In order to complete Lumina's side quest and get the Sunlight Spritnite for one of her abilities, you need to return back to the starter town Elgarthe. A scene will automatically play and it will. Sometimes in JRPGs, you get caught up doing side quests or other small tasks for so long that you forget what you're actually supposed to be doing to progress the story. Luckily for everyone, Lost Sphear has included a system to get us back on track when we get lost.
Lost Sphear plays as a kind of “greatest hits” album of all the best mechanics and themes of the past few decades of JRPGs. Some have criticized it as being too derivative, while others say that it is a refreshing return to design philosophies that have proven themselves in the past.We’re not here to tell you whether or not Lost Sphear is worth playing. For that you can read our Instead, we’re going to take an in depth look at the influences the developers utilized to create this old school JRPG adventure.
Just how many games paved the long road to Lost Sphear? Chrono Trigger – The General Battle System. Chrono Trigger is the most obvious influence at first glance. Between the ATB battle system, encounters taking place on the map without a battle transition, area based techs, and even a short cameo by dual techs, the battle system is almost a copy/paste. Correction, the battle system is copy/pasted from I Am Setsuna, which was a copy/paste of Chrono Trigger.But the influence here goes deeper than mechanics. Chrono Trigger also inspired Lost Sphear’s battle design. Chrono Trigger’s boss battles were more than just souped up versions of normal enemies.
They were all designed as a sort of puzzle. The player had to figure out not only what the boss was weak against, but also how to get around the powerful counter attacks and special defenses.Lost Sphear does the same thing, but with a focus on positioning. You’ll encounter a boar that can attack multiple enemies in a line, so the puzzle solution is to spread your party out. You’ll encounter a mech that can one hit kill anything that stands in front of it, so you flank it. This design philosophy helps battles feel tense, rather than spam fests of highly damaging moves and heals. Xenogears – The Vulcosuits.
Lost Sphear lets you ride in giant robots, though it certainly wasn’t the first RPG to toy with this mechanic. It’s clear that the Vulcosuit mechanic was inspired by the Gears system of Xenogears.When you got into your giant robot in Xenogears combat fundamentally changed; your damage and HP increased dramatically. Your skills were far more limited, but packed a huge punch. You were also limited by your fuel, a mostly non-replenishable resource that depleted as you took actions. If your fuel ran out, you were out of luck.Lost Sphear’s Vulcosuits are very similar.
While the stat increases are nowhere near as large as they were when you got into Gears during Xenogears, the rest of the mechanics are functionally identical. Your skills become limited, your stats dramatically increase, and your actions pull from a limited pool of VP that is, for the most part, non-replenishable.
The one major change here is that VP is shared by the party, which operates similarly to Super Mario RPG. Super Mario RPG – Timed Hits. Aside from the shared pool of VP that operates somewhat like Super Mario RPG’s shared pool of FP, Nintendo’s cute and cartoony RPG series also served as an inspiration for Lost Sphear’s momentum mechanic. In Mario RPG series, you could time button presses with your attacks in order to increase the damage done.
It made the battle system more interactive. In Lost Sphear you do the same, but you need to have a momentum stock to spend in order to do so.
It’s a small influence but it produces the same effect, making battles feel more interactive. Com homes for sale. Legend of Mana – Artifacts. No, not Secret of Mana, Legend of Mana. This little known installment in the Mana franchise came out for the PS One way back in 2000.
In this game, the world was destroyed and you used special items called “artifacts” to bring lost areas back into existence. Depending on what artifacts you used and where you placed them, these areas would then have special effects that altered what enemies you faced and what bonuses you would get in battle.Lost Sphear has a similar system. While you aren’t rebuilding the world from scratch, you are restoring lost areas through the use of artifacts and these artifacts have an effect on battles and enemy encounters.
Assorted Final Fantasies – Spritnite. It’s hard to really pin down any one specific game that Lost Sphear took inspiration from for its Spritnite system.Killing enemies gets you “memories,” which is the standard loot of the game. Going to a magic shop allows you to change those memories into Spritnite, which you then slot into one of your character’s Spritnite slots in order to give them access to a tech. You can also equip passive Spritnite, or Spritnite that adds effects to the techs you already own.Going to a store and buying magic is very similar to the very first Final Fantasy, as is having a limited number of slots for your techniques. However, the slotting system feels somewhat reminiscent of Final Fantasy 7. You aren’t slotting your Spritnite into weapons, but you are linking them with each other which provides additional effects. The way these effects eventually become permanent once you have fought enough battles with them feels similar to how you learned skills from your equipment in Final Fantasy 9.
Spritnite also has Charge Time, similar to Final Fantasy Tactics. It’s kind of a Final Fantasy grab back here, so let’s just say that Lost Sphear was inspired by the franchise as a whole. MOBAs – Charge Time. With Charge Time, every time you use a skill you have to wait a certain amount of turns before using it again. This shares something in common with Final Fantasy Tactics as mentioned before, but in Tactics charge time just determined how long it would take before you could take a turn again.
You could spam the same action all you liked.There’s another inspiration for this new mechanic: MOBAs, the genre that seems to be lending mechanics to every other genre these days. Granted, MOBAs run in real time, and character abilities have cooldowns in real time. However, the purpose of these cooldowns is the same: to prevent characters from spamming the same ability over and over again.
Cooldowns force players to use all of their skills instead of just one favorite, and that’s exactly what Charge Time does in Lost Sphear. Tales and Star Ocean 2 – Talking With the Party. One of Lost Sphear’s major new mechanics (seriously, it shows up on advertising and everything) is the ability to talk to your own party members. Just press the R1 button and you can hear what’s on your party members’ minds. However, Lost Sphear is far from the first game to allow you to do that.Fans of Bandai Namco’s Tales series may be familiar with “skits.” These short little scenes also let you talk to your party members.
Unlike Lost Sphear which only uses this mechanic for short quips and hints, Tales sketches can last for minutes at a time and provide quite a bit of character development.Star Ocean 2 took it a step further. Instead of just triggering a scene where the party talks to each other, you can actually cause the party to split up and wander around town independent of your main character. This not only acted as a hint system but was needed to progress the game or to trigger certain side-quests. It’s safe to say that Lost Sphear’s implementation of the party talk mechanic is pretty minimalist by comparison.
Manage your resources as a princess or duel other players as a knight. Knights and brides game help. Play with your friends and find your soul mate.
Quintet’s Games – Restoring the Lost, Rebuilding the World. Our final piece of inspiration has more to do with narrative than mechanics. In the SNES era, Quintent made a series of games that all centered around the world’s death and rebirth. These were games like Actraiser, Soul Blazer, and my personal favorite Terranigma. While playing these games, your adventures would lead you to take actions that restored the world to its former state and would shed light on why the world was destroyed in the first place.The plot of Lost Sphear has Quintet written all over it.
From the myth of the moon’s role in the world’s death and rebirth, to the slow restoration of the elements and even concepts such as time, Lost Sphear is all about recreating the world anew, which was Quintets Modus Operandi.Lost Sphear is an amalgamation of so many different systems and games, we might have missed a few. Can you think of any inspirations we didn’t mention? Let us know in the comments.