time playing this game and after completing it I have alot to cover so lets discuss pros and cons: Pros: Combat - This game has exceptional combat. It starts off slow due to only having 1 weapon type, but after you unlock the other 3 for a total of 4 weapons you can switch to on the fly, it really creates a badass, super fun experience that is satisfying to watch and perform. The perfect dodge, perfect block system is very rewarding and makes you want to perfect it all. Animations are solid from a combat perspective and really give you the DMC style flashy feel the game is aiming for. Weapon Customization - This game features an amazing weapon customization system, where you can add 6 fragment items to your weapon that will buff it with certain stats and then you can move, make bigger or make smaller, spin or reverse these items and plant them on your weapon anywhere you want to visually customize it to your liking. Its a great system that I would want to see more of if possible in the future from other games. Level Design - The areas in the game you explore are very nice to look at, super high fantasy, fun and overall beautiful. It gets crazier and crazier as time goes on. Boss Battles - This game is practically a boss rush game. Theres SO many boss battles in this game you will stay busy for a very very long time. The game even has a official boss rush mode at the end of the game, so thats a cool feature. Upgrade system - The upgrade system in this game is pretty good. It has a good selection of skills that allows you to really open up the different weapons and allow you to kick ass in your own way. If you are a DMC fan, this combat and system is for you. CONS: Graphics - This game looks like a ps4 game and runs like crap. Multiple graphical glitches, textures blurring out of nowhere, weird flashes on the screen, or the screen going black randomly. There are so much graphical bugs in the game and for a game that looks so old, I just dont see why. There are moments the game DOES look nice dont get me wrong, but holy hell this many problems? The water graphics in this game look like ps5 while everything else looks ps4. Difficulty - The game is easy as hell if you are even remotely good at games like this. I would recommend bumping difficulty to the max from the start if you are even decently experienced in games like this. Story - The games story is paced horribly, completely forgettable and downright laughable in the cringe department. Is has moments of interest, but it falls flat completely to the point where you just wanna skip and go right to the combat. Its unfortunate. NPC's dont shut the hell up - Your companion, Lord Arena, WONT SHUT UP. Theres no way currently to turn him off, or limit his speech. Constantly he is yelling at you during combat and out of combat. "What do you think of lord arenas power huh?" " Dont disappoint me kid!" Etc etc. It sucks. Save System - I hate the save system in this game. The npc is annoying, i dont want to have to hear her dialogue forcibly before i am able to save the game. It is annoying and dumb to make her the save system. Overpowered weapons - Once you unlock the 4th and final weapon, it's game over, you will use only that for the rest of the game and I dont feel like they wanted this when balancing the game. Its so easy its not even funny. Even before that, the 2nd weapon was overpowered too and carried. Useless Shop - The game features a shop that is for the most part, useless. I didnt buy anything from it. Literally nothing. Pointless for me. Why even have it? Voice Acting - The voice acting in this game is horrible. Truly horrible. You can switch to other dubs but still, holy hell this is bad. AI sounds better. Sound design - This is the worst one. Every single attack feels weightless, sound cuts out randomly in the game. Sound from far away, doesnt exist. There are moments you are fighting away from the camera and you hear NOTHING. There is no impact, no feel, NOTHING. I feel like i am attacking people with a plastic fork. I saw a dragon punch the hell out of another large creature ,with NO sound for it. Music randomly cuts off completely for no reason. WHO DID THE SOUND DESIGN?! Regardless, theres fun to be had here in Lost Soul Aside. I ONLY recommend this game at a minimum 50% sale, otherwise its just too much. Hopefully with fixes they will be able to come back strong but the core issues with the game cant be fixed with a patch since its the way they designed the game. 6/10 overall. I wish i could give this game a positive score, but theres just way too much cons sadly. Thanks for reading and if you want to watch my entire play through of this game you can find it on Hypnotic Gaming Live youtube channel.
• Recommended Posted August 29, 2025 on Steam Turn off ray tracing and put it in Japanese voices the English voice acting is horrendous and it becomes a much better experience, the combat doesn't open up until after the prologue so yes you need to play more then 45 mins, the skill tree is expansive and there's a bunch of different powers, I had some stuttering in the prologue cut-scenes but once I got out it's been running smooth the story is interesting, but one thing that bothers me is how snapshot the cut scenes to game play are, otherwise it's not bad at all and i'll keep playing.
• Not recommended Posted August 29, 2025 on Steam I'm only 3 hours in but I’m really torn on this game. On one hand, the visuals are top-notch and the combat is decent (a tier below Stellar Blade, imo). These were the two things that had been consistently teased and promised, and Yang Bing and his studio finally delivered on those aspects. Everything else is kind of a mess. Audio: The mixing is terrible, and the English voice acting is laughable — the Japanese VA is at least tolerable. Story & Characters: Bland and lifeless. Exposition is constantly shoved down your throat through monologues. The world looks beautiful, but the worldbuilding has been a big letdown so far. Movement: Outside of combat, movement feels floaty and awkward. The platforming puzzles aren’t hard because they’re clever, but because the controls feel so unpolished. Save System: Easily the worst design choice. You can only save at a designated NPC before bosses, but those saves are locked to that checkpoint. If you beat a boss, then save at that same NPC, closing and reloading the game makes you fight the boss again. To actually carry progress forward, you need to save at the next boss checkpoint. The game even knows you’ve already beaten the boss — cutscenes are suddenly skippable — yet it still forces you to redo the fight. Absolutely bonkers. Performance: I will say I haven't had any of the performance issues that some of these reviewers are claiming and have had a semi-consistent 240 fps (framegen at 2x) with Cinematic settings + RT (5090/7900X rig) in the actual gameplay. There are microstutters that break the immersion though and I've had huge framedrops/lag in the navigation menus. I hate doing anything in menus in this game because of how slow it is. If Steam had a “Neutral” option, that’s what I’d pick. The game delivered on visuals and combat, but everything else desperately needs polish. Hopefully future patches can address some of this.
• Not recommended Posted August 30, 2025 on Steam This game is baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad Take it from someone with 14 hours in the game and have fully beaten it. It gets a 3/10 for me and I can barely scrape any positives out of my experiences with it. tl;dr : Poor Performance. Uncompelling generic story with poor voice acting, voice direction and voice stitching. Gameplay the is fun for the first 3 hours until you realise the lack of enemy variety, lack of enemies fighting back, long and drawn out boss fights and little combo variety. Presentation with generic environments and music that never fits the tone of the action and lastly mechanics that are underutilised. **Performance** First off, the game runs poorly and from what I've read in other reviews it seems to be a universal issue with most computers. I'm not gonna go too in-depth with performance because everyone's machine is different so results may vary. **Story** Since it's an RPG I have to mention the story. All I can say is that it is extremely generic and uninspired and can be boiled down into "collect the 4 elemental crystals to defeat the big bad". Aside from the generic concept, there story doesn't even try to stay interesting and the pacing of the story lacks any form of urgency or agency for stopping the antagonist. I was so tuned out of the story that when I got to the final dungeon I went "wait this is the final dungeon???" The side characters who are important to the main plot are also uninteresting and completely irrelevant to the main plot and simply exist to have other characters exist outside of Kaser. The weirdest part 90% of the relevant side characters are just attractive women who are dressed like they don't belong in the world they live in and simply exist for the gooners to have something to look at for the single digit minutes they're on screen Staying on topic of the story, The English voice acting didn't do the game any favours with some of the most soulless and un-directed voice acting I've ever heard. Every single character reads their lines extremely monotone and without any expression and creates a severe disconnect to anything happening in the gameplay and story. One top of everything there are only 10-15 battle voice lines in the game so you're going to spend the next 14 hours of your life hearing the same 10 voice from arena complimenting you on your perfect block, evade and item usage. I cannot comment on the Chinese and Japanese dub but even OUTSIDE of those two languages there's a very noticeable issue with how voicelines are stitched together, which makes dialouge in any language sound very choppy and inhuman. **Gameplay** Finally, the gameplay. This was the part where I had some hope of it being good. All I can say is that it's serviceable. However it gets EXTREMELY repetitive after the first 3 hours with very few combo routes for each weapon. I was doing the same combo I was doing in hour 3 of the game that I was hour 13 of the game. It's partly because there is no incentive to do anything else. In other action games such as DMC there is a style gauge that gives the player motivation to come up with free flowing combo's on the fly to get the highest rank. In these game, there is no such motivation and very little combo variety between weapons that after a while every encounter has you repeated the exact same thing. This would be forgiven if the game actually pushed the player to engage with the game at all. The enemies barely fight back at ALL so you end up just hitting a large damage sponge while doing the same repetitive combo with little to no variance. On top of that, enemies that have a break bar have little to no hitstun until you finally break them which in turn has you mashing the basic combo over and over again until you break them to actually do the fun flashy combos. On top of THAT the "devil trigger"/install/transformation you get refills extremely easy and does WAYYYYY too much damage to get any fun from it. LASTLY the enemy variety is almost non existent so you end up fighting the same waves of enemies over and over and over and over again until credits roll Since we're talking about enemies, boss fights (there's a lot of them) also suffer heavily. Every single boss fight has a mandatory phase where you sit there and watch as they do their big telegraphed move. You CANNOT damage them during these moves and sometimes these attacks last 30 seconds to a minute at a time which completely removes any pace the fight may have. I'd appreciate it more if there was a window to attack them during these moves but they are FULLY invulnerable so it ends up boiling down to a glorified cutscene where from my experience the most effective way to dodge these attacks was run around the arena for 30 seconds. Final point on the gameplay is that there are NO difficulty options until you fully beat the game meaning that everyone's first playthrough will generally feel the same. The static difficulty is extremely easy with enemies that don't fight back and damage that almost doesn't exist. I spent the latter half of the game essentially face tanking everything because the enemies did little to no damage and I stopped caring. **Presentation** Finally I do want to touch on the presentation of the game. It DOES and CAN look pretty at certain points. However, after sitting back for a while and taking off my rose tinted glasses, these environments feel like the most UE4 asset shop flips I've ever seen. The environments consists of: mountains + temple, grassy plains, autumn forest, winter snowland and then some weird futuristic space taken straight out of a game like Astral Chain. On top of that the music for the game is EXTREMELY forgettable and does not fit the tone of the what's happening on the screen at most points. Usually when you think "epic boss battle" you expect cool music to accompany it but it never reflects that EVER. *Miscellaneous** Lastly some miscellaneous negatives: There's a crafting system that can 100% be ignored and does not need to be interacted with. The main hub world consists of what I found TWO shop NPCs/Vendors. There are no sidequests in the game (either a positive or negative for some) **Final Note** Look, I get it. This game was a passion project and started off as a solo dev project 10 years ago. But that's the problem it was **10 years ago**. Honestly, this game probably would've been well received if it released 10 years ago, but alas we are now in 2025 where we've SEEN these ideas before, we've seen other games that are MUCH better come out in less time, and some even being solo dev projects as well. On top of everything, this game now has the Sony/Playstation brand backing it which puts some expectations on the game. Ultimately, the game falls flat in every single department and it HURTS knowing that this game turned out this way considering how inspiring developer Yang Bing's story in how this game came to be and is a dream scenario for ANY solo developer. If I were to provide any closing statements for this review is that this game wants to be a game with "hype moments and aura" WITHOUT ANY of the "hype moments and aura". Congratulations Yang Bing for finally completing your passion project.
• Recommended Posted November 26, 2025 on Steam I can't lie and try to convince anyone that this game doesn't have issues on the technical front, but I can also say that as a big fan of the Character Action/Spectacle Fighter genre this game was one of my absolute favourites this year and I am so pleased to see the devs sticking with it, fixing technical problems and adding new content like the recent arena battle mode and additional costumes. For most, this is probably only worth it on sale, but for me it's an absolute all timer that I personally reccomend extremely highly.