1 lost sphear - an rpg with very soft music, trying out the demo

Dear Readers,

There's so much to do in Super Mario Odyssey that I've built up a bit of a backlog of Switch games! I decided to try out the demo for the RPG Lost Sphear.

The impression I'm getting from reviews of this game are that it's familiar and ordinary, yet solid. That's fine as long as it's good I suppose.

The font of this game is great :) Legible and functional and crisp! The title screen and logo artwork are really nice. The soft piano is nice and minimalist but could end up being lulling.

On starting the demo, I'm immediately in the field with companions. We are Kanata, Lumina, Galdra, Obaro and Van. We have to restore lost lands and this will do something for our battle abilities. Some stuff to learn here.

The dialogue has an option to rewind, visual novel style. I like this feature a lot :)

We wandered around the map a bit, collecting items at glowing spots and filling in the cloudy parts. This map is a bit like Bravely Default's map with its view. Anyway, we headed to Rajet. We met Aronus there, who wanted us to fill in a blank spot on the road.

We then got into our first battle! It has an ATB system and I'm not the biggest fan of it but it's okay. I just did some attacking for now. There is some tutorial stuff but I'll catch on later. The battle theme is nice but still very gentle and lulling. Consistent with the rest of the soundtrack so far.

The blank spot turned out to be a rock and I then got to use a vulcosuit. I can toggle between these mech suit things and they have their own abilities and stuff too.

Aronus is pretty pushy... is he on our side?

I quite like Van's attack that goes through a bunch of enemies in a line :)

We climbed up the mountain and went into a cave. Some people called Twilighters lived here and we had to capture them for some reason. It seemed cruel.

The Twilighters were under suspicion for causing all the lost blank spaces and our job was to round them up. Sodas and Sherra were among them and they were fighting amongst themselves. Then we had to fight Sherra.

Sherra beat us all up pretty quickly with her strong charm attacks. She had a couple of big beast creatures with her too for extra muscle. Then I was thrown back to the title screen. I'll have to start again another time.

It looks like we're part of this empire that's likely to be evil. How did we get mixed up with these guys? I'm really curious about this!

So yeah, with the gameplay I still feel kinda lost as I haven't learned about all the various moves.

There certainly is a dramatic storyline going on but the atmosphere and music is very lulling and gentle and doesn't really go with it at all.

The graphical style is very much like Bravely Default or Final Fantasy III DS, where it's in 3D and the characters are kind of like little munchkins. A lot of RPGs from recent handhelds are like this so it's reminiscent but at the same time it's kinda samey.

On the status screen, the characters show up as tiny Mother 3 styled sprites. This is really weird! It feels like they're taking bits and pieces from other older games and throwing them together. I'll play a bit more.