Lost Eidolons

"This is more a long movie, with breaks where you as the player get to fight in battles," reads one of Lost Eidolons' launch-week reviews, and it's a fair description of both what the game is trying to be and where it runs into trouble. Ocean Drive Studio built a turn-based tactics game that leans heavily into narrative and character relationships, following the template Fire Emblem: Three Houses set — and the reviews that name that game directly (a recurring comparison across both positive and negative reviews) generally agree the tactical half succeeds while the narrative half doesn't.

Solid tactics, a genuinely warm camp

The battlefield side of Lost Eidolons draws steady praise even from its harshest critics. "The gameplay is fun," reads one review that otherwise scores the game low, "but its about 25% of the game." Combat runs well, animations are polished, and a training system lets any character develop into almost any class, giving real freedom in how you build a squad rather than locking characters into fixed roles. Outside of battle, the 3D camp hub — shown in the screenshots with gift and conversation menus layered over a genuinely detailed tent interior — lets you build relationships with your roster between missions, and it's the second thing fans consistently point to as the game's strength: "the interactions with the npc's and the camp followers... really makes the experience," reads one review, before pivoting to its actual complaint.

Ocean Drive Studio also gets credit from reviewers for responsiveness at launch. One October 2022 review specifically updates its own text: "Developers acted immediately and soon came up with a satisfactory solution" to an early turn-limit complaint, "their communication with the community was excellent."

Where it loses people

The story is where this game's reputation splits, decisively and by a wide margin. Fifty-eight of the 100 most-helpful English negative reviews raise the story directly, and forty raise the writing or dialogue specifically — nearly double any other complaint category. The language used isn't gentle: one review calls it "game of thrones season 8 bad," another says it's "written by a 7 year old," and a third, at 114 votes, sums up a common structure of complaint: "For every strength this game has it has a comparable weakness and then some. The quality of dialogue is not good enough for a game that features so much of it."

The single most-upvoted negative review in the game's entire history — 699 votes, by a wide margin the most-discussed piece of feedback here — isn't really about writing quality at all. It's about a specific narrative mechanic: characters permanently leaving your party as a plot event, sprung on players without much warning. The reviewer is careful to frame it correctly: "Game is overall very good, but has one major flaw that has made me leave a no review." That's the shape of a lot of this game's criticism — not "this is bad," but "this one specific choice cost the game my recommendation even though I liked most of it," which is a more damaging kind of review for a studio to receive than straightforward dismissal.

A score still settling

Recent sentiment hasn't fully recovered from launch-era criticism — 57 of the 100 most recent English reviews are positive, a real step down from the lifetime 65.5%, suggesting the writing complaints keep reaching new buyers rather than fading as old news. The achievement curve tells a similar story about attrition: the easiest milestones sit around 55-60%, dropping to roughly 2% for the hardest, a steep decline consistent with a very long game (many reviewers report 50 to 100-plus hours) that a real share of buyers don't see through to the end.

6.5 out of 10. Lost Eidolons gets the tactics half of its Three Houses-style pitch genuinely right, and its camp and relationship systems have real warmth that fans defend even while criticising everything else. But its writing is a consistent, heavily-documented weak point rather than a matter of individual taste, and one specific narrative choice — permanently taking characters away from players who'd grown attached to them — produced this library's clearest example yet of a mechanic single-handedly costing a game its audience's trust. Play it for the battles and the camp; keep your expectations for the story modest.