Lost Dimension tricked me in a way few games have done before.
At its surface is a bog standard tactics RPG, turn based, move your dudes, attack the enemy, use spells, return to lobby, gear up, start next mission from the mission list. It is a simple loop, quick to get you playing. There are a few tricks. Namely, one of your team is a traitor.
You would think that is important, but it actually is not. The game is not about what is essentially a secret agent/superhero team going up against a madman with a traitor among them. The traitor is one of your party members, and he or she does not move against you in any way. You control the traitor's every move in battle and he will never act poorly or try to stop you. You suss out the traitor with a simple mind reading metagame that is only tough if you still do not understand it fully, and you must do so before proceeding at the end of each chapter as at least one person must die each chapter. So I won't spoil it by explaining the rules, just saying if you figure out what the rules are, you will never let a traitor go by. ... Yes, a traitor. There are multiple. In fact, beyond one scripted traitor, it is random each chapter who becomes a traitor next, and each NG+ run is all random. Weird, huh? Like I said, the game isn't about the traitors. It could not be with this level of plot muckery. This is a game about the mechanics. I will come back to this later and talk more about the mechanics.
Lancarse has experience with Etrian Odyssey. If you have not had the pleasure, EO essentially has some of the best RPG combat on the market. Varied classes, deep skill trees with a lot of options, a lot of challenge, and yet no needless complexity or lame arithmetic. Every skill, buff, debuff, ailment, it's all meaningful, even on bosses, and yet with immense variety between the classes. You have much of the same stuff here: Each of your twelve characters has a massive skill tree with three major branches focusing on different gimmicks. You have a healer, a tank, a warrior, a fire mage... but you also have a linker who can copy the stats and movesets of any other character in range, a teleporter who can control the spacing of the battlefield; you have more skill trees and classes than you can shake a stick at. While the expertise of EO is not fully realized here, the variety on offer is incredible. Now, wouldn't suck to randomly lose one of these because he was a traitor? That's the trick: You don't. When the time comes to execute a traitor, what gets left behind is his materia... essentially, his skill tree. You can then equip his skills to one of your living characters. You can no longer level them up, but suddenly you can give your healer the buffer's skills, or your fire mage the psi mage's skills. Some of these materia combinations can even unlock ultra moves in certain characters that can be real game changers.
THIS is Lost Dimension. Everything else is in service to this mechanic. Your team is whittled down from a dozen rotating team members to a lean half dozen hybrid classes where everyone is holding so many skills you do not quite know what to do with them all. This is where it tricked me; it took me two full plays to realize this is what they intended with this game. This is also why the game insists on a NG+ run for the true end: Lost Dimension wants you to replay it again, each time building up a new team, culled at random, to build a new series of hybrid warriors. In fact, you barely get to enjoy this system until NG+ where you get bonus skill points to really enjoy it (You start again at level 1 with no gear, but with extra skill points. Be careful not to overspend and make your mana costs too high before you have enough mana to support it!), and extra missions to really cut your teeth on. To get into the spirit of the game, I recommend you keep separate endgame saves of every team just so you can compare what your teams end up looking like from run to run.
Does Lost Dimension succeed at making an endlessly replayable game? I do not think it does it perfectly. The skills aren't all equally viable. The balancing isn't at EO level; some characters are just much better. The assist shot system, where enemies and allies near to an attacker can join in on the attack, overrides almost all that skill tree strategy and makes the positioning and "defer" system, essentially a baton pass to pass your turn to another character after you have moved but not acted, mean a lot more than clever skills. The game is also a little long to encourage repeated play, about 12-15 ish hours a run.
As far as the actual plot goes, you figure out pretty quick that The End is doing all this for some grand reason, and the first ending isn't a disappointment like Nier Automata was, but you have to get to the NG+ true end for the full gist of it so between start and the various endings is a lot of faffing about and social link type stories. The writing is on and off; your comrades all have serious issues, stuff that is too weird to take seriously and not goofy enough to be successful comedy. Your protagonist is at least written as a forceful personality, eager to slap down or call out these dopes, but it is not enough to save the conversations from feeling kinda stilted and autistic. But beyond all that, what Lost Dimension offers is a very clever turn based strategy with a lot of interesting ideas. It's easy to play: just pick a mission and roll, then check your math and see if you are closer to figuring out the traitor. Just... don't get too attached to your waifu. You might only get to keep her in the next run.
