Sorry guys, due to time constraints, my backlog, and real life pressures, this review and probably the next few won't feature the user-friendly screenshots and achingly witty/smashingly clever captions you have no doubt come to my love in my last 5-10 reviews. I hope that this will still be a fun read without them.

THE LOST GIRLS REVIEW (49/100)
The Law Of Conservation Of Good

The Lost Girls (no relation) by StarSkipping and SorceressKristy is an excellent example of a principle in amateur game design that I've observed. Namely, the better one specific area of a game is, the more effort has been focused into that discipline, the more the rest of the game will suffer. This means that a game can shine in some areas and suck in others, or be 'just okay' all around. Very rare is the game that is awesome in every respect. Sadly, The Lost Girls is no exception to this rule. Let me tell you why.

Story

The story of The Lost Girls gets automatic points for having some thought put into it, and for not being generic jRPG lite anime fantasy fare. Here's what it loses points for, though: it simultaneously hit no less than THREE of my pet peeves.

* The presentation of dialogue in this game is embarrassingly awful, rife with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and typos. This is almost inconceivable to me, to be honest, when compared with the quality and effort of the game's custom graphics. Would it have killed you to take one second away from spriting to make the game's dialogue not seem like it was typed by a dyslexic drunk who didn't give half a shit about presenting a polished, professional final product?

* The distant future, the year 2000. My pet name for one of my biggest pet peeves in all of science fiction. We all saw The Terminator when it was relevant, right? And a couple years later, we all laughed that James Cameron had set "Judgement Day" in the "Distant Future" of 1997, right? So why are people still making the mistake of placing their science fiction settings HUNDREDS of years too *early* to be taken seriously.

For instance, The Lost Girls is set in the year 2020, nine years from now. And the most unrealistic thing in the game is not, in any way shape or form, the demonic invasion that has crippled earth. For me it is the fact that we are supposed to have working nanotech and man-portable teleportation technology just nine years from now.

I can see two possible excuses for this. One is that the game is not set in the future of our world, but is set in the future of an alternate history where humankind has made significantly more extreme technological breakthroughs by 2012. If this is the case, it needs to be brought way more to the forefront.

The other excuse I can imagine is, "The Lost Girls" isn't meant to be serious/realistic, it's meant to be animu and over-the-top. Well, if THAT'S the case...it falls into the third and probably most serious pet peeve of mine this game commits.

* Tonal inconsistency. This game really cannot seem to decide what tone it wishes to have. There are scenes of high military action and science fiction espionage, scenes of truly gruesome horror, and light animu gag scenes, all jammed together. It makes the game feel disjointed, jarring, and confused. Like, the game has a genuinely great *gotcha* scare at one point where a horrible cthonic tentacle launches itself down a corridor just out of sight and drags off an allied soldier screaming. The (severely unlikable, largely due to this phenomenon) protagonist then remarks something like "Hmmm.....I guess I should probably save him, huh?". Her nonchalance is so palpable it makes her an immediately hateful bitch. I found myself going....GEE, YA THINK!

So you then idly amble down the corridor and turn a corner near a blood smeared door to discover the horribly mutilated decapitated body of the soldier you failed to save. You then crack wise about it (!) while searching his body for a key. The next scene is basically a gag about fighting a giant washing machine monster.

If the game is genuinely about demons, than demons should be scary, or silly, but they shouldn't randomly careen in between scary and silly.

This game needs to decide what it wants to be, in a sense of narrative and tone, because right now it's failing to be anything.

In spite of a title that seems highly allusive and literary, the game's writing also just generally lacked narrative panache and style.

SCORE: 30/100

Gameplay

TLG suffers from the syndrome where a game invests a lot of effort and custom stuff to achieve an end result that...probably would have been more fun with less effort and more use of default material. The game opens with a HALO jump where your character doesn't bother with the LO part or a parachute at all--there's that tonal confusion again, by the way, because the use of the correct military terminology for a HALO jump immediately invokes a game that is at least 'Metal Gear Solid' serious about modern military realism, but then your character eschews the use of a parachute and survives anyway, really ruining thewilling suspension of disbelief established to that point--which you control, which I thought was kind of cool. Unfortunately, like everything in The Lost Girls, this sequence is buggy as shit.

Once you die the first time, the game does not 'reset' properly, and missiles begin to collect on the top of the screen, making that area a death zone. Likewise, the scrolling of the screen starts being paced improperly compared to the hero's position on it. Still worse though is the fact that the entire game can just be skipped by moving to the leftmost side of the screen and taking your hands off the keyboard; which I recommend, because the minigame is frustratingly difficult, and grants no in-game rewards.

The menu and battle system of TLG seem to be totally custom, but that doesn't make them fun. Battles were annoyingly buggy and poorly balanced; the most annoying bug (I can only ASSUME it's a bug!) was that sometimes when your AT bar was filled, a monster would hit you at an inopportune time, causing you to totally lose your action. Beyond that, well, you had an attack that did high damage, and then three skills that...did some more damage. One of them was an uber attack, whereas the other two did fire and lightning damage respectively; I saw no enemy that was weak or resistant to either damage type in my short time with the game, however. There were some ideas that I thought were cool--like the artillery strike ability--but even that was flawed in its execution--artillery strike should have cost 0 TP.

The battle system is ultimately why I ragequit, that and the shoddy programming.

A) It shouldn't take me three tries, with success or failure based entirely on luck, to beat the first boss (the aforementioned washing machine) who is equipped with both an overpowered and very frustrating ability that can stunlock you indefintiely and a very powerful and very frustrating poison ability that can make it so that you lose the fight even when you win because of when poison damage is calculated.

B) If I just gritted my teeth through three tries to beat that boss, it CERTAINLY shouldn't be possible to step on the wrong tile and have to fight him AGAIN just because the creator doesn't know how to use switches properly!

I wish that was an exhaustive list of the problems with TLG's gameplay, but it isn't. There is also an obnoxiously long pause between

every.

single.

message.

of in game dialogue, which makes replaying through cutscenes you've already seen (or honestly, even the new ones) a tedious chore. And for every little thing I just mentioned, there's probably another one that was equally annoying but that I didn't bother mentioning because I got tired of writing this section.

SCORE: 30/100

Visuals

Almost everything in The Lost Girls is custom and looks great. I don't particularly *like* the style of some of the graphics, but it *is* a style, and that's worth some points. There is neat eye candy on display here everywhere you look. It's not quite as impressive (IMHO) as some other games I've played recently, like Omega Cerberus and Valkyrie Stories: Whatever, but it was still some hot shit, so to speak.

I'm not sure if the chips were custom as well as the sprites, but if they weren't, they still did a good job of matching the style of the custom graphics.

The mapping itself was a bit on the unimpressive side, however, but this was made up for by some really nifty graphical special effects.

SCORE: 80/100

Audio

This game uses music from other well known movies and videogames, and uses those tracks in a fairly predictable way. It is therefore, rather derivative. Of course, this also means that the tracks don't *usually* seem ill chosen or inappropriate, although the track playing immediately after my landing in London was *both* and contributed

The sound effects were nifty, and I don't have a lot to say about them.

SCORE: 45/100

FINAL SCORE: 49/100 (Not An Average)
BOTTOM LINE:
The Lost Girls has some really quite nifty custom graphics and some cool (but badly implemented) ideas at this stage in its development, but not much else going for it that I can see. Probably worth checking out for the custom sprites, but not only doesn't this game have replay value: it scarcely has *play* value. This game is promising and (some might say over) ambitious. The creator(s) need to spend some time slowing the fuck down and focusing on gameplay, presentation, and fun factor, rather than continuing to cram in custom graphics, systems, and tiddlywinks.