Lost Soul Aside is a game that finds itself in a peculiar position. And yes, I’m behind on reviews, but that doesn’t mean I won’t do them. Having the months pass gives me the opportunity to take my time with how to tackle my opinions about the title. Since reviews are out and well, my experience is more or less in line with them, I figure I’d try a slightly different angle. One that’s a bit more charitable, as I researched and learned a bit more about how Lost Soul Aside came to be.
You see, the way this was marketed, and well, priced. Felt like it was going to be a Triple A game, if you see the trailers and honestly, how the game looked, we got that kind of vibe. But in reality, it wasn’t. For comparison, UltiZero, the studio behind Lost Soul Aside, grew to a maximum of 40 employees. Now, one of my favorite games around, Helldivers 2, is considered to be a AA game. It has a budget but not too big, and its human resources pool is around 140 people. Triple A games typically have 400 or more people working on the same title, even more so for open-world type games or generally ones that have a larger scope when it comes to game experiences. I know that the origin of the concept of AAA is no, not from batteries, but from the quality of the product you get from the market. When it comes to producing games, making one that is of great quality in terms of visuals, gameplay, and more, it’s typical for it to require a lot of resources, like budget, skilled manpower, and access to technology. The years have shown us that the AAA label isn’t an automatic indication of quality for games, unfortunately. And I know that the idea is somewhat loosely applied to the industry, but I think it’s fair to say that UltiZero’s production of Lost Soul Aside doesn’t utilize a large amount of resources.
With that out of the way, what do I think of Lost Soul Aside? It’s clear to me that this game had much bigger ideas when development started, and had to regrettably scale back as the realities of scope creep set in. It draws clear inspiration from more popular titles created by Capcom and Square-Enix, and attempts to make its own spin on them. Unfortunately, their attempts to make their own style of swashbuckling adventure bear some pretty clear flaws in their execution. Although the game doesn’t really veer far from its muses, it then invites comparison to them. And it’s clear which of them stands above the other.
Now these can be forgiven; it’s their first game, after all. However, Sony decided to place it next to these titans, so now we’re here. We have a story of a game that aims to reach for the stars, where, unfortunately, such ambitions were beyond its grasp. So if you’d like to have me go into more detail about my findings, stick around. I know I said I’d try to be nicer, but you still should give criticism where it’s due. And believe me, there’s a lot of it to go around. So join me, gamers, as we pick apart the fragments of Lost Soul Aside.
Production (2.5 / 5)
This game is built using Unreal Engine 4. Something we now recognize as an older form of technology in 2025. It doesn’t take long to see that the game has a rather dated look. This look is most evident in the hair they sport. Not to take away from the effort put into refining the models and their movement, as the way they move and look is still pretty commendable despite technical limitations. This title can still flex during certain action sequences, making it feel like you’re playing or, at the very least, watching an anime action scene. Some effects unfortunatel,y look flat, especially the ones you see at the starting sequence,s which dampen the excitement a bit. It’s especially painful when there’s a bit more of it on the screen than what I’m able to comfortably play with.
This happens particularly during boss fights, where, to better express their mythical nature, are given extra effects to their attacks. It could be an explosion of flowers and thorns, or a slice of lightning, the appearance of clouds, or maybe my personal favorite, hundreds of swords forming from what looks like sand. And in case you didn’t catch on, I hated all of them. Not because they didn’t look good, they look great, impressive, even. The real problem stems from the idea that I have to dodge, parry and combo through these attacks quite relentlessly. What I’m trying to say is that while the effects and all look great, the fact that they tend to obscure what I actually have to watch out for became annoying.
However, I do appreciate the amount of detail they placed into making the backgrounds and vistas of each stage. The vastness and variance between the stages of mountains, cities, gardens, and more hint at the scale that the game had originally planned for itself. I genuinely wish I could explore more of it and see what it’s like to go over these mountains and more. Rather than just being ushered between combat arenas.
When it comes to the audio dimension of Lost Soul Aside, I sadly have to say that the music is rather unremarkable. I don’t actually have any attachments or recall of the music they gave. In a sense, it’s kind of good since the background music blended well into the background. But to the point that I don’t even know what music to associate the game with is a problem. I tried listening to the OST separately, but honestly, nothing stuck.
As for effects, like impact sounds and dodge indicators, those were pretty consistent and useful. Some impact effects were a little much to be honest, but nothing bad enough to get in the way of gameplay.
Now, before I get into the voice work, I’d like to point out that Lost Soul Aside had some funky configurations when it came to audio balancing. I thought something was wrong with my system as I could barely hear the voice-overs. I felt like I was watching a Netflix show with their talking sounding like murmuring. Until that is, I looked through the audio configuration of the game, which left me wondering why it was the way it was. Usually, you have voices loudest, sound effects a bit below it, and other ambient sounds and BGM the weakest. For some reason, this was reversed; a simple tweaking of these switches would fix it. Just, why was it like this in the first place? And well, hearing the English voices made me want to turn it down. Look, the voice quality is fine, but the acting took me back to the PlayStation 1 age with Megaman X4 or even Devil May Cry 1 on the PS2. Kaser’s (protagonist) sister, Louisa, unironically calls Kaser “brother.” The only character who can do that and still be cool is Liquid Snake. Frequency isn’t going to numb me from the pain, and they used that word a lot. So don’t be surprised if I decide to swap it to Japanese voices as quickly as I did. And no, the voice acting for the Japanese dubbing wasn’t something I’d sing praises for either. However, it was certainly a lot more palatable.
If there’s any silver lining for my viewing and listening experience for this title, it’d be the cinematic cut-scenes when taking out big bad bosses. It reminded me of Mounty-Oum’s work when he was making fan animations for Final Fantasy combat. It looked interesting, intense, and thoroughly graphic. It kinda made me wish I was able to do whatever Kaser was doing during these scenes. But hey, watching it isn’t so bad either.
Mechanics (3.5 / 5)
Lost Soul Aside’s gameplay can be seen as two things. One would be taking the safe route and making use of already popular ideas for your game, and the other would be genuinely being a big fan of the same concepts and trying to make something similar, but with a slight twist of your own personal touch. You can tell from the get-go that there’s a strong Final Fantasy XV inspiration with Kaser’s character alone, along with the deadpan stoicism and fashion choices. I would say that the combat is something of a combination between Devil May Cry, Dark Souls, and Final Fantasy. I’m actually tempted to say some of it is also like Genshin Impact, but it’s a bit of a stretch. I think you’ll see what I mean as we go deeper.
You can do the usual action game shenanigans, you combo weak and strong attacks together, vary a bit on the sequence, and even carry your attacks up to air combos. Along with that, you can also dodge and parry attacks to make openings for yourself, weaving through the enemy offense and sneaking in as many attacks as you can. Where you attempt to break their stance so you can freely wail on them without worry.
So by now you’d ask me, “What else is new?” All of the above functions are things you’ve already seen or heard in other games. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t think there’s a lot more to go over after this. The problem that this leads to is that you will compare how Lost Soul Aside fares against the games that inspired its combat system, and ultimately decide which one did it better. What this title attempts is to synergize so many popular types of combat mechanics into one easy-to-digest experience. But I think people would understand when I say Devil May Cry and Dark Souls have very different experiences in mind for their audience. The former focuses on stylized combat that can let the player rely on his twitchy reflexes to keep his flow of combat going, while the latter is geared towards methodical, calculated thinking that considers the next two or three steps in the future. That’s why one game has no stamina bar, and the other doesn’t penalize you for healing. If your combo forces you to get stuck in a recovery animation instead of allowing your attacks to quickly cycle, your moveset feels clunky. If you can heal at any point without having to commit a few seconds of animation, then there’s no tension in seeing your HP bar drop low.
You eventually get to swap between 4 weapons, each seemingly having a different purpose. The big sword for big guys, the shooter for flyers, something like that. Though generally, I think I was able to get through the game depending on only one of them, only swapping to other weapons to keep the combat from getting stale. There was no real benefit to learning them aside from getting through the stages that they were designed to be used in. You can just learn skills from their respective skill trees to get attractive stat upgrades and be done with it.
Speaking of skill trees, you can expand the moves and combos you can do by activating the relevant nodes in them. I enjoyed what I saw the most of the standard sword attacks, as that weapon had, in my opinion, the most visually striking attacks you can get from the entire set. It was the main reason I kept using it, despite finding the poleblade a much more versatile tool throughout the game.
Finally, the damage scaling in Lost Soul Aside felt very unbalanced. How much damage I can deal to enemies compared to how easily they can dispatch me became annoying. And to be honest, it looked like the developers agreed with me, issuing me some accessories that allowed me to have some crazy stat gains when I got stuck at a boss. I didn’t immediately use them, as it would be no different from switching a difficulty setting in the game. But I didn’t find the combat that rewarding. as it was more or less a repetition of several patterns of attacks or even enemies. I decided to make use of them to avoid getting absorbed in frustration.
I know that how I go over the mechanics and combat of Lost Soul Aside feels pretty one-sided. But if I found the game truly irredeemable, I would’ve stopped playing it. I don’t think it was particularly terrible, but it was indeed frustrating to see that the title had a good idea of where it wanted to go, but couldn’t quite stick the landing repeatedly.
While attempting to combine pretty popular concepts in action games, the combat design forgot to consider the intended experience of every one of the concepts they opted to mix. Imagine putting together a roll cake where your main ingredients are steak, sushi, and spaghetti. Individually, these sound great to have, but trying to seamlessly combine them into one dish would be a challenge, especially if you don’t make any concessions on which of the 4 would be the dominating concept. Als,o I wouldn’t recommend eating that much and in that variety, have mercy on your gut.
Content (3 / 5)
So there are only a few times that I found Wuxia quite entertaining. For those not familiar with that word. It’s basically ancient Chinese fantasy literature. Imagine something like Merlin, magic swords, and casting spells, but swap it out with a powerful mountain hermit, flying swords, and writing spells. Well, okay, they have very different approaches to writing as well. Unfortunately, the only titles I remember liking when it comes to this genre would be Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Kung Fu Hustle (if that counts).
Lost Soul Aside does one thing I’m not quite fond of, which is to introduce a lot of characters where maybe only a few of them matter. And always have some sort of mascot character that has a high chance of being annoying. Most of these other characters are also immediately accomplished individuals that you’ll just have to recognize and respect. Where you may have one meaningful interaction with them, if at all. This is the sort of stuff that makes me lose interest in cut scenes quite quickly. I mean, if what they have to say won’t really bear much in the story, why bother putting the lines there?
Anyway, I’d summarize the story into three parts. You start as a group of revolutionaries who want to help the downtrodden get better treatment from their government. However, the game takes no time in letting that plot simmer as you are quickly faced with a threat to human civilization itself, along with the need for Kaser to rescue his sister’s stolen soul. It’s quite literally the meme you might have seen online at some point, where an RPG where you start with a few menial tasks, and by the end, you have to defeat god. It’s also no secret where it pulls its inspirations from. Honestly, though, this is an action game, and what it really needed was an excuse to go through a gauntlet of bosses to fight. And that’s exactly what we got.
When you finally get into the fights, the real fights, a lot of those decisions start to make sense. I’d have to say most of the fights are decent, and the set-piece events during and between them are also a bit more interesting. The standouts for me would have to be fighting the mountain guardian that was using a bow, especially thanks to the chase sequence you have with her. Followed by fighting a giant demon thing by myself. A lot of these set-piece battles also had cinematic sequences that were nice to watch, but I kinda wish I was still playing through. Nevertheless, these parts of the game are what kept me going.
Not to say that Lost Soul Aside wasn’t devoid of what looked like padding, as the pattern of gameplay involved going through a new area to get a weapon, then going to an alternate dimension within that area to explore the new things you get to do with your new weapon. I was mostly ok with it except for the last weapon that I liked the least, the sycthe. It was a bit endearing how this game would have age old designs concepts like your interactive save point just somehow gets to the boss room ahead of you every time. Back in Megaman Legends, that was Data, in this title, it’s some incarnation of Hatsune Miku. Progressing through these stages felt a bit dragged on, and the fact that you’d go through incrementally upgraded variants of the same enemies every time was getting old the 3rd time around. And I did this for about 15 hours.
To mix it up a bit, they did place in platformer sections along with what I would identify as common open-world puzzles. There’d be a new gimmick to keep things fresh, but all of them were basically trying to get you between point A and B. Finally, there are those hidden challenges that you can take on if you want to, which really reminds me of Devil May Cry, no matter what you tell me. You literally teleport to it and it has challenges like “Stay within the center” or “Kill within the time limit” and whatnot. There’s a bit more to do, but I didn’t find the rewards for them, all that enticing.
Features (2.5 / 5)
Aside from the main campaign, you can play through what I consider to be its horde mode. Where you simply gauntlet through more and more enemies in a series of rounds. Where you get a chance to rest, restock and upgrade between them. In a sense, it’s quite literally the entire game without the story.
I actually immediately jumped into this mode instead of starting the story, so I’m not sure if your character progress could carry over to this mode. But I don’t think it’s such a big deal considering I managed to get through the first few bosses on my first run. The rewards are all cosmetic, so don’t expect to get much more out of it than that.
Speaking of cosmetics, I’d like to give a shout out to Kaser’s one and half trench coat. It looked like it was trying to make an excuse to have a scarf effect without having a scarf, I was always weirded out by it. And it was always comically flying in the wind no matter where he was. I was so glad to finally swap it out with something else mid-game.
Conclusion
Lost Soul Aside is the kind of game that’s clearly been through a lot. You see it in the remnants of bigger ideas that they had to cut down to narrow the focus into an action game. You see how the creators love the roots it takes inspiration from. But you also see it fumble and stumble as it tries to deliver a great gaming experience. It’s not really a big surprise to see this kind of performance; this is the studio’s first game! This is the proverbial Icarus trying to fly to the sun in real time! It also makes me wonder why it was marketed the way it was, and why it was priced the way it was. It’s really not setting it up for success when your publisher is trying to treat your hard work as something that isn’t. It’s a AA game at best, and I don’t think it’s much more than that.
While I don’t think Lost Soul Aside is a terrible game, it certainly leaves a lot of room for improvement. If you ask me what would be a great time while considering what’s worth your money these days, I honestly would be recommending other, older titles to you that have tighter controls, a story that’s more fun to follow and are offered at a price point that’s a lot lighter on your pockets. I hope that UltiZero games find a better stride for the next title it might put together, if the opportunity comes. I do believe that it wanted to make a great game, rather than try to be a cynical money grab that we’ve grown to despise.
As it stands now, Lost Soul Aside is only something I can recommend to check out if you’re curious how a game that started as a job application looks like. Hopefully, you can buy it at a considerable discount.
Lost Soul Aside is a game that’s missing a few fragments, and important ones, too. Scoring a 2.5 / 5
You can find this game on the PlayStation 5 and PC.