One of my favorite aspects of video games as a medium is its penchant to evolve. Japanese role playing games have been around for over decades and they've gone through a myriad of changes over the years.

Old school JRPG fans will find much to enjoy here, but the refusal to innovate does more harm than good for the genre's reputation.

Solid battle system and plenty of ancillary features and systems; The ideas behind the main plot are interesting, and unusually meta; Great soundtrack

A purposeful lack of new ideas, and sloppy implementation of a number of old ones; Bland script and characters; Surprisingly short and unwarrantedly expensive

If there ever was a blueprint for how a JRPG from the 90s should be designed, Lost Sphear is a game that would follow it to the letter. But instead of it having some form of special valuable selling point or aspect that sets itself apart from the norm, the game just simply exists as some form of...

Decently engaging combat; Story becomes engaging later on; Streamlined and traditional mechanics; Options to skip and fast forward are pretty welcome; Some nice vistas at times

Characters are basically embodiments of tropes; Really traditional and predictable story; despite it becoming engaging in later acts; Extremely slow paced; Visuals leave much to be desired; Plain boring at the best of times

Whatever moral fibre Lost Sphear had seems to have been 'lost' by the immaculate moon.

The great irony is, of course, that is was precisely this combination of feature creep and narrative bloat that moved the JRPG away from the tight-focused joys of the Super Nintendo era and which, eventually, inspired the creation of Tokyo RPG Factory.

Going into 2018, Lost Sphear was one of my most anticipated games of this year. That's because I am Setsuna was easily one of my favorite games last year, specifically on Nintendo Switch where I played it.

The new combat system is a dazzling dance of turn-based action; Each area is gorgeous and colorful; The Memories system lets you shape the world how you see fit

A cast of lifeless characters with no real personality; Occasional stuttering and frame rate problems on Switch; Tags

From Square Enix's Tokyo RPG Factory comes Lost Sphear , a spiritual successor of sorts to I Am Setsuna, and like its predecessor, Lost Sphear is a nod back to the popular, and often lauded, '90s RPGs such as Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Trigger .

As RPGs evolve and adopt more modern complexity, it's refreshing to revisit the classic mechanics that helped make the genre what it is. Like I Am Setsuna (the previous title from developer Tokyo RPG Factory), Lost Sphear tries to capture the 16-bit era, paying homage to classics like Chrono Trigger...

Even if it falls short of becoming a worthy successor to the likes of Chrono Trigger, really does capture the essence of classic role-playing games in a lot of ways. When it's not bogging itself down in overwrought mechanics, this RPG really can spark a sense of nostalgia.

"...Lost Sphear is an unremarkable yet pleasant JRPG experience..." © 2018 Square Enix, Tokyo RPG Factory. All rights reserved.

Great visuals and music; intriguing narrative concepts; quality of life improvements

Overall story falls flat; needlessly bloated systems; unbalanced