Stop me if you’ve heard this before. A diverse group of young people with special powers come together to save the world from an all-powerful threat, or in other words, half the role playing games that have come out of Japan. But when it comes to the concept of Lost Dimension, the latest RPG from Atlus, that’s about all it has in common with prior releases. Because you see, it’s not enough to climb the dangerous tower that the team is locked in while destroying their foes along the way. And it’s not enough to defeat “The End”, a mysterious enemy that’s responsible for threatening the world, The only way to climb each floor is to sacrifice one of your own, one of which may end up being a traitor to the team. Your decisions determine whether or not you kill a loyal comrade, or a snake in the grass who is looking to double cross you when the time is right. Feeling the pressure yet?
As a tactical turn based title, most of your time crawling through Lost Dimension‘s dungeons will be spent completing objectives for each mission, most of which involve completely defeating the enemy squad. Basic game play lives and dies by the team assisting each other while positioning them to do the most damage. Every team member has a certain amount of space they can move in, with the idea being to get into attack range while avoiding a potential counter attack. Each character specializes in a particular weapon, (outside of their abilities, which we’ll talk more about below,) ranging from pistols to knives, swords and even their fists! Each weapon has its own range, accuracy and power, which is only increased by closing the distance between you and the target. If members in your party are also in range, they’ll follow up your attack with one of their own, allowing you to pile on the damage. Keep in mind though, that all of the above strategies apply for your opponents as well, so you’ll want to think twice about throwing your units to the wolves.
Carelessly placing units between enemies will lead to disastrous results.
Each of the 11 member squad of psychics have their own specialties, (or Gifts as they’re called,) ranging from pyrokinesis to teleportation on top of their standard attacks. As you complete missions, earn EXP and level up, each member can expand their existing abilities or branch out towards new ones, with an impressive amount of options to unlock. You’ll obviously want to exploit enemy weaknesses with these Gifts in a variety of ways, ranging from using the right elemental attacks, boosting your party’s stats between clashes, luring enemies into small groups to take them out with area attacks and so on, but abusing your abilities drains your character’s sanity.
Losing your sanity is a double edged sword, because while that character does gain the benefit of boosted attack power and full health regeneration, their defense sinks while teammates around them get weaker due to being overcome with fear. The berserk teammate becomes CPU controlled and attacks friend and foe alike at random, so unless you’re using it as a last ditch effort to inch out a win, you’ll run a real risk of killing your own team. It’s all or nothing mechanics like these that make the combat that much more interesting, especially when the game comes off as an attempt at a “My First Strategy RPG” with how easily exploitable the fighting mechanics are with no real consequence to dying outside of earning a lower end of mission rank, and highly repetitive enemies. That’s not to say the game isn’t fun, (on the contrary, I found myself addicted more often than not,) but seasoned gamers should be able to blow through both the side and main quests pretty quickly.
Overusing gifts has its own consequences. Choose wisely.
While Lost Dimensions puts you in direct control of so many powerful psychics, players will primarily play as Sho, who The End seems to hold an unknown grudge against. Sho would have to hold some kind of amazing power to draw such ire from the main antagonist, right? Well at the start, Sho demonstrates his power to… shoot really well? In reality, his main power is the ability to read minds, which comes in handy when it’s eventually revealed that there’s a traitor on the team. At the end of each mission, (whether it’s replaying an old one or completing a quest for the first time,) Sho will hear thoughts from his team in the most extreme game of Guess Who anyone’s ever played. By mixing up your team of six, you’ll have to find the correlation between who’s on your team when these negative thoughts pop up, narrow it down to a few red herrings and the actual mole, then use your limited “Deep Vision” to dive into their mind and discover the truth. And if you’re thinking of using a guide to cheat your way through, don’t bother. The traitors are randomized during each play through.
Then again, as if Lost Dimension was trying to be as much of a reality show simulator as it is a video game, just because you know who you want to get rid of doesn’t mean your friends will agree. The balancing act that the game presents is that your team will trust whoever fights more often. Yet, the only way to pinpoint who the suspects are is by bringing them on missions. When quests wrap up, one or two comrades might ask your opinion in order to sway the votes a bit, but while this concept is great in concept, it becomes more of a chore to keep playing missions just to change the opinions of a few people until the vote is leaning towards the desired outcome.
Examining your comrade’s thoughts is vital for rooting out the traitor.
Outside of the simplistic game play and the somewhat grind heavy parts that slow down Lost Dimension, its biggest flaw is a byproduct of its amazing concept. Since each character can be killed at the end of every chapter, outside of a few personality quirks, none of these people stand out at all. They don’t have strong ties to the main story, their personal backstories, (which can be uncovered by building relationships with them through optional, limited conversation choices,) came off as shallow and rarely left me attached, and uncovering them as traitors provides no explanation as to why they’re trying to destroy the world outside of a Scooby-Doo-esque, “darn, you caught me” speech. Motives are implied through hidden notes and a second run through New Game + provides more details on the overall narrative, but it’s hard to care about when your party members die off if you weren’t interested in them to begin with. The only real loss is being unable to expand their powers, but whatever you unlocked up to that point can be equipped to a living member, making sure those skills don’t go to waste.
Eh, no big loss.
So now that my time with Lost Dimension has come and gone, I’m left feeling like I’ve witnessed what could be the start of a truly innovative, potentially game changing series if these concepts are given more time to grow, but one thats not without its weak points. Small annoyances aside, (like not being able to skip enemy turns, the camera getting stuck on walls when displaying far away enemies, having to restart your entire turn to adjust your movement range and Nagi’s levitation leaving her stuck on people’s heads to name a few,) it’s unique ideas are held back by a weak plot and little reason to care about who lives and dies. Its simplistic game play and relatively short length for an RPG don’t help matters, and its grind heavy methods for altering votes make eliminations more tedious than they have to be. Still, the large amount of customization options when it comes to Gifts, the pressure when trying to find the traitor in each chapter, make this one of the more memorable games I’ve played this year. I truly feel like we have something special with Lost Dimension, it just needs some more refinement to execute its ambitious ideas.
Final Score: 3/5