A Brief Review of The Last Remnant

Since a lot of talk has revolved around this game lately, I decided to write a brief overview of The Last Remnant. Let me start off by saying that I am not completely finished the game yet, but I am most of the way there. I generally don't read game reviews, so I have not read any for this one and may not cover the same issues. I will not get into any spoilers, though a couple of prevalent abilities may be mentioned.

Initiating a Battle: Battles take place by players initiating them, coming into direct contact with an enemy and through scripted events. Shortly after you begin the game, you get the ability to slow down time for a brief period, which can help you avoid battles that you don't want to deal with or prevent enemies from getting the jump on you. This is critical for building up enemy chains, which is the running total of enemies in an area that you have initiated a battle with and defeated and helps determine the amount and type of items you earn after battle.

Since enemies freely roam the levels, you can choose to fight them or avoid them. This works great for the most part, as you run faster or at least as fast as 95% or the monsters. However, if you touch them (intentionally or not), you start a battle at a disadvantage (an "ambush" type battle where you just defend for the first turn) and lose any enemy chain that you might have been building. What this means it that you have to be careful and initiate the battles yourself. Again, for the most part this is fine. However, there are some enemies, particularly the large or flying ones, which are ridiculously difficult to "target" because of the small initiation radius. It becomes less about being careful around these creatures and more about being lucky enough to initiate the battle without running into them.

Battle System: Since it is such a big part of the game, I will try to go over this area in detail. The Last Remnant is an effective attempt to mix classic turn-based RPG elements with those of a more traditional turn-based strategy game. You control up to five "unions", which you can think of individual unions as a group of characters (1-5 members) similar to a classic RPG party. Battles are broken up into turns in which you instruct each union to perform certain commands (attack, standby, heal, etc.) and then watch them go at it with the enemies. The best analogy that I can think of is that the game plays like an "RPG Manager"; like a baseball manager type game, you pick your characters, set them into groups/formation and give them a task to perform, but it's up to the individual character to decide how to perform that task.

In battle, everything is based around the unions (player and enemy unions), though attacks generally occur between one character and one member of an enemy union. Turns progress with sub-turns where a single union will perform an action or two unions will directly combat each other. Within those sub-turns, each individual member of the union acts on their own. The sub-turns would be comparable to a generic RPG turn (e.g. random action order, back and forth). Once each union is finished, then the next turn starts.

HP/AP (ability points) are shared for the entire union, which allows a character with say 500 HP to survive a 1000 HP attack as long as the total union HP is high enough. Individual characters can still die in battle, but it is much more common for the entire union to be wiped out by damage. Of course, that means that the entire union is dead and none of the characters can function. Additionally, many of the status effects in the game affect the entire union: one member gets poisoned and they all suffer. Another concern is that if the union leader dies, that union becomes "uncontrollable". While the leader is dead you cannot tell the union what to do, but they still *might* perform actions like attacking or using skills. Other times, they will just sit there twiddling their thumbs.

While the manager aspect can make for entertaining strategic battles where you order your unions to attack and flank the enemies (flanking gives an attack bonus and prevents the enemy from defending itself), this can also leave you very frustrated when the AI decides not to give you certain commands, particularly healing when you are around 50% life and fighting an enemy that likes to attack an entire union (or more) at once. The more fun attacks (character "specials") also rarely ever come up as options and there is no way (for you) to flee from a battle, which is a bit disappointing.

A Word of Curse: To put it bluntly, there are some enemy abilities that simply are not fair, unbalanced and clearly put in to screw the player over for no particular reason. One of those in particular, "curse", is consistently used by a common class of enemy and afflicts a union with random death. Yes, random death can occur before each member acts each turn. It has a random duration and can easily kill off the union completely in one or two turns. I have not seen anything that can remove the effect, but I would be surprised if there really wasn't something. What is worse is that the enemies that use this attack use it against all attackers during the first turn. This would be fine if you always had the option to standby and not attack, but this isn't the case and usually two out of three unions can be knocked out. Combined with really high enemy HP, this makes certain battles a simple matter of a coin toss instead of being even remotely related to skill or strategy. There are other such abilities, such as "overdrive" which lets an enemy perform up to five consecutive attacks (which will simply just kill you if they happen to be area attacks). It is never the case where you cannot eventually win after repeated attempts, but it can get into coin-flipping territory sometimes.

Leveling: There is no leveling in this game, no experience points and no easy way of knowing how you are progressing. There is advancement though. Characters can randomly receive stat increases, new abilities (even during battle) and improve their weapons after a battle. If you have ever played a game like Final Fantasy Legend II, stat improvement is very similar. However, this is only possible while the game thinks you are "under powered" for an area. If the game thinks that you are "over powered" then you have a very low, and eventually a zero chance of getting any improvements after a battle. In other words, the encounters can become absolutely pointless and only serve to make the game take longer. The enemies in an area can get stronger as you progress through the game and allow you to advance when you revisit an area, but that is trial and error.

A correlated issue is advancing your weapons. You generally do not buy better weapons. Instead you have to upgrade them. That is fine, except upgrading them requires both items collected from battle and money to pay a shop to upgrade them. The upgrades are decent, but get to a point where it can take several hours just to find the rare monster which may drop the item you need for an upgrade. Also, because of the commitment in time and money to upgrading your weapons, it is probably best to look at a weapon list to pick the weapon type that you want to use for the entire game and start using/upgrading the base weapon(s) as soon as possible.

Graphics: I have seen a lot of talk about the graphics. Yes, the graphics are good (running them at 1080p on a 60" screen), but not without two major problems. First, the frame rate is bad. Not just a little bad, but I would estimate that it can dip lower than 5-10 fps during some battle/cinema sequences. This actually can help with some of the battle trigger timing events, but is a major noticeable distraction. I am playing the Xbox 360 version, so I cannot account for how it will run on a PC. The game uses Unreal, so a properly configured PC may be fine. The second issue (again, at least with the Xbox version) is texture popping. You can literally count the texture levels in some cases as you watch them appear one after another. Once they are loaded, things are fine, but starting cinematic scenes can be distracting because of this.

Wide Open and Empty: The cities and levels in the game can be extremely large and detailed (see the popping problem above). Unfortunately, they are relatively empty too. The game uses a targeting system similar to the KOTOR games to interact with chests, people and the environment, so exploration is less cumbersome that it could be. The problem is that the cities are sparsely populated with people you can talk to (i.e. one section may have a couple dozen people walking around but only five can be talked to) and there are really no secret items to find. This is a bit of a disappointment, but it does cut down the play time needed to search an area.

Instruction(less) Manual: The instruction manual does actually cover quite a bit, including the battle system in detail. However, there are a lot of things not mentioned or glossed over. Take character stats for example. Each character has strength, intelligence and speed which are easily explained, but each character also has a unique stat which has no explanation in the manual or in game. I've yet to figure out just what the "management", "impetuosity" or other stats do. There is also little explanation of just how to use weapons; you can only directly change the equipment for your main character, but shops sell some equipment that only your companions can use.

Saving: No complaints about the saving system. In fact, the ability to pretty much save anywhere really does help to lessen the impact of the other imperfections, as it is usually easy to save right before and after battles (major or minor). Coin-flip battles can still be irritating, but they generally will not erase more than a couple minutes worth of work in the worst case. The saving system also lets you experiment with different union formations or weapon customization without preventing you from undoing those changes if you don't like them.

Conclusion: Obviously, I haven't covered everything in the game, that would make this too long and boring, but I did try to cover the points that I think could be major influences on a playing decision. I will not give the game a rating because it would be pointless since everyone has a different opinion. The people who say the game is perfect or unplayable fail to account for people who value certain aspects (e.g. popping) differently. The game is far from perfect, but it is certainly not unplayable either. The plot is somewhat generic and predictable, but there are numerous side quests to embark on which flesh out individual characters or unlock new areas. The uniqueness of the battle system makes it difficult to compare to any other games, but a liking of turn-based RPG's, and to a lesser extent strategy games, is pretty much expected. Damn, didn't quite get to 2000 words…

 

I dunno, it looks pretty forgettable to me. I might have to try it sometime though. RPG's are just so lame nowadays.

It looks like Square just sucked with the Unreal engine. I'm guessing it's because of a lack of communication and documentation?

 

Possibly, though it could just be because they were trying to go in a new direction and have never used the engine before.

 

This game joined my fabled collection of games that can remain sealed until I finished Fallout 3, Prince of Persia and finally finish up my level on LBP.

It may remain sealed for quite some time...

 

ugh, this doesn't sound like a game i want to play. unless the story is amazing which i hear it isn't anything special. i'll pass. there's better RPG's out there I need to play right now. Pokémon!!