Video Game / Lost Dimension

How far will you go to save the world?

In the near future, the world is on the brink of ruin. One day a man calling himself "The End" claims that he will destroy the world from within a giant pillar. Desperate to stop him, the government sends in a group called S.E.A.L.E.D. consisting of several teenagers with special abilities to stop him. Upon entering the pillar, End claims that one of their own is a traitor and in order to proceed to the top, they must eliminate who they believe is the traitor on each floor. Sho Kasugai must use his special ability "Vision" to determine who's the traitor and put a stop to End's game.

Such is the premise of Lost Dimension, an Eastern RPG developed by FuRyu and published by Atlus. Debuting in Japan on August 7th, 2014, it was released for Playstation 3 and PlayStation Vita in America on July 28th, 2015, before being ported to PC on October 30th, 2017.

This Tactical RPG contains examples of:

• The Ace: Toya. He's spent so long excelling at everything that he's starved for equals.
• Affably Evil:
  • When speaking to the party (exceptions are made for when speaking to Sho individually), The End is rather cordial and collected.
  • Most traitors, which makes it all the more tragic to have to Erase them. This makes sense, as none of them are really evil at all.
• All Are Equal in Death: Toya is happy if chosen for Erasure, especially if he's the traitor, because he's glad to finally be among people who are his equals.
• All-Loving Hero: Agito considers everyone his friend, no exceptions. This includes The End, who they entered the tower to kill. This makes it hard for Sho to trust him, though whether he's right to be suspicious or not depends on the file. It also means Agito has a hard time thinking of anyone as his "best" friend, something he struggles with in his conversations with Sho.
• Alternate Universe: The End and the five traitors are from the "old" world, which is in parallel to the "new" world, the key difference being the "old" world is about to be struck by a meteor.
• All There in the Manual: The game contains multiple text files that expand on the lore of the setting, several of which can only be acquired on a New Game Plus that detail The End's plot and shed light on his motivations.
• Anti-Villain: As it turns out, the traitors are Well Intentioned Extremists, bordering on Hero Antagonist. Like you, they're trying to save the world. Their world. Either of you succeeding means dooming the other world, so it's more a tragic case of Good Versus Good.
• Anyone Can Die: And you and your companions are voting who to Erase. Out of 11 starting characters, only 6 will make it to the end on any given playthrough.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Critical Hits ignore defense.
• Bittersweet Ending: You've defeated The End and saved the world!! To be precise, you have saved the "new" world and doomed the "old" one. Averted in the Golden Ending.
• Bloodless Carnage: This is the standard for battles; however, in the final battle with The End, his attacks will be shown to draw blood, which spatters on the ground and then disappears.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Sojiro is only concerned with the absolute power of medicine, and even admits that his belief system is totally outside of normal human morality. See Morally Ambiguous Doctorate below. He doesn't show any remorse or regret for killing someone, but because his belief system doesn't hold that action as evil, not out of malice.
• Break Meter: Sanity acts as this for enemies. Deplete it, and the enemy will be dazed the next turn. For allies, it's a bit different: they go Berserk, becoming Glass Cannons who indiscriminately attack allies and enemies for three turns, and then they become Dazed.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Sho's after-mission visions let him hear 'future voices' of whomever accompanied him. Suspicious remarks are colored red. (In a particularly confusing bit of Guide Dang It!, the characters that appear and the voices that speak do not necessarily correspond to the floor's suspects.)
  • You can also mark your allies as a way to help keep track of your investigations, such as marking somebody you trust in blue or suspected traitors with red.
• Combat Clairvoyance: Sho. In particular, one of his special abilities allows him to preemptively counter and prevent an incoming attack (even attacks that can't otherwise be countered). Then he shoots them again, just for good measure.
• Combat Medic: Sojiro has decent defensive stats and a strong heal-over-time self-buff; these combine with his eventual "inflict all ailments on standard attacks at a low rate" skill to make him a surprisingly strong tank. His status effect tree makes him more of a Deadly Doctor.
• Crapsack World: Due to End's actions.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Erasure. There's no gore involved, but those who are Erased leave behind nothing but a Fate Materia which others can equip to gain access to some of their powers… or so it seems. The files and true ending reveal that what actually happens to those "erased" is that they get transported back in time. This means that they're removed from the tower, but don't actually die. Probably.
• Cute Bruiser: Mana Kawai's Gift makes her a powerful fist-fighter.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Fail a mission and you can either retry it with no penalty or return to the Lobby to reassess, get new equipment, or try a different mission to level up, again with no penalty. Also, regardless of damage taken, skills expended, or KOs during battle, all characters are returned to full status following a mission, win or lose.
• Desperation Attack: Characters can go berserk for a number of reasons, from being hit by Friendly Fire to giving another character their turn. You lose control of that character for a short while and their defense is halved, but their attacks get much stronger as well. And considering that you'll need to trigger it, is it any wonder who decided to publish it abroad?.
• Ditto Fighter: Zenji can copy the stats (and later the skills) of any other party member, also allowing him to share buffs and healing with those characters. One of his special skills lets him copy everyone else at the same time. Later skills let him reflect a portion of all effects back at their source and to grow stronger around other characters.
• Dwindling Party: Unlike most RPG's where you gain more members as you proceed through the game, Lost Dimension is the opposite as you lose more members as you proceed.
• Dying Declaration of Love: Several of the female characters, if they have a maxed-out bond with Sho and they're selected for Erasure, will take a moment to directly or indirectly say that they love him before they go.
• Eagle Land: George is a classic type 1, benevolent, kind, and heroic. Even if he is a traitor.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: Getting to The End with 5 traitors in your party is a lot harder than it sounds, as not only do you have to manipulate everyone's suspicions just right (while up to 3 traitors are influencing the votes) to make sure you Erase only innocents, but if you're particularly unlucky it's possible for there to not even be ANY new traitors on the 4th floor, making the Bad Ending unreachable. Your "reward" for managing to pull this off is No Final Boss for You, but you can still do a New Game Plus.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • Generally speaking, the traitors don't begrudge the others when they're Erased.
  • The End in the Golden Ending. Oh, you murdered 2 Billion people just to get revenge against one guy? Oh it's cool, let's hang out together!
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: The End's tower.
• Extreme Doormat: Mana only finds value in cute things, and believes that her power leaves her unable to be cute. When she grows attached to Sho, she offers to let him do anything he wants to her. Sho doesn't convince her that her value system is wrong, only that she should also consider herself cute.
• Face Death with Dignity: Most of the traitors takes the prospect of being erased nicely.
• Faux Affably Evil: The End, the game's Big Bad, acts incredibly friendly towards SEALED, all while stirring up suspicion between them, forcing them to erase each other, and threatening to nuke the entire world. Oh, and he's killed millions of people before the game even begins. And all those deaths meant nothing to him, all he wants is revenge against Sho.
• Fighting a Shadow: When you first meet The End, Nagi tries to shoot him, but he's not really there, he's just sending a projection of some sort. You don't actually get to meet the real him until, well, the end.
• Flat Character: Subverted; most characters will be playing their archetype straight for the early portions. However, as the team ascends they open up to the protagonist Sho and begin synergizing with one another. YMMV on how far this goes of course.
• Forgotten First Meeting: The End hates Sho personally for reasons Sho cannot remember, and eventually explains that this is due to the events of ten years ago.
• Four Is Death: At the end of the fourth stratrum, The End reveals a particularly cruel twist: You have to Erase two people instead of one.
• Friendly Sniper: Sho. His battle style includes the standard sniper hallmarks of long-range (including a skill that gives him the highest possible range on standard attacks), 100% accuracy, critical hits, and instant kills. His range and skills also make him one of the best at supporting attacks.
• Gender-Inclusive Writing: "They" and "them" are used as singular pronouns in certain lines of dialogue discussing the possibility of a character being the traitor. This is presumably because the game was originally written in Japanese, where the concept of third-person pronouns doesn't exist in the same way as in English, and so the game's code only contains one set of text strings that can potentially refer to either male or female characters and only supports changing the names, not pronouns.
• Glass Cannon: The Berserk status effect massively increases a character's damage output, but also the damage taken from enemy attacks. This is on top of making the character uncontrollable.
• Gratuitous English: George Jackman, being the Token American, has this for several of his voice clips. Mostly single words like "Justice!", "Judgment!", and "American!"
• Gratuitous Japanese: The English localized version of George is instead an Occidental Otaku.
• Guest-Star Party Member: Anyone who turns out to be a traitor, though you can keep them around, but it'll cost an innocent life and it'll end really badly for you later. The set-in-stone traitor in the first playthrough is a straight example, as it's imposssible for them not to be erased in the first judgement, meaning you won't get to properly use them until a New Game Plus.
• Guide Dang It!: As long as you've figured out the mechanic properly, you can coast along and figure out the traitor and get them voted off without hassle. Then you hit the fourth floor and it turns out there's two traitors on this one, though you're not specifically told that until Judgement time comes. You can identify them both, but if you weren't expecting this, you could be in trouble with only one of the traitors getting voted off and the other sticking around. Though, then again, the game does require you play through twice to get the Golden Ending anyway.
• Guilt-Based Gaming: Go ahead, Erase an innocent who has a maxed bond with Sho. The game will go out of it way to make you feel HORRIBLE about it.
• Harmful Healing: Sojiro Sagara has a skill that weaponizes his role as The Medic. It lets him heal enemies past their maximum HP, which causes damage.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Zenji is well-aware that his Link Gift allows him to do anything as well as anyone he can copy, leading him to take a Hard Work Hardly Works view of life and to scorn most other people.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: The End's status as the Big Bad is obvious, but his true motivations remain a mystery for most of the game. You don't learn the full story until the second playthrough.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Characters using a weapon skill will always pull out the appropriate weapon for the skill, even if they use a different weapon type (like Zenji's skill copy or any character with Fate Materia). To a lesser extent, Marco and Nagi, who have a number of skills that involve flinging weapons with telekinesis or gravity, respectively.
• I Just Want to Be Special: According to her profile, this is why Ordinary High-School Student Yoko wants to become an Idol Singer. On the other hand, she doesn't care for her telepathic Gifts as, in her view, they stop her from putting effort into her songs by giving her an "easy way" to touch people's hearts, preferring to only use them when it's strictly necessary.
• Jack of All Stats: Toya. He has average and highly-varied physical and magical offense, as well as some buffs and debuffs.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: You start the game with almost no idea of what's going on, getting pieces of information from The End and TIPS files as you go. It's only at the very end of the first playthrough that things start making sense, but even then there are a lot of unanswered questions. It takes a New Game Plus to finally get the full story.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: Particularly in the Vita version. Less so on the Playstation 3, but it's still noticeable.
• Lightning Bruiser: Marco has the highest defensive attributes of the party, has good magical offense and good attack range, and his Stab Them! is one of the game's strongest attacks, combining long range, high power, and a high critical rate at a relatively low cost. His downsides are low HP and high SAN costs; he's particularly prone to ill-timed Berserks and since Critical Hits ignore defences, he's very vulnerable to them.
• Lonely Rich Kid: Marco is the child of oil barons, and he's used to people only trying to approach him to get close to them.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Yoko begins the game as a low-powered buff-caster, but she has the highest PSY (Gift attack power) by a large, large margin, frustrated only by her lack of anything to do with it. Approximately halfway through the game, she (roughly simultaneously) 1) gains the ability to give the entire party a buff to every single stat for three turns and 2) gains access to actual attack spells (whether by her own skill trees or by Fate Materia). At the end of the game, she's one of the strongest characters.
  • Played in an interesting way with George. His natural skill set is quite small, leaving him with very few options early on. At the end of his tree, however, he gains access to a huge number of powerful abilities that can only be accessed through others' Fate Materia, making him incredibly powerful if he lasts all the way to the end. Since he's the fixed first traitor on the first playthrough, he's an example of one whose true powers don't come out until a New Game Plus.
• Mighty Glacier: Mana and George are powerful offensively and defensively, but are limited by lower move and attack range.
• Mind Screwdriver: Essentially the role of every New Game Plus exclusive file and scene. The biggest comes after you max out everyone's bonds.
• The Mole: A character per floor is a traitor and must be eliminated without accusing the wrong person. On the fourth floor, there are two.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Sojiro is very dedicated to the absolute power of medicine to save people. So dedicated that he kills patients with ailments that medicine can't cure, because if he does, then their cause of death was murder instead of the failure of medicine. Sho reacts predictably.
• Never Be Hurt Again: Himeno's Pyrokinesis activates on anything she pays attention to. As a result, she spent most of her early life trying not to grow attached to things or even to look at them. If selected for Erasure, she admits that she actually really likes the Judgement Room, because it's the one place she doesn't have to worry about her power burning the things she loves.
• New Game Plus: Carries over Gift points and your earned ranks while adding new TIPS and randomizing the first traitor. Also provides a number of new missions, new scenes, and is the only way to get the True Ending. Basically, New Game Plus is vital to understanding the true story of the game.
• Nominal Hero:
  • Himeno considers herself one: she doesn't care about saving the world, she's only with the team to kill The End, and says I'm Not Here to Make Friends word-for-word. She's lying. In reality, she cares very deeply about the world, but due to her pyrokinesis powers triggering on anything she focuses on, she feels anything or anyone she cares about will end up getting hurt in the end, so she intentionally distances herself from others.
  • Played straight with Sojiro, an unrepentant murderer who Sho only continues to side with because they have a common enemy.
• Non-Standard Game Over:
  • It's quite hard to do so, but it's possible for Sho to be the erased. Apparently, the easiest way to do this is to aggravate the other characters by telling them when they ask who the traitor is that you believe them to be the traitor. If you do get it, Sho doesn't even say anything, he just gets erased. And you get an actual Game Over screen, which normally doesn't happen in this game.
  • If you make it to the top of the tower with everyone in your party being traitors, they kill you on the spot and the game ends right then and there.
• No Sense of Personal Space: Implied with Agito for physical distances, whose official bio states that he has a "warped sense of psychological distance from others".
• NPC Roadblock: Characters cannot move through other characters unless they have Levitation or Teleportation. This can be problematic in hallways.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Mana speaks with a faux-British accent, but occasionally some French words slip through. If Sho spends time with her, it's revealed she's not British, nor has she ever been to Britain, but merely picked up the accent because she thought it was cute.
• Permadeath: Any character (innocent or guilty) selected for Erasure is permanently killed. That's because whoever is "erased" gets sent back to the "old" world, which is doomed to be destroyed by a meteor. Averted in the Golden Ending, thanks to Sho destroying the meteor before it lands.
• Person of Mass Destruction: The End starts the story by killing two billion people.
• Power Nullifier: The Judgement Room disables the Gifts of all the player characters.
• Procedural Generation: The identity of the traitors isn't set and is randomly generated with each playthrough. With one exception: the very first time you play the game, the first traitor is set in stone. But on subsequent playthroughs, that's also up in the air.
• Revenge Before Reason: The End's main goal. He doesn't care how many people he kills, he just wants to make Sho suffer.
• Sadistic Choice:
  • Not only do you have to struggle in choosing who the traitor is, do you actually eliminate them or are they too valuable to you? The downside being a harder final boss, but… do you really need that healer that you are certain is the traitor? Turns out this is very much intended In-Universe, as part of The End's plan to make Sho suffer. His motives being that he himself was on the bad end of a Sadistic Choice in the past, and he wants Sho to know how that feels.
  • Berserk can also be this, especially since Atlus has warned that the game gets extremely hard later on so you'll have to trigger it for strategies to be viable.
• Sanity Meter: SAN is one of the three main gauges for units, alongside HP and GP. It decreases when using Gifts or taking damage, and when depleted, the character will go Berserk (if allied) or be Dazed and miss a turn (if an enemy).
• Save Scumming: While the game saves automatically when proceeding to Judgement or if using Deep Vision, this can be used as a strategy to always select the traitor if you save a backup using PlayStation Plus or if you use a USB device.
• Screw Destiny: The End is a rare villainous example, though he does have good reasons for acting this way. All his motivations stem from him and his world being "destined to die". This left him extremely vengeful against the lucky ones who get to live.
• Sequel Hook: After the True Ending, the game says that the survivors in the new dimension and those who were banished back to the old dimension will never cross paths again… unless "the two worlds are threatened once more".
• Skill Scores and Perks: Every character has three skills trees. All characters start with one available; if they don't have immediate access to a second, they gain access very quickly. The third skill trees require skills from both trees to unlock and tend to become available past the midgame point.
• So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear: Entirely averted. Skills learned by Erased characters can be inherited by others through equipping their Fate Materia, and any equipment an Erased character was wearing will be immediately returned to your equipment pool upon their erasure. (Though in the case of George, Sojiro, and Mana no-one else would be able to use their weapons anyway.)
• Splash Damage Abuse: Area-of-effect attacks do not trigger counters, and this provides several characters with an early-game way to avoid them. Certain enemy types make extensive use of this.
• Squishy Wizard: Himeno and Yoko are both magical Glass Cannons.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: The bad ending. Sho makes it to where The End is waiting, only for The End to reveal all of Sho's surviving teammates are traitors, upon which they quickly surround him and off him in a cutscene, with no chance to fight back. In this scenario, Sho is one person who has been caught off-guard by five people whom he trusted, so it’s no wonder he was so easily dispatched.
• Tagline: "11 psychics with MATERIA venture into a mysterious tower to stop 'THE END' an agent of the apocalypse."
• Teen Genius: Sojiro received his medical license at age 17.
• Telepathy: Yoko. Additionally, Sho's Vision ability can allow him to enter the thoughts of others.
• Title Drop Chapter: If there are any traitors in the six survivors, the final mission will be named “Lost Dimension”.
• Too Dumb to Live: You can make Sho this. When characters ask you who you think the traitor might be, you can pick them out. Not only will this make you lose most, if not all affinity with that person, but you will have just put yourself on the chopping block to elimination.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: If you harm a character during battle, they'll go berserk similar to depleting all Sanity, and their trust with another character will go down (thereby making it more likely to blame that other character as a traitor).
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Anyone who gets Erased on the first or second floor will likely not have time for much Character Development.
• What the Hell, Hero?: If Sho guesses wrong as to who the traitor is, he is punished by having the wronged character appear as an enemy during the final boss battle. Several characters will also call him out brutally if they're selected for Erasure, even some of the traitors. And if you erase an innocent…
• What the Hell, Player?: It's entirely possible to reach The End with only traitors in your party. What happens? You don't even get to fight The End by yourself, you get a short cut-scene with it ending with one of the traitors stabbing you.
• White Hair, Black Heart: The End has snow-white hair with red tips.

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