LOST EPIC is a side scrolling Action RPG by oneoreight and Team EARTHWARS. And, having been recently ported to the Nintendo Switch, we were sent a code for review.
So, as to story, you are a new knight, and your job is to kill the new Gods that displaced to old ones. The new Gods are rough on the Perishing (or, you know, just regular humans), and that’s why you gotta kill ’em. Most of the NPC’s are a static part of things, so if you’re expecting a more traditional Japanese RPG plot, this probably isn’t the game for you. They also do this thing where bosses have dialogue that plays while you’re fighting. The problem is that you’re usually trying not to die, and the game doesn’t have an English dub, so I’ll be damned if I can tell you what the bosses said, or if it’s even relevant to the story as opposed to them just trash talking you.
And that really leads into what I want to talk about with this game. LOST EPIC is by no means a bad game, but it has some somewhat questionable design decisions all over. For example, this game has a stamina bar like Dark Souls; unfortunately, this game’s way more punchy than DS, so you wind up feeling like you’ve run out of gas at the worst time. If anything, it would’ve been served by doing away with it entirely, considering the game feels more akin to a 2D Devil May Cry based on the speed of combat. There’s a crafting system, specifically for weapons; unfortunately, you can’t see the tree in the crafting menu, and can only see what you can make at the moment. The tree itself is hidden in Tidings, which is where you spend skill points gained at level up.
It doesn’t end there, either. There are several classes of weapons, but you’ll probably stick to the swords you started with. Aside from the fact that you have to go on a treasure hunt to typically earn the ability to upgrade swathes of the weapon trees (in the case of bows, you can’t make any at all until you’ve done so), most other weapon types have downsides that make them difficult to choose over the starting single-handed sword. Longswords typically scale off of strength, but they’re heavy enough that you’ll have to put points into constitution to raise your equipment weight limit. And since levels start to get fairly costly the higher your level, you start to miss the benefit, when you could’ve just made a strength-scaling one-handed sword and pumped the stat for max benefit.
Bows, on the other hand, are of questionable use up close, require you to spec in Skill (a.k.a. dexterity in other games), and require a base of the single least-likely weapon drop I’d encountered. Seriously, the archers hate to drop their bows.
The cost of upgrading is also an issue. The further you go up a tree, the more costly it gets to move to the next evolution of a weapon. You also can (and should) upgrade these weapons to boost their stats (which gets exponentially more expensive the higher that plus number gets). Sure, this is one of the only uses for Anima (LOST EPIC‘s answer to souls) aside from item synthesis and leveling, but all of that anima represents time spent butchering enemies to earn it. And all of that goes up in a poof of smoke, anima and tamahagane and all, once you evolve to the next tier.
Trying to run down more of these as quickly as possible: Skills often take ~300 uses to master, with no means of speeding things up. Elemental weapons aren’t worth making, since they require random drops of random drops to make and you often have no clue what enemy resistances are until you beat one, meaning you’re probably stuck with a weapon doing less damage than if you just made it without the element. There’s stat scaling for weapons, but even end game weapons don’t go above a B… why? You can look up the effects of stats precisely nowhere in game.While the translation is good overall, every once in a while a quest will, due to (presumed) mistranslation, be misleading. Some special enemy/boss encounters are poorly designed (Regulus, in particular, is a bad Kill List fight that many have complained about). Rods become available so late they’re not worth speccing for. The game, quite literally, never stops being grindy, and the grind never stops being tedious. I know it’s nitpicky, but if that’s not all, that’s most of it.
Oh god please no…
Visually speaking, the artstyle is great. Lamentably, it works best with the stationary NPC’s, because there’s something to the animations. When your character is moving around, you notice it; it’s somewhat similar to that sort of paper doll animation flash stuff used back in the day. It’s most noticeable at the joints of a character. You notice it less the further you are, but it never totally goes away.
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LOST EPIC Review (Switch)
LOST EPIC is a side scrolling Action RPG by oneoreight and Team EARTHWARS. And, having been recently ported to the Nintendo Switch, we were sent a code for review.
So, as to story, you are a new knight, and your job is to kill the new Gods that displaced to old ones. The new Gods are rough on the Perishing (or, you know, just regular humans), and that’s why you gotta kill ’em. Most of the NPC’s are a static part of things, so if you’re expecting a more traditional Japanese RPG plot, this probably isn’t the game for you. They also do this thing where bosses have dialogue that plays while you’re fighting. The problem is that you’re usually trying not to die, and the game doesn’t have an English dub, so I’ll be damned if I can tell you what the bosses said, or if it’s even relevant to the story as opposed to them just trash talking you.
And that really leads into what I want to talk about with this game. LOST EPIC is by no means a bad game, but it has some somewhat questionable design decisions all over. For example, this game has a stamina bar like Dark Souls; unfortunately, this game’s way more punchy than DS, so you wind up feeling like you’ve run out of gas at the worst time. If anything, it would’ve been served by doing away with it entirely, considering the game feels more akin to a 2D Devil May Cry based on the speed of combat. There’s a crafting system, specifically for weapons; unfortunately, you can’t see the tree in the crafting menu, and can only see what you can make at the moment. The tree itself is hidden in Tidings, which is where you spend skill points gained at level up.
It doesn’t end there, either. There are several classes of weapons, but you’ll probably stick to the swords you started with. Aside from the fact that you have to go on a treasure hunt to typically earn the ability to upgrade swathes of the weapon trees (in the case of bows, you can’t make any at all until you’ve done so), most other weapon types have downsides that make them difficult to choose over the starting single-handed sword. Longswords typically scale off of strength, but they’re heavy enough that you’ll have to put points into constitution to raise your equipment weight limit. And since levels start to get fairly costly the higher your level, you start to miss the benefit, when you could’ve just made a strength-scaling one-handed sword and pumped the stat for max benefit.
Bows, on the other hand, are of questionable use up close, require you to spec in Skill (a.k.a. dexterity in other games), and require a base of the single least-likely weapon drop I’d encountered. Seriously, the archers hate to drop their bows.
The cost of upgrading is also an issue. The further you go up a tree, the more costly it gets to move to the next evolution of a weapon. You also can (and should) upgrade these weapons to boost their stats (which gets exponentially more expensive the higher that plus number gets). Sure, this is one of the only uses for Anima (LOST EPIC‘s answer to souls) aside from item synthesis and leveling, but all of that anima represents time spent butchering enemies to earn it. And all of that goes up in a poof of smoke, anima and tamahagane and all, once you evolve to the next tier.
Trying to run down more of these as quickly as possible: Skills often take ~300 uses to master, with no means of speeding things up. Elemental weapons aren’t worth making, since they require random drops of random drops to make and you often have no clue what enemy resistances are until you beat one, meaning you’re probably stuck with a weapon doing less damage than if you just made it without the element. There’s stat scaling for weapons, but even end game weapons don’t go above a B… why? You can look up the effects of stats precisely nowhere in game.While the translation is good overall, every once in a while a quest will, due to (presumed) mistranslation, be misleading. Some special enemy/boss encounters are poorly designed (Regulus, in particular, is a bad Kill List fight that many have complained about). Rods become available so late they’re not worth speccing for. The game, quite literally, never stops being grindy, and the grind never stops being tedious. I know it’s nitpicky, but if that’s not all, that’s most of it.
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LOST EPIC Review (Switch)
LOST EPIC is a side scrolling Action RPG by oneoreight and Team EARTHWARS. And, having been recently ported to the Nintendo Switch, we were sent a code for review.
So, as to story, you are a new knight, and your job is to kill the new Gods that displaced to old ones. The new Gods are rough on the Perishing (or, you know, just regular humans), and that’s why you gotta kill ’em. Most of the NPC’s are a static part of things, so if you’re expecting a more traditional Japanese RPG plot, this probably isn’t the game for you. They also do this thing where bosses have dialogue that plays while you’re fighting. The problem is that you’re usually trying not to die, and the game doesn’t have an English dub, so I’ll be damned if I can tell you what the bosses said, or if it’s even relevant to the story as opposed to them just trash talking you.
And that really leads into what I want to talk about with this game. LOST EPIC is by no means a bad game, but it has some somewhat questionable design decisions all over. For example, this game has a stamina bar like Dark Souls; unfortunately, this game’s way more punchy than DS, so you wind up feeling like you’ve run out of gas at the worst time. If anything, it would’ve been served by doing away with it entirely, considering the game feels more akin to a 2D Devil May Cry based on the speed of combat. There’s a crafting system, specifically for weapons; unfortunately, you can’t see the tree in the crafting menu, and can only see what you can make at the moment. The tree itself is hidden in Tidings, which is where you spend skill points gained at level up.
It doesn’t end there, either. There are several classes of weapons, but you’ll probably stick to the swords you started with. Aside from the fact that you have to go on a treasure hunt to typically earn the ability to upgrade swathes of the weapon trees (in the case of bows, you can’t make any at all until you’ve done so), most other weapon types have downsides that make them difficult to choose over the starting single-handed sword. Longswords typically scale off of strength, but they’re heavy enough that you’ll have to put points into constitution to raise your equipment weight limit. And since levels start to get fairly costly the higher your level, you start to miss the benefit, when you could’ve just made a strength-scaling one-handed sword and pumped the stat for max benefit.
Bows, on the other hand, are of questionable use up close, require you to spec in Skill (a.k.a. dexterity in other games), and require a base of the single least-likely weapon drop I’d encountered. Seriously, the archers hate to drop their bows.
The cost of upgrading is also an issue. The further you go up a tree, the more costly it gets to move to the next evolution of a weapon. You also can (and should) upgrade these weapons to boost their stats (which gets exponentially more expensive the higher that plus number gets). Sure, this is one of the only uses for Anima (LOST EPIC‘s answer to souls) aside from item synthesis and leveling, but all of that anima represents time spent butchering enemies to earn it. And all of that goes up in a poof of smoke, anima and tamahagane and all, once you evolve to the next tier.
Trying to run down more of these as quickly as possible: Skills often take ~300 uses to master, with no means of speeding things up. Elemental weapons aren’t worth making, since they require random drops of random drops to make and you often have no clue what enemy resistances are until you beat one, meaning you’re probably stuck with a weapon doing less damage than if you just made it without the element. There’s stat scaling for weapons, but even end game weapons don’t go above a B… why? You can look up the effects of stats precisely nowhere in game.While the translation is good overall, every once in a while a quest will, due to (presumed) mistranslation, be misleading. Some special enemy/boss encounters are poorly designed (Regulus, in particular, is a bad Kill List fight that many have complained about). Rods become available so late they’re not worth speccing for. The game, quite literally, never stops being grindy, and the grind never stops being tedious. I know it’s nitpicky, but if that’s not all, that’s most of it.
Oh god please no…
The soundtrack is great. I wouldn’t put it in my top ten, but there’s some good stuff in there. I can’t say the same about sound effects; some of them are a bit skungy. The worst, in particular, was the sound effect that plays when you’re landing from above a certain height, which is also used for certain skills which strike the ground. I don’t know if it’s the cheapness of my soundbar or the sound effect’s hidden properties, but it always seemed to cause a form of static that sounded like it was threatening to blow out that speaker. Not a problem with headphones, but it was still fairly pronounced so I lowered the sound effect volume to comfortable levels. There’s also something weird with the stereo mix, in that sound effects will play on the extreme side they are on screen, even when it should probably be a bit more centered than it is. This will probably bother others for a completely different reason than it bugs me (I’ve found that people my age or younger often hate even good stereo mixing).
Sweet Jesus I lopped off a pregnant wolf lady’s head. I’m not sure how to feel about that.
Controls are good overall. I wish I could swap movement to the D-Pad, but that’s probably just me. There is, however, an issue seemingly unique to the Switch version. Namely, it can’t do the single thing for which the console is named. If you decide that you want to take this game to another part of the house after playing docked, you’ll find the controls don’t work, and won’t work even if you put it back in the dock again. It’s inexplicable; there are games I’ve bought on ridiculous discount that can do this. But LOST EPIC requires you to close out of the game entirely and start it back up again to avoid being locked out of controlling the game. It’s unusual, and I hope it gets patched eventually.
THAT ALL BEING SAID, there is definitely something to it. Maybe it’s just the fact that I like Metroidvania-type games, I don’t know. But I can recommend it, provided you know what you’re getting and keep all of those caveats in mind. And you, too, may enjoy LOST EPIC.
LOST EPIC is a bit rough around the edges, but the core gameplay loop stands up.
Final Score:
*We were provided a key for this game for the purposes of this review*
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