Before I go into the specifics I'm just going to say this flat out: The game is ass, no question about it.

Here's the thing, I've played this game since OGP; even beta'd it with my friend before it even came out. I spent literally years lying to myself about how great the game was. I just quit recently because after all this time I got fed up with it.

Here's why:

1. Pay to win: You must throw your wallet at the screen to be even competitive in this game. While I played, my main was the Dark Shaman and it was a low tier character I completely dominated with. Main reason is that I had to buy certain gears to keep him viable as the game devolved into a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ basicly money only game. The main people I see voting for this game are most likely people fine with this aspect and have already spent a ton of money. To them, there's no point in quitting since they've already invested a large amount of funds in this product.

2. There's no point in the characters this game showcases. You could easily just make an avatar and outfit him or her with whatever style or gameplay you choose. You want a magic character, give him a staff, you want a ninja, pick the kunai, and etc. If they had made the game to where you couldn't interchange different character gear and only able to use gear you bought, the game would be perfectly fine. But guess what, you can; making the point of having such characters moot and pointless.

3. The game seems to force you to pvp. Reasons:
a. Lags like hell during crusade and other pve modes.
b. exp gain is slow compared to playing with someone for a couple of hours.
c. The difficulty in Adventure mode is unbalanced to where the only way you get a somewhat adequate exp gain is to do Master with a bunch of people.
d. Party with people at your own risk. If you don't play with friends, you may get leeches that hang back while you fight everything. It's just not worth it in the greater scheme of things.

4. If you aren't a veteran, you're pretty much screwed. The main reason is that certain gears people own showcase an incredibly OP ability that's either hard to dodge or difficult to counter. You're also faced with people with stats in the 100s in which you can only beat by some obscure tactic that involves a gear you missed out on. The thing is, if they hadn't dragged their feet on getting this game to steam, this problem probably wouldn't be that bad. Coupled with the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ room rank finding system, new players would run before they sat around long enough to dig their heels into the experience and just roll with it.

5. ♥♥♥♥♥♥ community. 9 times out of 10 you will come across a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that has his ego so far up his ass that he believes he can beat anyone and raises a complete ruckus wherever he goes. How do I know this? I was at one point said ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with an ego to match it. But at least I wasn't all talk like so many others. I could back up whatever I said with force. I was however, helpful and nice to newer players and took it easy. The fact still remains though, that there are people like me and people much worse than me.

6. Too many farm rooms. To get past the slowpacedness of this game, even the veterans farm. I never took part in it as I preferred to suck it up and do crusade or fight people. About 90% of the rooms you'll see in the queue are farm rooms. Anyone that states otherwise is full of crap. Even the people that have put more time into leveling their characters than I, farm their asses off to do so. In that sense, there's not really much accomplishment.

7. Slow leveling. One actually has to fight at least 8 hours out of a day and win the majority of his matches in a large room to make headway once you get past lvl 30. If you don't want to do this, you can sade or adventure with possibly unreliable people or you can just fish. This is the slowest leveling method of all.

8. Premium characters: Iori, Kyo, Mai, and Project K are probably the characters that you'll encounter most when playing other people including the veterans. Along with Staff Master and Destroyer, all 6 of these characters make the game even more pay 2 win. You can literally, I mean literally throw your face in the keyboard and win these characters. Which once again, makes the game even more pay2win since 4 are premium and 2 you can buy to bypass the rank restriction.

9. The events are crap. Sure, you get certain things to sort of catch to those that have been playing forever, but these events are far in between the instances where they update the shop with new gear everyone runs out to buy.

All in all, I put myself through a lot with this game. I had a total of about 60+ characters and 200-300+ pieces of gear in this game. I survived the transfer when OGP didn't give us our crap and bought, all of my crap back again. I'm telling you this from experience. This is former Dark Shaman master DarkShamanTazuna/Ace~Of~Bunnies telling you that, if you want to save a few bucks to play something better and not as p2w, run as fast as you freaking can because you will be left with nothing but an empty feeling and an empty wallet. Hell, I'd suggest LoL or Dota2 over this mess. RUN! You can't even call this review biased because I spent an incredible amount of time in this game and almost ruined my marriage over this. I had that amount of stuff in OGP and in Z8. If anything, I'd say I was being super objective. The fact that this was allowed on Steam is rather appalling if anything else. The only people that gave it a thumbs up were majority veterans that have played before it came here. Steam is a home to me and with this release, it feels like my home was violated by this hobo.

If there was anything I had to say that was good about this game, it would be that if you are able to make friends cherish them and play with them as much as you can or that they'll be available for. I made some extremely good friends while I played and I do miss them. However, I have no intention of returning anytime soon.

To be brutally honest here, I know why many people gave this game a bad review. Although, in general, I wouldn't necessarily listen to what most people said about the bad reviews. Although a fair portion of it might be true, it's more-or-less extremely exaggerated, and for most of the given part, is taken with a little pinch of salt. Is this game "Pay to Win?". I can't lie here and say no, but saying yes would be just as much of a lie. You can easily play this game without spending a single dime and actually be able to compete with other players. For me, I have 56-58 permanent characters (none are under 15$), and I would say I paid for less than 5-10 of them. We're at the point where complaining about a game like this being "pay to win" isn't actually a legitimate argument.

There are tons (when I say tons, I mean tons) of events that give away free crap all the time. Most of them don't really even require effort, it's just that people don't bother doing them. At higher ranks, you can argue that this game is competitive to a level that it's utterly boring, but there are ways to go around that. Do you need to play with the highest ranked players? Hell no, grab a friend and do a 1v1, and play for freaking fun. My main concern is that everyone is fanatic over winning that they've become corrupted, psychologically insane and some may even be lunatics. But it's easy enough to avoid these kinds of players: every single damn game has these guys. There's a block button you know.

To address concerns that other people have been complaining about, I first must put this out for the public to realize: THIS VERSION IS MADE FOR THE NORTH AMERICAN SERVERS. DO NOT POST BAD REVIEWS IF YOU CAN'T ACCESS THE GAME BECAUSE YOU LIVE SOMEWHERE OFF THE COAST OF BRASIL OR INDONESIA. I swear, half the bad reviews were just foreign people unable to access this game's version. Yes, lag can also be a slight issue, but if you live on the Eastern coast of North America you should be fine. Only some people experience lag from the West coast. As for bugs/issues, this game does have quite a few, but they're nothing game-changing at all. I mean, slight text bugs? Unreleased styles? Unintended prizes? If you're going to complain about SUCH minor issues, don't even bother to play video games in the first place. Period. Go grab a book if you get that startled over such little things. Most bugs aren't big, but it may look like an issue, considering this game has quite a few.

Although the purpose of this post was to tackle the certain complaints, if I were to conclude, I would say it's a great fighting game. Whenever I'm bored of playing shooters, action games, MOBAs or whatever it may be, I often find myself having a few matches on this game. Huge variety, uncomparable customization options, various modes and styles: it has all that's on my hit-list. Although it may not be everyone's cup of tea, but if you're into cartoony/animated (or anime) inspired visuals, along with a huge variety and great action, then this game would be for you.

I played Lost Saga NA for over 5 years, with over 8,000 hours invested into it via another gaming software. I've played it through two different host swaps, and as time continued on, one thing remained true the entire way: the game gets MUCH worse over time.

Now, is Lost Saga really a bad game when looked at as JUST a game, meaning looking at nothing but how the game plays, the mechanics, the fighting styles, the attack systems, the utilities, and all that? No, Lost Saga is not a bad game in that regard. Actually, it's an extremely good game. It's a game that bites off of the fight systems within various other games, the most apparent one being Super Smash Bros. Including all of that, it has some extremely unique features as well, with the main selling point of the game being one: the ability to swap between mercenaries in-game. Not only that, but the customization of the game is pretty fantastic as well. You're able to use a piece of equipment bred from one character and place it onto a completely different character, and use it the same way you would the original character it came from. Really, that is EXTREMELY unique, and would make for such an incredible game if handled correctly.

That's exactly where the problems with this game come in. It wasn't handled correctly, not even slightly.

This game was created to release specific equipment, for cash purchase only, that's SO powerful that it makes pretty much everything else not even worth using. That way, you're left to choose one of two choices: spend the money to obtain these items so you can continue to play the game normally, or spend no money and lose every single game you play, to the point of not even wanting to play any longer. In addition to that, these sales of incredibly overpowered equipment were done EXTREMELY often (usually every 1-2 months) just for the sake of continuing cash flow for the company running the game. There was no other reason, it was just simply for money.
I might as well add onto this: these equipment releases were also TIMED releases, meaning that if you didn't buy them within two weeks, you couldn't obtain the item other than by other extremely (and I mean EXTREMELY) expensive means. So, instead of just a poorly-crafted pay2win system, you also have to deal with the pressure of buying items within 2 weeks.

You see, metagame (aka meta) exists in virtually every online game out there. Perfect balance among multiple different classes isn't achievable in any game, and I understand that 100%. However, perfect meta usually exists among a marginal difference in base power, one that's significant but not futile in defeating, and can be defeated with a significantly larger amount of skill. In a game with perfect meta, the weakest character can beat the strongest character easily if the user of the weakest character has a noticeably larger amount of skill. In Lost Saga, that's not the case... not even slightly. The greatest player in the entire server can be using the character he's the very best with, but still get absolutely destroyed without even a slight hint of a second chance by a meta player who's spent lots of money and has extremely high stats. This may sound a bit shocking/unbelievable, but not only is it the 100% truth, it's also something that's not very surprising and happens quite often within the game.

This extremely drastic, game-ruining problem that exists within Lost Saga is like the tree that creates all of the branches of problems within the game. The lack of balance between the EXTREMELY large, vast amount of equipment within the game causes there to be absolutely NO diversity among playstyles from player to player. You will enter 4v4 games, and meet 7 other players all using the exact same things; from the characters themselves, to the equipment those characters use, to the equipment they character-swap to use. The lack of diversity among playstyles causes distress to the players who cannot afford to spend all of the money required to keep up with the meta, causing the community of free/low-cash players (which is the thick majority) to become upset with how the game is played. This results in toxicity spread throughout that part of the community, which results in toxicity spread throughout the high-cash playerbase, which ultimately results in just a very toxic community overall (which is exactly what Lost Saga is composed of). You will find it extremely hard, if not completely impossible, to play a single game without either having a toxic player act toxic towards you, or feel the need to act toxic yourself. Either way, toxicity is created and spread.

That is the main problem that exists within Lost Saga, but it isn't the only one. Allow me to spawn a list of other, less important, problems that exist within the game:
1. Two other problems with the community: an entire 32-member guild famous for directly attacking other players' internet connections just to win games in tournaments, and well-known foreign players who play games with NA natives (which, in-result, ruins the games due to how connection-sensitive the game is), with both of these facts continuing to reign true without any punishment towards the players mentioned.

2. Broken game servers. The servers are extremely cheap, and it's nigh impossible to play games with other NA native players that don't live within about 500 miles of you (sometimes less). And even with solid connections and not much distance between you and the other players, the servers still have a natural .75-second delay that's absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to avoid, no matter the circumstances (even the game's moderators lag).

3. It's being ran by a very incompetent company. You can have a very important issue, such as your account being hacked, send in a ticket to support, and receive NO response to it at ALL. And heck, even if you DO get a response, it usually will take 10-14 days for it to come. What's worse: you have global moderators, who work for the actual company and not in-game, logging into the game and playing games with the players, and doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to help them; just directing them to the broken support system that ignores your request tickets.

Did I name every problem in the game? No, I didn't. And I admit I didn't. I'm just tired of talking about this game, and that's it. I think I've done more than enough to make you understand how bad it is, and why you should never play it.

Quick disclaimer before I end:
This review had absolutely ZERO intent to come off as complaining/crying/etc. It may have to some, yes, but it wasn't. Truth is, I've always been a very high-ranking player. As I said above, I have over 8,000 hours invested into the game, over the course of over 5 years (started May 2011). I've been a very well-known, high-ranking player throughout all 3 hosts that this game has been run by, up there with the very best the entire time. I was a long-time meta slave, who spent just around $3,500 on the game throughout all of these years. And, despite all of that, I still say what I say in this review. And no, it wasn't that I just suddenly burned out, and became upset like all of the non-cash players. I do have some regret behind playing/spending as much as I did... but, I have FAR bigger regrets in life, and this one isn't even CLOSE to being the biggest. I quit the game in the same position I had been in for the past 5 years: up there with the best of them. I say everything I said in this review because it's the 100% truth, and I took the time to say it because I know I have some credibility and/or "qualification" (if that's what you want to call it) to say these things. They're the truth, and the truth needs to be told. That's all there is to it; there's no complaining involved here at ALL, only the 100% factual truth.

Thank you for reading all of this, and I hope I was able to help.

- Alne/Cannibal, NA Lost Saga.

Final game rating: 2.7/10

Finally the day has come after many many years Lost Saga NA is finally on STEAM!!!! I've played this well over 5k hours in the past 5 years and this is my most favorite game of all. I don't know why but it just is.

The graphics are very low key and good, even on my r7 250 im hitting 125fps on max settings. And even before I got a gaming computer this game was able to run an intergrated graphics card around 65 fps. Note: frame rates do drop at random moments in the game.

The community gaming. There is a giant gap of players who A) Played for years. B)Recently started playing. The difference is huge and growing. Admittedly at first this game isn't the most fun as I was once a newbie. But after time you just get good. You'll realize different stragies to play and win. Some will say it's a PAY2WIN but it isn't. Since the major client update on September 30, 2014 that has been gone. When you start the game you will automatically get a select few of basic, but pretty sweet perm heroes. In lost saga we have what is called "Skill level" It arranges your matches to only play people within a certain range of your skill level. With Cadet being the lowest skill level and Admiral being the highest. Everyone has a different style of playing to tailor to their liking. Say you want to just spam/camp base, get a mage, like pressuring and fighting up close? Get a melee hero. Want a hero with a gun, get a ranged hero. Want one of those special mixed hero, get a special hero. Want to be a complete ♥♥♥, get a cyborg<<<< Everyone will complain about the hero you use so just ignore them. Also anyone can get very easily angered in game.

RANDOM COMMENTS OFTEN FOUND IN GAME: "NEWB, NEWBIE, NOOB, N00B, LOSER, YOU'RE JUST SAD, YOU SUCK, HAHAHAHAHAHA, LAGGER, LAGGERS, LAG, SPIKE, INDO, INDO HACKER, RUNNER, SPAMMER, SPAM, PAY2WIN, PAY2LOSE, EW, DISGUSTING, TRASH, SWAGGER, ZZZZ, SSS, FFS, SOME WORDS AREN'T FILTERED SO GOOD GAME, ETC."

ONLY THING I DONT LIKE: The community itself varies. People can be nice but often idiots or just want to fight and don't care for talking.
Just like Dota there are people from other regions that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this game. Lag plays a very prevaliant part of this game. Often times hits are either not registered or delayed when hitting a lagger.They are called Indos(indonesian) Which in my opinion is the only thing that ruins the game

There are 8 different game modes but you'll often find these: TDM, PRISONER (ONE LIFE PER ROUND), ADVENTURE MDOE, DAILY MODE, AND POWER STONE. Mostly you'll find farm rooms where you just chill. There are passive things you can do like fish in a plaza or go relicing for items(in game currency or gear)

Gears of this game: As with any hero you can have up to 4 epic or rare gears in the following order, weapon, armor, helmet, and trinket. The weapon is only epic and only for that type of hero. Say if you have a cowboy, it can only use an epic cowboy weapon. The armor, helmet, and trinket can be any rare or epic gears. Rare gears are not a part of a certain hero released already. Epic gears are the special gears of a hero, but do the same thing, the only differnce is that you are able to add stat points. Medals also add stat points, you are able to get up to 6 medal slots.

Overall Game: 8/10 Community iffy, Gameplay fun as hell

Edit:
Overall Game: 9/10 Only game like it's on kind. If there honestly were another game built just like this one I would go try it out. But for the past years nothing has been like it. It maybe the reason why I like it so much.

I've been with this game since it launched into the stages of Open Beta Testing with OGP, so around 5 years now. And over that time, I've watched the game evolve and flourish. Yes, there's been some missteps, but we're here, and the game is at it's best, the best it's been in a long time.

For starters, our current hosts, Z8Games, have given players the most stuff our of all three publishers (OGPlanet and WeMadeUSA being the other two). Z8Games regularly gives out chances to get style packages (let's you completely style out a hero regardless of style level restrictions. It also let's you choose to have the female gender). We also just today had a perm hero scroll in the attendance calendar, which gives a player a random permanent hero!

We also had a large game changing update recently that made the game a lot more newbie friendly. the first quest you do now gives you a scroll that lets you choose a permanenet hero of CHOICE out of a selection of heroes. Master modes of dungeons ALSO now give perm hero scrolls as drops, which means even more chances at free permanent heroes!

Now, onto the part I'm sure you're wondering about. Is the game pay2win? With the current state of the game, I can honestly say it is not. With all the free stuff being given, a free player can get a lot of permanent stuff, as well as GOOD permanent stuff. I myself have gotten 18 free permanent heroes, and then paid for one (a premium, only available with cash). Now, while premiums and rares might only be available through cash, that doesn't make the game pay2win. Some of them are outright bad, and some of the better ones have a free hero that's as good as that rare or premium hero, so you can still compete.

All that said, I give this game my full seal of approval. I say give the game a shot. If you don't like it, chances are it just wasn't meant for you. After all, not all fighting games appeal to everyone. However, be considerate of others if you review the game. Even if you didn't enjoy it, others might as well.

This game was alright... FIVE YEARS AGO. since then the have done nothing but add a bunch of petty items that make it seem like the game is growing. While they stay true to the amount of heros they advertise, each hero added has increasingly more ways to overpower an opponent with an unfair advantage. In other words, the game is seriously unbalanced. Not only that, but a sinister, evil entity engulfs this game; LAG. massive, MASSIVE amounts of lag, from foreign players, who absolutely do NOT need to be connected to this server, let alone the actually people that do belong on the north america client that STILL LAG ANYWAY. z8 games has by far done a worse job and OG Planet and Wemade USA combined. and they still haven't solved the lag. Imagine: you go into a game, and do your best to fight, only to see almost every attack you make doesnt even register with the opponent, and they are still able to hit you with pin point precision and accuracy. thats what lost saga is about these days; Hero's that juggle you so much you cant have a chance to fight back, and laggers who you cant even hit when you DO have a chance to fight back.

My review is only facts. I admit ignorance when confronted so instead of disliking my review and running off why not start an argument?

TL;DR
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- Bad community
- Pay to win
- No support team
- No balance
- No skill is required to be good
- To many bugs
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The morons who give this game a positive review are idiots like me who spent over thousands of dollars into this game. Now before you click the funny button let me explain why.

1. You must pay for the simplest of features. You cannot have a female avatar without paying real money. You cannot keep playing without paying real money. (No matter what anybody tells you this is factual. This has actually happened to me three times. Please correct me if they've fixed this in the comments.)

2. They're plenty of events that may give you pretty cool gear but it's nothing compared to what they have in the shop. Gears that will switch locations with players across from the map. So all you have to do is jump off the edge and use the gear. Z8Games is smart doing this because the competitive players will patiently wait until the next week or so they release a gear to counter the previous. Thus making a endless cycle of addiction and paying to win. Another thing you will notice as a new player is that you can pick up gears that opponents drop. If it's a gear that somebody bought they will whine and complain in the chat about how much money it costed them for that one gear. What they tell you isn't a lie.

People giving this game a positive review are fine with this aspect. (Which is why they're so many.)
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Balance is another problem this game has that will never be fixed. This is impossible because of ways around the skill rank system and the amount of over powered gears that have already been given to players.

1. Players are able to repeatedly join rooms and act as a noob getting damaged by enviromental hazards and jumping off the edge. When the game detects this it lowers a players skill level. This allows them to join rooms that new players have created.

This is the one thing aside from the pay to win that could somewhat make the game better if it was fixed.
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Gameplay is horrible.

All you'll be doing as a free player is PVP because the PVE is nearly impossible to beat. Also expect to just open hero scrolls and gear chests.
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So many ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ errors.

When you try to delete anything it tells you to type a confirmation code. When you type it in it states that you're the one incorrect when it's literally impossible to decipher the text thats flying off the edge of the panel you read it on.
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This game in the past have had worse connection problems so I'm going to mildly criticize it on that.

1. Instead of blocking a foreign ip address (don't ask me how it works, Korean Lost Saga managed to do it) if you're locale isn't set right you can't play the game.

2. People with great connection are getting cannot operate.
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This game takes no skill to play.

To win in this game all you have to do is buy a premium hero and literally I MEAN LITERALLY throw your head back and forth on your keyboard.
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Hackers still exist, fishing gives you ♥♥♥♥, no support team, bad community and the game has little to no features.
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Money spent: 2600$ +

There is nothing good about this game and it took me six years to realize it. How long will it take you?

Lost saga is an online casual MMO featuring many different characters. The game not only boasts smooth game-play but also emphasizes individual creativity. There are endless ways to win matches and knock your opponents' pants off, literally.

this game its kinda like a sport if you dont practice you wont be very good at it. if you do put in the time , effort , and tears it is a very fun game. However this game has the worst communty ive ever seen. people will insult you if your good. people will insult you if your bad. people will be total ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on these game no matter what. but if you can find a few good freinds its a fun experince i guess. not a very freindly community.

If you're thinking about playing this game brand new or don't have alot of free time on your hands. Avoid right now. After a few matches with the fellow rookies you'll be thrown into games with the players that been at this for years, and you will lose. A lot. Stripping what fun there is to this game.

They claim that with events and dailies you'll be geared up and ready to take on everyone, which is a lie. You'll need to get really lucky with the RNG chests to give you the gear that could be even remotely useful. And when it comes to heroes, you'll need to get a certain combo of heroes to even stand a remote chance against your opponents. All the premium "fun" heroes are going to cost you either actual money or a ton of grinding in the PVE, which is another RNG timesink. The hero scrolls given to you will give you a hero at random, some are good, others you may like, but the concept of play to your style is a lie against the meta crowd.

Gameplay can be fun if you run into the right people. All the qualities of a brawler with a so-so combo system. Only so-so due to connection problems and odd hit detection for unknown reasons. I can play most of the games I own without any lag but somehow i'm stuck on 1-2 bars in LS, and I live in the US. If you're running on wireless or don't have decent enough speed, don't bother playing. Add to it the "pros" that have the hero combos that will stunlock you into eternity. The community claims Cyborg is the way to go to counter this play, but the veterans have a counter for it and will shut down and mock you for using Cyborg.

The community itself is riddled with unhelpful toxic players that will mock you for the slightest hiccup and will insult you non-stop, win or lose. If you make one complaint against this game you will be met with LS defense flame. Just as terrible as most MOBAs out there. You have those few that are friendly, but good luck spotting them.

This game must of been good at it's original release, but now it's infested with a terrible P2W system and a toxic elitist community. So to the new, poor, or those with not alot of time on their hands, avoid this game. If you need a decent online brawler, wait for DFO to get rereleased in March.