Parents' Guide to The Lost Child

This turn-based role-playing game merges monster collecting and training with graphic novel visuals, but its repetitive play limits its appeal to hardcore fans only. The story of The Lost Child is decent, as is the pacing, but you really do need to be into Japanese dungeon crawlers to appreciate the story's twists and turns. There's a hefty focus on combat, and the game tries to distinguish itself from other role-playing games by offering a number of offensive and defensive moves, as well as collected supernatural allies (called Astrals), that can be used against a large horde of monsters. In fact, the Pokemon-like way that you acquire allies from previously defeated foes can keep you engaged as you deploy them against other creatures, "training" them in battle to develop new abilities.

But despite the variety in moves and enemies, the gameplay quickly gets repetitive. In fact, you'll find that the gameplay in each story chapter works like this: watch a cutscene, move slowly through a dungeon, find an Astral, enter a fight, and then repeat. Occasionally you'll open some chests that you come across for items or collect karma to level up your party, but the cyclical pattern of this gameplay quickly stops being interesting after a short while and becomes dull. In fact, unless you're a fan of dungeon crawlers where you have to grind your way through each step for progress or collecting monsters to do your fighting for you, The Lost Child might not be an adventure you want to undertake.