Antiquia Lost review for PS Vita, PS4, Switch

Platform: PS Vita
Also On: PS4, PC, Switch
Publisher: Kemco
Developer: Kemco/Exe-Create
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: E10+

While I wouldn’t say I was excited to play Antiquia Lost, I went into it with moderately high expectations. After all, my previous two experiences with Kemco-produced RPGs, Asdivine Hearts and Revenant Saga, both went pretty well. Both of them looked like generic old-school RPGs, but I found things to like, particularly in the latter. I had hopes that Antiquia Lost would carry on in that tradition.

Unfortunately, to borrow a phrase, sometimes a generic-looking old-school RPG is just a generic-looking old-school RPG. Antiquia Lost takes all the elements of an RPG you could’ve played at any point in time going back to the NES days, and…well, that’s all it does.

There’s a party full of standard RPG tropes: a hero with a mysterious past/power, a princess, a soldier, and so on. There’s an overworld map you travel around, looking for points of interest. There’s a convoluted, text-heavy story that does little to draw you in. There are uninspired turn-based battles, which you can push through just by pressing attack on every turn.

To be sure, nothing here is necessarily bad. Every aspect of the game is competently-made, if wholly uninspired. Antiquia Lost is totally functional, and you can get from beginning to end without the game ever breaking on you.

But that leads to the bigger question of why you’d want to go from beginning to end. I get that some people just live to play retro RPGs, but I’d hope that even these people have better taste than to play something as forgettable as Antiquia Lost.

Kemco provided us with a Antiquia Lost PS Vita code for review purposes.

Grade: C-