RPG Talk: Lost Dimension

In which I talk (write) about RPGs from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: PS Vita (though it's also on PS3 and Steam)
Release: 2015

Lost Dimension is an idea RPG, and by that I mean that it's based on a particular gameplay mechanic or gimmick to stand apart from the rest. Specifically in this case, the player and their cohort are climbing a tower to prevent the end of the world, and on each floor one of their party members turns traitor. The player needs to figure out who the traitor is and root them out before they get stabbed in the back, and the traitors are randomized each playthrough so it's not possible to use a walkthrough to identify them.

Needless to say, I wondered how this was going to work when your party is not a group of faceless mooks. Most RPGs rely on some level of interaction between characters to get through the game and if everybody other than the protagonist is potentially a traitor… how would the game balance that? Would everybody be a flimsy personality, or would it be possible to have a party that I'd genuinely care about by the time I got to the end?

There are eleven playable characters, ten aside from the protagonist, and a total of five will betray the the team by the end, which means that any given companion has roughly a 50-50 chance of being a traitor, with one exception. George is always the first traitor on the first playthrough. I don't know if this was a gameplay decision, because he also has the least developed skill tree out of the cast (for the life of me I can't figure out how his analysis is supposed to work), or because he has the least developed personality, to the point that I can best describe him as Japanese caricature of an American weeb.

Though George is a bit lacking, the rest of the cast is not, which is good because they're the highlight of the game. Each one is distinctive, with their own personality quirks and hang-ups, compounded by the fact they know there are traitors among them. They naturally have trouble trusting each other in the beginning, but bit by bit the backbiting falls away until they feel like a well-honed team.

I would have liked another female character though (the playables are 4 female to 7 male), because they do a fantastic job with the ones they have.

Himeno in particular has become one of my favorite female characters in any RPG, to the point that I feel bad that the only way I can hear her story is by constantly shoving Sho (the protagonist) in her face to bother her.

It's not just that she's as tough on the rest of the party as she is with herself, but I love her hilarious habit of trying brush off Sho with a little TMI. She recognizes that with some men, friendship is just cookies towards a sexual relationship and she isn't having any of that. By telling him things that aren't his business she intentionally makes the conversation as awkward as possible.

The premise of Lost Dimension is that a terrorist going by the name The End, has already wiped out two billion of the Earth's population with targeted strikes in large population centers. He taunts the UN and promises to nuke the rest of the world in thirteen days. In the meantime he waits inside of a mysterious and alien tower called the Pillar that appeared out of nowhere.

In response, the UN sends a team called SEALED to infiltrate the Pillar, and among the various members of SEALED are people known as the Gifted, who each have a different psychic power. However, shortly after arriving, the only members of SEALED to actually make it inside are eleven Gifted, our playable characters. Worse, they have memory loss as to how they actually got inside. None of them know each other, but they recognize they're part of the same team from their uniforms.

The central gimmick of Lost Dimension is the Room of Judgement. After a number of required fights in each stratum of the Pillar, the Room of Judgement is unlocked and the members of SEALED must vote for one of their number to be erased, otherwise the stairs up to the next floor will not appear. There is no way around it. They've tried searching for an alternate exit, but there isn't one, and their psychic abilities (pyrokinesis, teleportation, etc.) are neutralized in the Room of Judgement so they can't cheat their way out.

However, if they have to erase someone and one of their number is a traitor, it would be most convenient to erase the traitor, right? That is the reasoning provided by The End, and though they are reluctant to agree with that line of reasoning, it becomes the most logical choice.

Sho is unusual for a protagonist is that his ability is not the flashy kind. Himeno is the pyrokinetic in the group. Toya has electromagnetism. Agito is the guy who teleports.

What Sho has is precognition. It's an interesting choice, given that most stories put precogs in support functions, but Lost Dimension makes Sho's ability central to the game. At the end of each battle Sho hears echoes of his teammates' voices from a potential future. (The fun thing after having beaten the game a couple times is that I recognize the various conversations where many of the future lines come from.)

If there is a suspicious person in that group of five he can hear the discord in their thoughts. Being suspicious is not enough though. Given the fact everyone is on edge and knows there are traitors around, it's unsurprising that people would be watching their backs, so Sho has to use a deeper vision into a given suspect's mind to find out if they're the traitor. The game limits the number of times he can do this and autosaves on every use, so there's no cheating around it.

The traitor is obviously not interested in being erased, so they will be manipulating the opinions of the rest of the team as well. Being a precog, Sho can call up a prediction of how the vote would turn out if everyone voted at that very moment, so if he sees an innocent person is currently slated for erasure, the player can do something about it to sway opinions.

The game doesn't call it out, and Sho himself is not inherently a manipulative person, but what he ends up doing is socially isolating the traitor on every floor and ensuring that they're the one erased rather than one of his allies. But as I played, I began to wonder why Sho never tries talking to a traitor prior to erasing them. There's no time when everyone votes, since the giant eraser beam activates shortly after voting, but narratively he should be able to try beforehand.

George actually brings this up in his character dialogue (which means it's only accessible on a second playthrough) and though Sho doesn't directly spell it out, it's implied that the reason he doesn't speak to the traitors prior to voting, is because even if he knew the other person's motivation, it wouldn't change the fact the team has to erase someone at the end of every stratum. If he knew their reasons, it might be too hard to erase them.

This is understandable given Sho's personality. He walks a nice balance between wanting to believe in his companions and being realistic enough to know that sometimes he can't. But as a player it's frustrating, especially on a second playthrough and the answers just aren't coming.

Lost Dimension's greatest fault is the pacing of its otherwise intriguing premise, requiring at least two playthroughs to see the true ending. Worse, the first ending is the unsatisfying kind that gives no answer. Sure, Sho and his surviving band of psychics defeat The End, but even they know that there is a significant part of the story they're missing. The End claims that with their choice they've condemned billions of people to death and Sho has a strange vision of a meteor crashing into the Earth. But the world is still there. He doesn't knows what happened.

The true end is locked by two factors. The first one is that Sho must correctly erase all traitors, and second is that he must befriend all his companions. The latter is only possible across multiple playthroughs since early traitors will be erased before their storylines can be completed.

On top of that, the randomized traitors mean that the second condition for obtaining the true ending (becoming friends with everyone) is a potential gamble (*). Two playthroughs is the minimum for the best ending, but by no means a maximum.

And the second playthrough is not immediately enlightening. Other than the fact a certain mysterious child shows up earlier in second and subsequent playthroughs, and the player can pick up new research files, there's nothing new in between the start of the game and the fifth stratum on New Game+ unless the player is on the path to the true ending.

So why are people betraying the group? Once you get past the premise of Lost Dimension, finding traitors and rooting them out, that's really the question worth asking, isn't it?

It's actually a nifty idea, which is why I dislike how the execution in game was so poor, and if not for the teaser tidbits I probably would've stopped sooner.

The thing is, a long time ago all of the Gifted were ordinary kids until they were implanted with the Fate Materia, which is a set of stones that protects Earth from extinction level calamities (just roll with it). There are twelve stones and twelve Gifted. The End is the twelfth.

When a giant meteor threatened to destroy Earth, the scientists of the time built TOF, otherwise known as the Pillar, which is a sort of link between dimensions, specifically that of their Earth and a new one they replicated (without the meteor attack). The Gifted were instrumental in the creation of the new world, but because of certain qualities of the stones, not all of them could cross over to the new one, otherwise the new dimension would become a complete replica of the one with a meteor attack. To stay meteor free, six of them would have to be left behind on a world that was doomed to be destroyed in the next ten years.

Being a precog (though still a child at the time), Sho was given the task to select who would stay behind. One of them was The End. The children's memory of this was later erased.

The SEALED members who show up at the tower at the beginning of the game, confused and with partially missing memories, are from both dimensions, both the original meteor-stricken one and the newer meteor-free one. Sho is always from the meteor-free dimension, but at the beginning no one is aware that they're from two different dimensions, which is only possible because of the tower they're in.

The traitors are all from the meteor dimension, and The End enlightens them one at a time as they go up the tower, which is why they all turn on Sho at the end of the game if he has not erased them on the way up. Because the Earth was only replicated, the original dimension is still in need of saving and the traitors are willing to kill Sho to do it.

What isn't clear is how the meteor dimension can be saved by defeating Sho. In the super bad ending where Sho erases all his allies instead of the traitors, The End implies he will somehow acquire Sho's power and go back in time, but that really doesn't explain how he and the others will stop the meteor.

And it doesn't explain why everybody except the Gifted appear to exist in both worlds. Why would people create a new world that survives when theirs doesn't? It's not like "Well, at least a copy of me continues existing somewhere else" is much comfort. And why are the six Gifted left behind randomized except for The End? Their powers are always the same, so they should have the same stones inside them no matter what. Is it that multiple combinations were viable so child Sho could actually make more than one choice?

True ending was disappointing. After all that anticipation, all that build-up, it doesn't entirely make sense, and makes even less sense once Sho decides to find a way for The End to live. He essentially combines his power with The End's and somehow that allows him to teleport to the meteor dimension and literally punch out the meteor before it hits, thus sparing life in the original dimension.

At that point my brain fried. Did that really just happen?

Sho is a precog and The End's ability allows him to witness other dimensions (which is how we get the randomized traitors, any given playthrough is a different reality The End is witnessing), so how does he do any of this? We see chunks of rock falling down, reaction shots of The End and the surviving party members, and that's it. No sign of Sho. Is he dead? Did he stay in the meteor dimension? Nobody knows.

I feel like this is a game where the mechanics were made first and then they forced the story around it. It has some really nice ideas. I like people being from two different dimensions and not knowing it. I like the randomized traitor as a gameplay mechanic. The worldbuilding with the research notes was excellent. It just needed more of it, and for the story to be better thought through so it would come together in the end.

And seriously, something better than teleporting into space and punching a meteor.

(*) Gameplay Note: I don't usually mention gameplay, but walkthroughs don't cover this and I had really bad luck with randomized traitors. As a result of my many playthroughs, I can say with some confidence that traitors are not truly random. They're picked based on battle rankings at the start of each floor from the second stratum onward, so someone at the bottom who is at risk of being voted out is not going to be the traitor, even if they are a suspicious voice. Traitors will only come from the middle or top ranked characters. So if there's someone you really want to survive, use them only the bare minimum to keep them from being erased. I was able to spare two people this way (three may be pushing it). Starting with the fourth stratum up, when the final traitors are decided, you can safely put them back in your party.