There's nothing more frustrating than an almost-brilliant game.
Enter Lost Sphear.
To understand this throwback to the console role-playing games many of us grew up with,
we have to take a brief trip down memory lane to 1995.
Chrono Trigger was the black sheep of the Squaresoft RPG family.
Playing second fiddle to Final Fantasy, and even the lesser known SaGa and Mana series
in terms of sequels and follow-ups.
All we got in the Chrono franchise was the Super Nintendo original, a loosely connected
Playstation sequel, and two ports of the original to the Playstation and Nintendo DS.
But most modern consoles don't have legacy ports of these once-grandiose titles, as they
further fade into our memory.
Yet they are considered by those who played them among the greatest Japanese-style role-playing
games ever crafted.
Weaving fantastic yarns of time travel and alternate dimensions, with lovable characters
and enduring cities and locations, not to mention Yasunori Mitsuda's breathtaking
scores for both games.
It's a wonder no one has picked up the mantle and brought us the flavor and unique mechanics
as those games did decades ago.
Hearing whispers of a Chrono Trigger-like successor in the works, published by Square
Enix itself, I could feel the embers of my bitter, stony heart stirring.
This wasn't a sequel, nor was it even in the same universe, but the resemblance was
clear.
Beautiful old-school world maps, a clean design, colorful character roster, importance of character
placement, lining up attacks and positional strategy in combat, and an emphasis on atmosphere
and soundtrack.
It sounded too good to be true.
Created by Tokyo RPG Factory, a studio newly formed by Square to craft old-school style
RPGs for a new generation, their debut project was I Am Setsuna.
It garnered praise but struck many as an independent-style production in AAA clothing.
That's not always a bad thing, but it does ring a little hollow.
Cut corners were noticeable, and there was an inescapable feeling of a humble budget
at its foundation.
So today I'd like to talk about Square's experimentation and their attempt to bring
back the classic feeling of Chrono Trigger, one of my favorite games of all time.
And how well this new beast fares against the classics of yesteryear.
Let's do this.
Lost Sphear aims to unearth the winning formula of classic games and make improvements to
gameplay, visuals and story that 20+ years of industry evolution could bring to the table.
Chrono Trigger, like many other games of the golden age of RPGs, had a sincerity to it,
due to the sheer effort, talent and hard work put into it.
These were the AAA games of their era, after all.
The Lost Sphear soundtrack is similar to the old Squaresoft games, with simple progressions
and a leading riff to carry the song forward, aiding its memorability -- akin to the recently
popular Undertale soundtrack.
The soundtrack to Lost Sphear is better than most, but compared to Mitsuda and Uematsu's
masterwork...well, it's quite a high bar to clear.
Lost Sphear has a charming art style, mimicking the super-deformed look of the classics.
Whereas on a console like the Super Nintendo, sprite size and animation memory were real
factors and heavily influenced design choices.
The limitation to 32 pixel sprites necessitated the exaggerated head size, body parts and
dramatic expressions.
But this limitation also inspired the endearing art style.
Most modern games attempt subtle emotions, and with the best of games, it works on many
levels.
But there is a charm in seeing the Chancellor literally drop his mouth to the floor or seeing
Crono jump into the air, arms outstretched with giant beads of sweat, at the smallest
surprise.
This spiritual successor tries to mimic the character model style of the old games, but
implements them into a modern 3D engine.
The advantage of having condensed characters is you can show expressive and individualized
models from a distant overhead camera.
One thing missing, however, was the sharp detail that the state-of-the-art pixel graphics
of the originals showcased.
The 16-bit sound effects, though cruder and lower fidelity, carry much more impact when
a sword is drawn, a critical hit is landed, or a power tech ability is used.
Some abilities in Lost Sphear are satisfying, but the animations are fast, carry little
weight, and don't use that time-stopping trick with a crunchy sound effect when landing
a powerful blow to your enemies.
Something which made every critical hit and special attack in Chrono Trigger feel amazing.
Lost Sphear seems to borrow many little cues from the classics of old.
The starting town immediately reminded me of the beautiful golden vistas of Crysta,
from the lesser-known SNES classic Terranigma.
But that could be coincidence.
The so-called Vulcosuits and steampunk mechs look and function a lot like the magitek suits
from Final Fantasy VI, and some combat abilities are throwbacks to Chrono Trigger, like X-Strike,
Aura and Cyclone.
This new game recreates the workmanlike structure of the world, reminiscent of the sprites and
tiles of classic RPGs, and although some areas look plain for a 2018 game, there are times
where the camera pans down to reveal a gorgeous vista with minimalist and appealing architecture
and terrain.
It's in these moments where the visuals are truly inspired.
Though one area where Chrono Trigger excelled in is the variety of activity and locales
you get to visit.
Your journey spanned from the solitude of an ice age, a bright and beautiful imperial-age
fair, a desolate post-apocalyptic future, medieval fantasy forests and jurassic plains
and mountaintops.
This was partly due to the wide opportunity of locations available in a game about time
travel, though.
I Am Setsuna was much smaller in scope and theme, but Lost Sphear learned some lessons
from its predecessor.
No longer constricted to snowscapes and piano solos, we are introduced to golden grassy
plains, forests, deserts, and steampunk cities and castles.
And the soundtrack was composed more like the full orchestral melodies with much more
instrumental variety.
And at times, it does indeed sound spectacular.
Lost Sphear is an unabashed throwback to the RPGs so popular in the Super Nintendo days
of the early 1990's, but two decades of genre tropes colored the dialogue and stories
of would-be successors.
The style of tales told in earnest in the 80's and 90's, now come off more like
a tribute or a self-aware throwback.
Most of the games of the era that inspired it began with an initial incident: something
to hook in the player and set the stage for the entire game to perform upon.
For Final Fantasy VI, it was Terra's delve into the Narshe Mines with other imperial
soldiers.
When an esper kills her captors and indirectly frees her from mind control, this catapults
the story of her self-discovery, the longstanding conflict of humans and espers and the vile
plots of those who seek to conquer both.
For Secret of Mana, Randi is out exploring with friends, falls from atop a waterfall
and stumbles upon the Sword of Mana.
The ramifications of plucking it from its resting place brings on the monsters and dangers
that get him exiled from his hometown and friends, to eventually saving the world from
assured destruction.
For Chrono Trigger, it started happily during the Millenial Fair.
Crono bumps into a fellow teen and while at his inventor friend's demonstration of her
newest creation, accidentally tears a hole in the fabric of time—leading his group
to discovering mankind's future is doomed--and must now traverse time itself to repair the
course of history.
These are all great setups and explicitly outline the framework of the pursuant story.
So what do we have with Lost Sphear?
You see a king fighting in unknown ruins, but the world is soon consumed by a white
mist.
Fast forward to some years later, in a small town Kanata and his friends fight a few monsters,
go out fishing, and their town turns white and nonexistent when they return.
Kanata figures out quickly that he can collect memories of each object or place that is "lost",
then consume those memories to restore it back to reality.
Some memories are dropped by slain creatures, others are collected by holding a button during
dialogue where an important line in a sentence is highlighted.
He can restore entire lost locations on the world map and in the various areas you visit
during the adventure.
This is a satisfying concept for the story, but the way it is executed throughout the
game is a little dull at times.
The game eventually builds a bit of mystery around these disappearances and the clandestine
actors who would take advantage of the situation for power, but the story needed to have a
stronger catalyst; something that's gripping and creates a conflict to propel you through
the rest of the story.
Even the hook of restoring your own hometown is solved within the first hour or so.
The characters lack a strong motivation.
Most get along peachy until at least 5 or more hours into the game.
A general guideline for compelling storytelling is to establish a protagonist, antagonist,
and motivations early in the first act.
Lost Sphear doesn't explore the main characters much and there isn't much to keep you going
beyond saving Kanata's hometown.
Lazy dialogue transitions occur that have characters magically fade in and out of existence
if they're not convenient to the plot at hand.
One scene literally had the characters gawk about someone disappearing into thin air before
their eyes, only to have one of them disappear right after that since the game devs didn't
know what to do with that character model at the time.
Most 3D games get to use camera tricks to introduce characters that weren't present
when you started a conversation, but in Lost Spear, the game is dedicated to the old-school
overhead camera and does not shift or adjust during dialogue.
It is, however, chock-full of quality-of-life features like quick saves nearly anywhere,
fast forwarding cutscenes and dialogue, rewinding if you missed a line or two, and queuing items
up in a shop for easy pricing before buying.
One great feature they added is a dedicated party chat button - which often leads the
player to where they need to go next, a hint system without banging you over the head constantly
with a quest marker.
But little of the lore is a mystery for long, sometimes with the solution or answer to a
burning question in the very same room.
Or randomly one of your party members will rattle off obscure history despite their previously
unstated expertise on the subject.
Ridiculous detours and solutions like inventing a day-night cycle that has never existed in
their civilization before, simply to sneak into a prison...or derailing the entire quest
to find a stolen wallet, work to defeat player immersion.
Now let's dig a little deeper.
One major factor of the experience and willingness to be engaged with a storyline is context.
Action games and mindless shooters just need to establish how badass you are, and how much
you want to destroy your enemies.
But in a sophisticated and nuanced story as you'd expect in a role-playing game, you'll
instinctively desire character development, memorable friends and notorious villains.
Old school video game stories were presented a little like stage plays; you had to emote
loudly and clearly due to how small the characters appeared, and musical cues would drive the
drama and emotion just as much as the actors themselves.
Lost Sphear attempts to emulate these reactions and feelings with sounds and icons that pop
up next to a character's head, but their faces and reactions change little during much
of conversation, with long stretches of expository dialogue, sometimes repeating itself.
Lost Sphear incessantly tries to explain what's going on in depth rather than show it.
Between the emotive faces, dramatic jumps and cues, Chrono Trigger's story is told
at its best through emotion, rather than words.
Some good examples of this methodology at play is the moment the gang learn of the impending
demise of their world, Marle runs around distressed and you can feel her frustration in her movements,
extending her arms pleading to Lucca and Crono to do the right thing, and save the world.
Compared to a similar conversation about Lost Sphear's danger of the world being consumed
by the mysterious "lost", and you'll see what the problem is.
There's a little-known rule in graphic design: Your layout should speak what you're trying
to get across without any words at all.
This applies to storytelling as well.
It's no coincidence that many movie directors are also painters.
Composition and imagery can communicate a story stronger than words alone ever could.
In many of Chrono Trigger's story sequences, you can get the idea of what is happening
through the visuals, music and sound design alone, even if the dialogue wasn't there.
This isn't the case with much of this spiritual successor.
In the context of a 16-bit RPG from 1995, Chrono Trigger's hyperactive and to-the-point
attitude toward the story works fantastically.
Emotions are exclaimed, motivation is hammered home, and characters are more like simple
archetypes than the mix of a thousand subtleties of a real person.
This is partly due to the less refined translation and localization efforts from Japan to the
West back in the day, and with only a couple hundred pixels rather than a full HD screen,
you could squeeze just a few words into the pixilated dialogue window.
If these limitations were applied to many modern games' conversations it might require
a hundred or so clicks to get through a small chat.
William Shakespeare once said, "Brevity is the soul of wit."
Well, if that's so, designing and writing Chrono Trigger for a low-res and low-tech
piece of hardware, then translating it from Japanese, might have accidentally made this
game's story execution brilliant.
And in this way, it's almost unfair to compare a game from that era to a modern one.
Today, not only is there no excuse to have well-developed characters with deep writing
and world-building, it's expected.
When the lauded Active Time Battle system was already stagnating after use in several
games in the 1990's, players were dazzled by the subtle yet rippling changes Chrono
Trigger introduced to the standard combat formula, popularized by games like Final Fantasy,
Breath of Fire and Phantasy Star.
It used to be that exploring and fighting took place in different worlds, loading a
miniature battle arena in unforeseen random encounters just for the fight at hand, and
taking one out of the experience.
Conversely, Chrono Trigger's offering was seamless.
Whereas attacks in Final Fantasy were either single target or all targets, Chrono Trigger
innovated on this front.
Some special attacks hit multiple targets in a ray, or around a small area of effect.
This made combat more strategic and calculated; you'd wait for enemies to move or shift before
lining up your attack.
Combined with allowing two or three characters to do special attacks or defenses in tandem,
made for a battle system easy to pick up but difficult to put down.
Player characters were expertly designed in look and feel to have a strong personality
both on and off the battlefield.
Frog was the chivalrous knight who had tongue and sword-related attacks.
Robo was a mechanoid from the future who fired rockets and lasers.
Lucca was an inventor who fought using her gadgets and flammables.
Lost Sphear takes the simple combat design of Chrono Trigger and adds depth and complexity
at every corner.
This is easily the most welcome change it introduces.
Modern graphics allow for a much wider battlefield to tacticize in.
Attacks and spells come in all sorts: circles, rays and squares.
The area of effect is now clearly outlined in the battlefield as you plot it out, an
excellent addition.
The payoff of lining several baddies up to land an effective blow has been ecstatically
reproduced here.
Though the character design suffers.
The sword-slinging main character, Kanata, might as well be a reskinned Chrono, his best
friend Lumina fights with her fists and has an assorted set of abilities, Locke uses a
bow for ranged attacks, but is quite similar to Van's ranged weapon, though lacking his
expanded spellcasting mechanics.
They're different enough, but the strong identity and distinct feature set of each
character is greyer than in the games that inspired it.
The touted Vulcosuit system is a bit of a miss for me though, as all it does is drop
your character into a mech with a party-shared mana pool.
There are some unique abilities and the famous Double Techs from Chrono Trigger emerge here
somewhat—available only to pairs of characters inside their Vulcosuits.
In the end though, it works: simple, fast, moderately tactical combat that gets you in
and out of fighting quickly, just like the classic that inspired it.
Lost Sphear ties in its story with an interesting progression mechanic which involves crafting
passive upgrades on the world map out of memories.
This is meant to reflect the restoration of the world that happens throughout your adventure,
and is fine, if only a minimal impact on your effectiveness.
The Spritnite system (as borrowed from I Am Setsuna) is like a simplified version of the
beloved Materia system from Final Fantasy VII; with this you can combine special abilities,
counters and triggers together for a more tailored skillset.
Other layers of depth thrown in include upgrading weapons and armor, and the Momentum system
sees a bar fill up over time during combat when you wait, attack, or get hit, with up
to three pips appearing for each character.
You can activate those in realtime at the press of a button to bolster an attack, or
activate a special effect to your spell, or save it up as a requirement for one of your
Spritnite setups.
There are peripheral systems like food crafting and Sublimation, which permanently adheses
a Momentum bonus to a Spritnite spell after continued use.
There's an attempt at making a fleshed-out system with many intricacies here, but it
just feels like a "What-about-this-too?"
design, rather than distilling what works and what doesn't, to an elegant core set
of mechanics.
Chrono Trigger's combat wasn't complex, but there weren't needless complications added
for the pursuit of depth.
Chrono Trigger's scenario design was varied up in each new area you went to.
You could be trying to plead your case in court one minute, only to be sneaking around
guards the next.
Figuring out the controls to a crane or memorizing a password, or just playing around with carnival
attractions for fun and rewards.
Unfortunately, Lost Sphear relies too heavily on the basics: Walk around, talk to NPCs,
buy equipment, fight a few monsters, repeat.
It's consistent and uninventive, with just a slowly expanding set of tools, rather than
innovative scenarios around every corner.
Though touting more complex and arguably deeper combat, it doesn't vary up its setpieces
and mechanics as much as it could to keep things new and interesting.
One minor annoyance is the fact that items outside of chests reappear when re-entering
areas, making their acquisition seem trivial.
But easily the biggest gameplay problem with Lost Sphear is its chaotic difficulty settings.
I was breezing through enemies so had to set the game to the highest difficulty.
It was more satisfying this way until I hit a sudden boss fight which was nigh impossible,
with a single target performing one-shot kills multiple times before any of my four characters
could act.
Thankfully you can swap difficulty on the fly, but this overcompensation of enemy turn
speed and damage is way out of proportion and makes for a rocky road for those wanting
a moderate challenge.
Lost Sphear has the content for dozens of hours of gameplay, but is there adequate quality,
variety and new mechanics to hold your attention for that long?
It's been compared to Free-to-Play and mobile games, which have notoriously muddied the
waters of what the broad audience considers good value.
You can play solid games for next to or literally nothing.
But it's the hidden costs and manipulative game design that coerces people into coughing
up money that becomes the true cost of some of these Free-to-Play games: your wasted time.
How much a game should cost is subjective.
Some of my most-played games have been under $10, and some of the shortest campaigns I've
enjoyed have been over $40.
To expect a dollar-per-hour conversion of gameplay is a bit ridiculous.
If that were the going rate, games like Wolfenstein: The New Colossus and Uncharted would go for
about 10-15 dollars at release.
So my thought on the matter is that price should reflect quality, whether concentrated
in a tightly-knit, exceptionally acted and linear movie-like storyline, or spread out
over many repeating or similar mechanics and gameplay—like a large open-world RPG or
a survival game.
Bigger budget games need to recoup their development costs and so by necessity are priced higher,
but in cases like No Man's Sky or Lost Sphear, the APPARENCY of being a low-to-medium budget
indie-like game makes the AAA retail pricing unpalatable.
Lost Sphear is a good game, but the fact it isn't a great one frustrates me.
I desperately want to see a high-quality, old-school Japanese RPG like this to succeed
and prove decades-old game design brilliance can shine once more, but in today's market,
this title will be perceived as unremarkable and overpriced.
Tokyo RPG Factory's heart is in the right place.
They have all the right ingredients here: Heart, a simple storyline, a colorful world
and an engaging combat system.
It feels more like a Golden Age RPG than pretty much anything out there I've played for
years.
Even negating the changes that games like Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Cross made such
as flow-breaking combat with overlong animations.
It gets about 75% of the way to becoming a successor to my favorites of the era, but
it falls short in terms of a gripping story, emotion or a consistently compelling drive
forward.
I enjoyed much of this game, but I can't help but feel there are many other games your
average consumer would rather spend their hard-earned $50 on.
And it seems Japan didn't jump ship for the game either, selling about a fifth of
the copies of I Am Setsuna.
So it seems to be a niche title priced (or mispriced) as such.
Will this game revive the dying niche of traditional JRPGs?
Probably not.
But it's a glimmer of hope to those wanting to see a glorious revival of this style of
game.
And I for one applaud it as such.
Let's hope that Square Enix and Tokyo RPG Factory give this almost winning-formula another
shot.
And hey, third time's the charm, right?
You stayed through the whole video.
Good on you!
Let me know in the comments what you thought of Lost Sphear, the JRPG genre, or what you'd
like to see in the future.
My deepest appreciation to my amazing Patrons who help make these videos possible.
And thank you so much for watching!
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