Lost Sphear

There are surprises in the storytelling, with one or two genuine shocks, even if one twist is blindingly obvious

Centred on a plucky group seeking to revive lost places by summoning old memories, Lost Sphear’s story might seem a little on-the-nose coming from a studio whose raison d’etre seems to be just that. As with its wintry debut, I Am Setsuna, this is a consciously old-fashioned JRPG, designed to evoke fond feelings of a time before extravagant, fully voiced cutscenes and lavish presentation became the norm. It uses the same top-down camera as its predecessor, and also features a turn-based battle system with realtime elements. There’s some shared terminology, too, and a melancholic undercurrent to its narrative. Yet if this spiritual successor of sorts has been pressed into a similar mould, it’s not quite the production-line number it first appears – and not only because you have a party of four this time, rather than three.

The world’s still blanketed in white, but it’s not snow that’s covering the ground; rather, a strange phenomenon is occurring whereby towns and villages are becoming ‘lost’ – replaced by a twinkling, empty space. It turns out that they’re not so much gone as forgotten: the residual memories of these places have somehow attached themselves to nearby monsters, and only by defeating them can our heroes reinstate these settlements and their inhabitants.