Review #693: Lost Sphear

 But not lost in translation.

 Lost Sphear is Tokyo RPG Factory's second attempt at bringing classic Squaresoft styled JRPGs into the modern day. It's a bit of a mixed bag, featuring a ton of needless mechanics couples with very shallow characters, as well as an uninteresting plot that goes on and on and on...

 The plot follows Kanata, your unassuming generic JRPG protagonists that goes out fishing with his friends only to return to find his village 'lost', yeah, kinda like Tales of Phantasia. Not to fret, as Kanata soon discovers that he has the ability to collect memories, from people, books or fallen monsters, and 'recover' whatever or whoever got 'lost'. And thus Kanata's journey begins to save his planet from total disappearance. Characters are fairly uninteresting, although I found that Van and Kanata get quite a bit of development together, making for a few endearing interactions between both of them, the rest of the characters don't fare much better. The dialogue is fairly cringy, and it only gets worse as the game goes on, and some characters that pull some pretty shady stuff, like turning a certain civilian into a brainwashed cyborg get away with it scott-free, as a matter of fact, a ton of dubious characters are forgiven pretty darn easily, making for a rather unsatisfying narrative. 2/3rds into the game, it pulls a fast one on you and plays the credits. It's so sneaky that some people refer to this final third as the 'post-game', but it's a lie, it's part of the game and brings closure to a TON of dangling threads. And while it ties said threads and provides more twists to the story, its only to the game's detriment, since this final part of the game drags on for what feels like forever. The plot should've ended by the time the credits rolled, because the plot got very uninteresting by this time, and I was growing tired of all the 'we can't lose hope!' and 'Kanata is everyone's hope!' shtick.

 As for the gameplay, it follows the tried and true SNES JRPG formula of going through towns and dungeons while engaging in turn-based battles. Fun stuff. It's also got an overworld, when was the last time we saw one of those? It gets bonus points for that alone. As per tradition, you eventually get a boat and an airship to travel through continents and what not. While going through the overworld you may come across 'lost' areas, so you may have to find a specific spot to raise an Artifact, out of your collected memories, which restores the lost area and grants bonus passive abilities to your party. Things such as periodic damage to the enemy party, including bosses, bonus experience points, halve the cost of magic by removing your ability to deal critical hits, etc. It's a surprisingly fun way to strengthen your party, or cripple it if you choose to build the terrible 'Paragon' artifact, while tying it to the whole 'restoration' part of the plot. Not that it does such a good job at that though, later in the game a few characters get 'Lost' and good guy Kanata and the party decide that there simply isn't time to restore them, when it'd take a few minutes at most. As a matter of fact, Kanata only brings them back because the plot demands it, and you can't restore them before that even though there's no good reason as to why Kanata would downright ignore a couple of persons while you go around the overworld restoring stuff.

 Before getting into battles you may want to equip your characters with weapons and abilities, but that opens a new can of worms. In a few words... the game can very easily become a grindfest. Restoring the world around you, including a few plot-mandatory restorations, requires memories. Which, fair enough, you get from defeating enemies.... problem is, buying spells for your characters ALSO require trading memories at various different shops. There's a ton of different memories, so it's impossible to remember which enemies may drop what memories, and a few memories are exclusive to the overworld, so you have to enter and exit the overworld to recollect them. If you want specific, useful artifacts, you will need specific memories. There's an in-game enemy glossary that shows you what memories each monster drops, but that means finding said enemy and then remembering where they are. It's a needless annoyance, to be honest, so you probably won't get to customize everyone as much as you'd like. Besides the spells, you can also buy 'counter' spells or side effects to your spells, which is pretty neat and deep, but unless you grind for memories you won't be getting much mileage out of it.

 Then comes equipment.... the entire equipment system is weird. Money is rather hard to come by, but upgrading weapons gets pretty expensive pretty fast, meaning that you'll probably be focusing on four out of the eight different characters. Word to the wise, Dianto is a mandatory character for two boss battles, and Locke is required for another mandatory battle, so try not to neglect them. I was able to do just fine with my fully upgraded Kanata and having them equipped with base level equipment, but it was unnecessarily tough, more on this later. Regardless, here's the best tip I can give you: The best armor in the game is the initial 'Noble Cloak' characters start with. It's pathetic at first, but keep them and upgrade them every chance you get and you'll end up with the best armor in the game. Also, another tip, look up on the internet which are the best weapons for each character, upgrading is TOO expensive to focus on more than four characters or to waste upgrade materials on weapons that are better left ignored. For example, Lumina's best weapon is the Mech Tekko, the second weapon she gets. Honestly, upgrading is very weird in this way, and it's a bit flabbergasting as to why they made it such a money sink when money is so hard to come by in the game. Plus, there are very few healing spells, and besides the mana cost they also have a cooldown, making them fairly unreliable, so you need items which are also pretty expensive. Particularly the revives, which are pretty much a necessity since so many bosses have INSTANT-KILL attacks.

 On the other hand, battles are relatively fun. There are no random encounters, so you can try to avoid enemy mobs if you want, but you shouldn't since extra money and memories never hurt anybody. Positioning is very important, having your characters close together or lined up could mean getting multiple characters hurt from a single enemy attack. On each turn you can either attack, use a spell or an item, and each option lets you reposition your character. Long-range characters, such as Van or Luke are pretty neat, since they can shoot in a straight line and pierce through every enemy on their line of fire. As said before, spells also have a cooldown, a set number of turns you must wait before you can use them again, so you can't just use spells willynilly. As for turns, the game uses Square's classic ATB system, wherein enemies can attack while you pick your actions, and every character and enemy having their own speeds when it comes to getting their turns. Landing hits, or getting hit, charges your momentum gauge. Momentum can be use to add extra damage to your attacks or add effects to your spells, provided you bought said added effect with memories. Momentum is a neat idea, I just wish I could've gotten more out of it.

 There's yet another mechanic: Vulcosuits. Each character gets his own Vulcosuit, a mech, and you can get them on and off them by pressing the L button on their turn. Vulcosuits raise a characters stats, but they are fairly limited. Each Vulcosuit can only do three things: Spells, their unique ability or use an item. Abilities usually take about 8 turns to cooldown, so most of the time you can only use spells, and you also draw from a shared pool of Vulcopoints, which can only be restored with a few rare items or by sleeping in an inn. Vulcosuits can give you a little edge during boss battles, but not always. For instance, I felt that having Sherra, the game's designated healer, in a Vulcosuit was just stealing Vulcopoints away from Van and Lumina, two characters with a ton of DPS that made better use of them.

 While random battles are usually rather fun, bosses are not. Most of them are fairly cheap, being able to pretty easily kill your characters, a few having egregious one-hit kill attacks. During the 'post-game' there's this boss that you have to fight with Kanata, Dianto and Locke. Not only where my Dianto and Locke underequipped, but this boss had a bad-breath attack, not unlike Final Fantasy's Malboro's, that would cause all sorts of negative status effects on my party. One time it turned Dianto into a rooster, froze Kanata and confused Locke, so I had to wait as the boss slowly murdered Locke and Dianto while I could do nothing about it. Things like these made a few bosses feel luck-based, one time I'd get murdered without a single sliver of hope, and then I'd try again and kill them without much hassle. This is not good game design, and made the difficulty feel very artificial. Shin Megami Tensei this is not.

 Lost Sphear feels like a very generic SNES JRPG, which is the highest praise I can give it. It sticks to very classic and aged tropes, but those are the best parts about the game. Sadly, the plot has more lows than highs, and I wish characters would've received more depth, while others getting the comeuppance they deserved. On the other hand, where it chose to innovate, with all the unnecessary mechanics that just makes the game a bit overwhelming just doesn't help, specially when getting the most out of said mechanics involves wasting time grinding for memories or money. I know one could do a lot worse than Lost Sphear, and for a short while I had fun playing through a SNES-style JRPG, but the game simply falls into too many pitfalls that prevent it from reaching the quality of the classics it so closely tried to emulate.
 5.0 out of 10