Lost Dimension review: in sheep's clothing

Released in Japan last year for PlayStation 3 and PS Vita, Lost Dimension is the latest title from developer Lancarse and Persona publisher Atlus. It's a tactical role-playing game with a killer hook: As you progress through the game, you weed out traitors from your group of companions.

The premise is clever, but Lost Dimension doesn't execute on it flawlessly. It has hiccups, falling prey to repetition especially. Among its faults, however, is a genuinely interesting take on the genre.

Lost Dimension opens on the eve of the world's destruction, when a cartoonish villain by the name of The End threatens to destroy the planet. World leaders send an elite team of 11 "gifted" soldiers to take down The End for good. To do this, hero Sho and his companions have to fight their way through a mysterious tower filled with strange enemies while weeding out the traitors in their midst.

The tower itself is divided into several floors, with main and side missions to be completed in a selected squad of six. Battles are turn-based, but action-oriented; you take control of each character and can run around the map with them. As characters begin to trust and like each other, they'll provide support in the form of satisfying follow-up attacks. By positioning my team smartly and building these bonds, I learned to topple tough enemies with ease.

These battles are fun on a basic level, but it's the characters themselves that make them so satisfying. Everyone has a unique gift that makes their individually leveled talents valuable. There’s an assassin with the power of levitation, for example, and a teleportation-based fighter who becomes a puff of smoke when he moves. Lost Dimension made it easy to create vastly different yet complementary squads with the soldiers I had, even if there were a couple I never found terribly useful.

This idea in itself isn't a bad one, but being caught off guard by it felt like a cheap trick. Although I was told early to bond with my teammates, the game failed to express how important that socializing actually was. It’s not that I didn't try to master this mechanic, either. I simply gave up after it started to feel pointless — building the trust of my teammates didn't seem to affect the identity of the traitor. I watched my closest squadmates turn on me floor after floor, no matter how much time I’d spent winning over their support.

Sniffing out traitors is one of the most important, and sometimes difficult, aspects of Lost Dimension. After every battle, Sho hears snippets of his companions' thoughts, allowing him to sense traitors in his midst. When you’ve got one in your group, he’s firm about it.

Traitors are randomized with each new game, so it's impossible to find them any other way than Sho's powers. In practice, this boils down to shuffling in and out different party members for each battle and employing a good deal of mental sleuthing. Once I'd narrowed my suspicions to a handful of people, I’d use a Vision Point to dig through a culprit's thoughts and either confirm my guess or clear a suspect. I love how much this made me sweat. Vision Points are a rare commodity, only achieved through certain battles, so I couldn’t afford to be foolish.

Lost Dimension isn't afraid to punish you for your mistakes, which lends even more weight to these decisions. The traitors you let live eventually turn on you, leaving you to finally kill them in battle; if you screw up, you’re at a disadvantage with one less teammate. Even when I felt unfairly forced into this situation, I loved the sense of actual consequences to my choices. It's a testament to the likability of the game’s characters that, upon learning two of my favorites were traitors, I was heartbroken.

I like that Lost Dimension randomizes these outcomes, even when it's frustrating that you can’t influence characters to stay at your side by building their trust. The game is smart about balance, too. Every time you lose a character, their skills are kept alive through materia you can equip any party member with. When my healer or my favorite tank died, I was able to not only keep their talents, but actually enhance a character that would otherwise be a weak link.