Lost Soul Aside was one of the very first games in Sony’s China Hero Project. An action game inspired by Square Enix, it was to be the first game made by Yang Bing and his studio, Ultizero Games.
If you followed it this whole time, you would have expected a huge AAA.
The game finally released in August 29, 2025. It reached a MetaCritic of 62 on PS5, with a user rating of 6.0. On Steam, it reached a Mixed rating from 952 user reviews.
What Happened To Lost Soul Aside?
Yang Bing, Ultizero, and Sony have yet to make any statements about this game. A new BiliBili blog post from user 极文 claims to know the story of the game’s development behind the scenes.
To be clear, we can’t vouch the veracity of this account or their claims. But they are serious enough that they are worth consideration.
To make sure we accurately verified the meaning of this blog post, we sourced a translation from Reddit using ChatGPT, and one from Twitter user SynthPotato. We compared these two accounts from our own machine translation using DeepL.
Please remember that none of this is confirmed. With that said, we’re focusing on two main points made in this blog.
Lost Soul Aside Did Not Take Ten Years To Make
The common narrative was that Lost Soul Aside took ten years to make, but that isn’t accurate or fair. Yang Bing was inspired to make a game after seeing Final Fantasy 15 in 2014.
He wasn’t really making the game on his own for all that time. He was still studying Unreal when he signed the Sony deal.
Lost Soul Aside started production in 2018, with five people who were all studying Unreal. Yang Bing gave up on making an open action game and restarted in 2020.
Sony looked at that 2020 game in 2024 and demanded they make it even smaller. Developers who worked on God of War and Horizon (probably also in China) stepped in to help finish the project.
Clearly, Ultizero struggled to make the game for these six years. And that takes us to the next point.
This Was Never A AAA Game
While they never revealed the game’s budget, 极文 claims that Lost Soul Aside was made at 20 % of the budget of Black Myth Wukong. And while Black Myth Wukong has a lot of fans, Game Science also showed their inexperience in poor optimization and long delays.
Both were far from the scale of AAA development from either Japan or the West. That’s in terms of both the number of developers and their budgets.
Some fans feel that Lost Soul Aside is being unfairly reviled. The problem is, Sony’s marketing didn’t make it clear that it was not a AAA game at all. Sony also allowed fans to speculate freely for eight years.
This Situation Is Unfair To The Fans – And Also Ultizero Games
From our assessment of the situation, Sony allowed this game to meander in development hell in the same way that EA mismanaged Dragon Age: The Veilguard, or that Bethesda and Microsoft mismanaged Redfall.
If you were looking forward to this game, you may feel that Ultizero and Yang Bing let you down. But the studio and its founder were inexperienced devs placed in a bad situation.
Sony themselves bear huge responsibility for Lost Soul Aside. Fans should hold them accountable here the same way they did for EA and Microsoft/Bethesda.
We think Sony and Ultizero should address these claims shortly, and we hope to share news on that front as soon as they come out.
We would certainly feel better if Sony debunks this whole narrative. But if they want to end all these questions from the fans, they should provide the answers themselves.
