Lost Dimension PC Port Impressions

A few years back, Atlus USA released Lost Dimension on PlayStation 3 and Vita. Needless to say, not everyone liked it. I did, but I'd agree that our own review is fair, and it's decidedly not an easy game to recommend to anyone. That being said, Ghostlight has brought the game to PC, and we've decided to see how well the port stacks up. The verdict? Unfortunately, it's not very good. The port lacks graphics many standard graphics options and runs bizzaringly poor on systems where a port of a Vita game should run a heck of a lot smoother than it does.

Lost Dimension PC System Requirements

From the get-go the PC requirements for the title seemed a bit odd. The minimum specs seemed fine enough, but the recommended specs definitely felt inflated for what should've been a relatively easy to run game.

• MINIMUM:
  • OS: Windows 7 (64-bit)
  • Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4GHz or comparable
  • Memory: 4 GB RAM
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 or comparable
  • DirectX: Version 11
  • Storage: 1100 MB available space
  • Sound Card: Windows compatible sound card

• RECOMMENDED:
  • OS: Windows 10
  • Processor: Intel i7 3.3 GHz or comparable
  • Memory: 8 GB RAM
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 or comparable
  • DirectX: Version 11
  • Storage: 1100 MB available space
  • Sound Card: Windows compatible sound card

The oddest thing about these specs, is I'm not sure exactly what is accurate and what isn't - or any reason why the game runs so poorly on my desktop. For perspective, the desktop I tested it on is a Windows 10 rig with an i5 3570k overclocked to 4.2GHz, 16GB of RAM, and a Radeon R9 290 - a good bit stronger than the recommend GTX 960 GPU.

Lost Dimension PC Configuration Options

Sincerely not helping matters is the fact that the port lacks much in the way of graphical options. It does support controllers - both my Dualshock 4 and my Xbox One controllers worked with little to no error, and there is full control remapping - but the only graphical options are resolution, and whether you want to run the game in a window, borderless, or fullscreen. You can see a screenshot of said options embedded below.

It's a pitifully small selection, with no ability to change shadow quality, set any anti-aliasing, and more. It's downright barebones. On the bright side, you can change the options from in-game.

Lost Dimension PC Impressions

Truthfully, I didn't expect to have such a problem with this port going in. I like Lost Dimension, and I had hoped a good PC release might be able to give the game a second chance at love after not selling well on consoles in seemingly both Japan and the west. The PC experience leaves a lot to be desired, unfortunately. As mentioned, playing the game on my above-listed rig left me with many issues. Constant screen tearing, framedrops when there simply should be none, and even infrequent pauses. It's a mess. You can use keyboard and mouse in menus, and it didn't crash on me, but I wouldn't be surprised if emulating the game in RPCS3 would run smoother. I looked up footage of the game on the emulator, and at this point, it seems almost likely.

On the flipside, when I tried running the game on my laptop (with the specs being an i7 6700HQ, 8GB of RAM, and a GTX 950m), the game ran better. Still not great, but noticeably improved over my desktop. I don't know why. Even as I've been writing these impressions I've been booting up the game on both systems, but I still haven't located the cause. My desktop isn't having issues in other games, and so my only guess - which is only a guess, with little else to base it on besides my own experiences - is that the game might not have been tested with any AMD GPUs, and as such runs poorly on my system. Checking my CPU utilization on both systems, I have trouble believing that it may be a CPU bottleneck, and even if it was, it would still be unacceptable.

I can't guarantee that Lost Dimension will run well on your system, and even if it does this is a less than stellar port for a game that was already not for everyone. Maybe patches will be able to fix the port in the future, but for now, I just can't recommend it.