The Lost Child

released on Aug 24, 2017

A first-person RPG dungeon crawler set in the present day and continuing the El Shaddai series. The game uses random encounters and turn-based combat with a team of 5 characters. Creatures can be captured and added to your team, as well as being combined to create more powerful creatures.


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The Lost Child is very much based on the classic SMT formula, in pretty much every aspect. The story revolves around a battle between heaven and hell, the classic rpg dungeon crawling, and finally you team of defeated demons to join your party. Just because it’s an SMT-lite, doesn’t mean it’s not fun. The story is fairly interesting and the gameplay should satisfy even the most hardcore of Atlus enthusiasts.

37 hours for the main story. Got sick of the instant kill bullshit in the end and just cheesed the final boss in Easy.

It's got a lot of good ideas for a dungeon crawler - the way that skills are learned in battle like Saga, the way that enemy hate is handled (it's one of the few RPGs I've seen which makes defending really matter) and the whole modern day occult setting is pretty good. There's a section in the middle which is really well done and properly brings the game together with El Shaddai that I really enjoyed. It just has too many niggling issues though; the Vita version runs so badly (and doesn't support Vita TV, infuriatingly), the game has separate trophy lists for each version which don't share, and the whole interface is about half a second too slow in every action. It takes about 30 seconds on the PS4 to revive and return a summon to your team from the menus because they're so slow and unresponsive. You have to quit and restart the entire game, which takes a full minute on Vita, if you want to upload a network shared save, because you can only do it from the title screen.

My biggest fault in the end ended up being something which happens in other games but is particularly egregious here - if the main character dies it's instantly game over. The worst part is that there doesn't seem to be any kind of defence against instant kills, and so you can just be told to do the fight again because the random number generator rolled a 1. The last few bosses just ended up with the two main characters just kind of cowering in defence, hoping not to die from a stray attack/group hit, while my summoned "astrals", 20+ levels above them, just pounded away on the enemy.

They clearly know it's an issue as well as there is a system where you can retry from just before the fight you died in for a fee, and that fee is tiny. All it does is waste your time and I can't help that that (plus the too-slow XP gain for the main characters compared to the Karma points you use to level up your astrals) is in service of getting that first clear time closer to 40 hours.

In the end, frustrating and ordinarily I'd say that they'll get it right next time but I don't think there will be one. If you're interested, definitely pick it up for PS4 and don't worry about turning down the difficulty at the end, or enjoy the grinding. It's fairly well set up for that.