Nintendo Switch – The Lost Child #171

Sometimes things are best left short…

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The Lost Child – Nintendo Switch – Released: 6/19/18 – $49.99

Short Review (Review copy provided by NIS America)

NIS America puts out some great titles that I hold dear to my heart like Disgaea and Danganronpa but “The Lost Child” is a game I don’t plan on revisiting. The first few hours of “The Lost Child” makes it seem like a solid game from start to beginning but then 10-15 hours in, you notice the cracks. “The Lost Child” is a Dungeon Crawling RPG and while this genre isn’t one that I spend a ton of time on, it is one that I always find myself coming back to certainly the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series. “The Lost Child” has one fatal flaw… the story drags on, it has plenty of good moments to close the story just to fake you out. The biggest and baddest villain will show himself repeatedly before sending a lesser villain to deal with you as he escapes. It is like watching an old Saturday morning cartoon that doesn’t know when to end the series.

I found myself revisiting the same 4-6 dungeons over and over again for the first 15 hours. While I have no issues with this, the game doesn’t give you an easy way to progress the story. So you find yourself spending an hour or two working on a layer to get 100% discovery just to find out, you are in the wrong dungeon. Then before the game wraps up it takes a sharp turn to finish the story. “The Lost Child” could have been a solid 15 hour experience but the confusing dungeons, no marker for the main story objectives, movement in the dungeons and battling system waste your time. While I did have a great experience for the first 10 hours, putting around 5 hours the first day due to the engaging story, I found the last half of the game drawn out with no sign of it ending. I would give “The Lost Child” a 6 out of 10, the game had the making of a solid title and one I was looking forward to but after the rose tinted glasses came off, it was a brutal mess that needed a better direction.

This icon looks really good wish the title was a bit bigger but otherwise great:

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Story

Hayato is an occult journalist when a mystery woman named Lua shows up and claims that he is the chosen one. He finds out that he is a special person that can use a weapon call the Gangour, a gun-like device that captures demons. He uses the gangour so he can catch demons for himself in battle. Once he finds out that an evil deity has come to destroy the world by taking over the pillars to heaven. He ventures out to solve the mysteries of Japan one dungeon at a time while defeating the evil deities that have latched onto the pillars eating all souls who try to escape.

Gameplay

The Lost Child is a dungeon crawler that requires you to catch demons and use them in battle. You will find yourself looking through dungeons for the entrance to the pillars to defeat a big boss in each dungeon. These dungeons are filled with traps, hidden walls, levers, and buttons to be pressed. While the game does offer a nice range of demons for you to collect you will need to level them up to gain new attacks. Hayato and Lua can equip different items and level up to become stronger but the demons will need to be fed essences. These essences come in three forms, light, dark, and dual. These have different experience gains depending on which one is fed.

The demons you capture don’t have any items to equip but will have special abilities that are different element types. All enemies have a rock, paper, scissors to their types as you can attack a water demon with electric to do much damage but using water against a water demon will result in lesser damage or healing.

Personal Experience

This game started out really solid with amazing cutscenes, a dramatic story that pulls you in, and a leveling mechanic that kept me changing demons throughout my play through. The downside is the game is all over the place once you get beyond the opening sections. I found myself being introduced to dungeon mechanics 80% into the game with the introduction of electrical boxes to power doors. This part drove me insane due to them coming out of nowhere and giving me a marker of where they are located if I pass them. This is something that was badly needed when the introduction of hidden walls were introduced around 10 hours into the game. I feel as though the game tries way too hard to be more than what it needed to be and drew out an excellent game.

My biggest issue came in the form of areas that required different demon kills to unlock the door. Instead of having a higher spawn rate in those rooms for those enemies, I found myself pressing L and R to move left and right repeatedly until an enemy spawned. This was the final straw for me since something that should only take a few minutes could potentially takes 5-10 minutes waiting on the right enemies to appear. This wasn’t just one room either… there were several of these rooms in the same layer. Doing this for an hour was a pain when the bulk of the dungeon wasn’t even complete. In that same dungeon I was also hit with doors that would close behind me resulting in me going around in circles if the incorrect path was chosen.

Final Thoughts

The Lost Child starts off very strong and would be on par with other NIS America games but it is hard to keep pushing to finish line. Once I finished it, it was a sigh of relief as I knew I didn’t have to return to it for another play. About half way through the game I found myself just pressing the A button in battles as many characters were overpowered from the grinding that I didn’t mean to do. Too many of the “puzzle” elements were forced and made me push against every wall to the point where some felt like luck to find. The weirdest one being a riddle about the “unluckiest path” which ended up just being a random long wall. As I did enjoy the opening half of the game, it is hard to say this game is great all the way until the end so if you don’t mind what I’ve said you should check it out. I would give the game a 6 out of 10!

My Gameplay Footage:

Will upload once I return from vacation!

Trailer: