The Last Remnant

"Big battles with a bit of strategy sound good to you?"

After years of shipping out development to other studios such as tri-Ace or Jupiter and making sequels to previous franchises, Square-Enix has at long last created a brand new title by itself: The Last Remnant. To give a basic run down on the idea of the Last Remnant, if you have played any other Japanese RPG, you know most of what to expect in terms of the story, how the player progresses, what the sidequests will be like, how long it will be, and so on and so forth. The only real twist to this game is that the battles involve groups of enemies and allies rather than a single small band of heroes engaging equally small groups of enemies.

Graphics, Audio, and Presentation

Let us start with the bad: This game has some technical issues that need to be talked about. If you do not install the game to the hard drive using the NXE, you're in for a bumpy ride. The load times from the disk are pretty bad and the framerate will chug along in battle. On the other hand, if you do install the game, both of these will probably go away. The key word here is probably. It is not a guarantee these problems will go away with the install.

With that said, if you can look past this or the install does iron it all out for you, the game is pretty well put together. The Unreal Engine 3 does produce some ugly models every now and then, and the character animations are occasionally wonky, but the art style to the game really makes these vague afterthoughts. The environments are varied and have a lot of detail put into them, so there is no problem with viewing the same bland backgrounds over and over like there is in many games of this genre. As it runs on the same engine and is somewhat similar in purpose, Lost Odyssey is a good comparison if you need a game to compare with this game's graphics.

Though there are only a few standout tracks, the soundtrack is overall pretty well done. I never came across any tracks that struck me as particularly annoying, and they all fit the mood. One of the neat things the game will do in battle is switch out songs depending on how well the player is doing to give off that “yeah, go get ‘em!” or “hang in there!” feeling.

As far as voice acting goes, this game delivers. Though the lizard race has a grating quality to their voice, only one ever speaks at length, and he tends to grow on you. Otherwise, the accents are all appropriate and welcome rather than out of place or too ridiculous. The fact that the game was made with the English voice-actors in mind also makes the cutscenes a lot better in presentation than those of many other RPGs where the lip-synching is totally off because it was made for the Japanese version.

Overall, as long as the technical problems don't weigh you down, the game presents itself in a pretty nice package.

Story

Since the game is produced by the same people who make Final Fantasy, it should come as little surprise that the story is very much like many of those in the series. A little bit of political intrigue here, a hint of romance there, a teenage hero with mysterious powers, an even more mysterious villain trying to conquer the world, objects holding vast amounts of unexplained power. Despite the fairly formulaic plot, there are enough twists to keep the player's interest and the cast has enough personality to make itself memorable. Perhaps not the best story ever told, but for those of you who grew up playing Japanese RPGs, this is likely the sort of tale you will enjoy.

Exploring and Battling

The Last Remnant seeks to vary from the sea of Japanese RPGs out there by offering up a battle system in which the player controls up to five groups of five characters each and pits them against armies of monsters and other foes. In this battle system, the player gives vague orders to each group and then watches the battle unfold. There are also quicktime events which flash a button that, if pressed with the right timing, allows the player to score extra damage and give the next character in the group their attack immediately. This can be turned off if it grows annoying, but it helps serve to keep the player in the action and make the battles more intense. After completing a battle, characters may gain stats or learn a new move based upon what they did in battle. So how does this all work out?

At first, it feels like a jumbled chaotic mess. Your first few battles are likely to be spent wondering what in the world is going on and what all the various numbers and boxes represent. As you play a few more battles, one of the things that will likely stand out is how random many of the things about it are. To some players who demand complete control of everything, this may be a big turn off. If, however, this does not strike you as a game breaking idea, then this will turn out to be one of the battle system's strengths as it will end up leading to each battle being unique and allowing strategy to step in as you spend more time deciding how best to handle the options and units available to you rather than focusing on learning big spells and grinding for gear with huge numbers so you can just mash the Attack command over and over like a traditional RPG in this vein might demand.

The battles are such a treat that it remains fun throughout the game to chain together monsters so that you can fight more of them at once using the game's unique way of encountering enemies. With the growing trend away from random encounters, Last Remnant has the enemies walking around the map whereupon touching one will launch the player onto a separate screen for a battle, similar to games like Valkyrie Profile or the Star Ocean series or Tales series. However, in a new twist, the Last Remnant has a “timeshift” feature where the player can temporarily slow down time and engage with every enemy he touches while running around. The more enemies the player touches, the more enemies there will be in battle which leads to a tougher fight but bigger rewards. In the later parts of the game, when the player's party is tough enough to handle a lot, it is even possible to take on hundreds of enemies at once like this.

It is a good thing that battles are such fun, too, because the majority of the sidequests of the game revolve around searching dungeons or defeating a boss. There are plenty of sidequests to be done in the game, with the majority of them being quests that can be commissioned in the pubs of each town. In this way, the game is somewhat similar to Final Fantasy XII. The difference is that the quests are a lot more varied than the simple hunting of marks found in that game and contain a lot more backstory than the extremely brief paragraph or two of text that led into hunting down a mark, meaning that the player will feel a bit less detached to the task at hand.

Conclusion

All in all, the Last Remnant is an excellent game for the average RPG fan, but the technical hiccups and the fairly strict adherence to the standards of the genre make its audience limited. The game is fairly lengthy and has plenty of sidequests, so if the battle system intrigues you and you've been looking for something to hold your interest for a while, give it a go.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/02/08

Game Release: The Last Remnant (US, 11/20/08)