The Last Remnant

"Let's hope it really is the Last one."

In between bouts of swearing and controller-throwing, I occasionally looked up at my television and remembered I was still playing a cretinous little video game called The Last Remnant, Square-Enix's latest well-intentioned-but-horrible electronic entertainment failure- a failure so vast that I would have bet you money it was designed, written, and produced by a gaggle of 8 year-olds looking for their next Ritalin fix, had I not seen for myself the names of the adults responsible for this horror during the ending credits.

The Last Remnant's story begins with our hero, Rush Sykes, feverishly hunting down the whereabouts of his missing sister, presumably kidnapped or lost or maybe just looking for a way out of this game like the rest of us who possess fully functioning abilities to think and feel. Eventually, you and she and a host of ugly, ugly characters find themselves in a war with the ultimate bad guy- The Conqueror. That's right, the game's main bad guy is so laughably and unsubtly named that I was absolutely confident his presence was just a red herring, even 3/4 through the game! There's no writer, I thought to myself, who would name his script's bad guy something so ridiculous and silly and blunt. It'd be like naming your main character "Johnny McHero" or "Prince Awesome" (ah, perhaps for the sequel). At least this big bad lug did end up conquering a few things. It'd be awkward to name your kid "The Conqueror" and have him end up being a radish farmer or a barber. I wonder if "The" was his actual first name? These questions, I fear, will lay unanswered forever, much like a lot of the other more sizeable plot holes in TLR. To sum up: the silly, short, linear storyline is as subpar and inelegant as the graphics.

What a segue! Yeah, the XBox360 graphical processors aren't exactly stretching their legs with this title. I could almost envision it being run on a PS2 at times, what with some background detailing and foreground effects sometimes being added in the middle of some cutscenes. It woulda been funny watching one of the game's characters going into a big long soliloquy while his jacket was still being hastily drawn in... if I hadn't just spent sixty dollars for the experience. And the art design itself is no picnic either, drawing very heavily from the Final Fantasy Tactics/Final Fantasy 12 look, with a handful of different ugly races of people wandering around drab looking towns and ruins in garb that might have fit in around the time of Oscar Wilde- and drawn a characteristically pointed barb from him about how embarrassingly gauche they are ("Either this game goes or I do!"). At least one of your party's main characters looks and acts kind of like Yoda, so I could think of Star Wars during the game, offering me a brief moment of happiness.

Surprisingly- perhaps shockingly, considering the rest of The Last Remnant- the game's battle system was not only refreshing, but downright enjoyable. Instead of the usual core group of three or four RPG characters in your party, you, as Rush, lead up to five different squads, each of which can have several different warriors in them at any one time. At game's end, you could have, as I did, 4 different unions with 4-5 characters in each, and you get to command each grouping. Well, "command" is a bit of a stretch. While it was admittedly thrilling to be the war general of squadron after squadron in battle, what with all those spells flinging and swords wooshing and bombs exploding all over the battlefield, the manner in which you control things is a bit... nebulous, to put it politely. Somehow, even with all the fighters, mages, Yodas, etc, that you have at your disposal, each round in battle will see the gamer being forced to pick from only a handful (five or six) of predetermined battle selections for the fight you're in currently. To describe it more accurately, let me give you an example I experienced: In a particularly nasty fight, one of my teams had racked up enough action points to not only dish out tons of damage with tons of special moves, but to heal ourselves from our grievous wounds- which had amounted to about 90% of our dwindling HP at that stage. Since all HP (as well as AP) is in a communal pool for each group, we had to heal ourselves fast, or it was lights out. So what happens at the beginning of the next round?

We simply were not given the choice to heal ourselves. Forced by the AI to battle with 10% HP left, we were slaughtered.

I can't describe to you how angry and impotent and cheated I felt at that moment, all at the same time. In ANY other video game, when you get injured, you heal. When you wanna fight, you fight. Simple as that. In The Last Remnant, you have to hope to the high heavens that your next turn allows you to use the fighting or healing option you need. The specific choice is not yours, not once. Add to this the fact that when one person in your 5-man groups gets a status affliction, then you ALL get that status affliction, well, you can see why there are controller-shaped marks in my wall. And one status attack, Curse, is by far and away the worst attack in the history of JRPGs. I'm not prone to hyperbole, believe me. I've been RPG-ing since Dragon Warrior 1 for the NES. I thought I'd seen it all. But Curse hits your team, invariably affects every one of your members even if 4 out of 5 avoided it, and then gives them all a repeating 50/50 chance of instant death for the next FIVE ROUNDS of battle. It's also incurable. It's also used (along with a record number of other instant KO attacks) by TONS of enemies in the game. It's such a game-breaking attack that I more than once felt like snapping those two TLR discs in half and tossing the remains in a garbage can, then setting that garbage can on fire before flushing the ashes down the toilet. Incidentally, please forgive any further typos in this review, since I'm so angry now that I'm typing this with my fists, punching at my keyboard out of sheer rage.

So it's as good a time as any to mention the game's... "issues" with its difficulty level. Imagine, for a moment, your average everyday JRPG. Early boss fights are easy, boss fights in the middle of the game are tougher, and the ones at the end of the game are usually the hardest, most involved ones. But not in The Last Remnant! Oh no sir, logic is thrown brusquely out on the window, spat on, and then kicked in the groin when talking about the difficultly level in TLR. One boss fight might be kinda tough, followed by one that's ludicrously easy, then one that's so unbearably hard and unfair that you want to stab your own kidneys just so you can concentrate on another kind of pain to draw your attention away from the current suffering. That battle will then later be followed by a boss fight that's so easy, you'll wonder to yourself, as I did, if you were underleveled, overleveled, or just cursed by a gang of black cats with new rotten luck. Trust me, if you do play this game, you'll never know where you are in its storyline, with tough fights following easy ones, easy ones following hard ones, and no discernable way to tell if you're at an appropriate strength to take on the next section. It got so bad that the fight with a random dragon before the fight with the final boss was actually ten times tougher than the wussy, insanely pathetically easy final boss was! I had no idea the game was over until the credits rolled! "This was it??" I shouted to myself, among other less printable obscenities. The ending, too, while we're at it, was unsatisfying and short, like a kind of video gaming Danny Devito. That's right, I take on the blockbuster stars of this world. I'm not afraid. Take that, little man. You're next, Ronnie James Dio.

Were there any real positives about The Last Remnant? Well, uh... let me think. Okay, there's a good amount of downloadable content, most of which seems to be cost-free. Of course, that's like saying you can get a broken leg, then add a couple broken toes free of charge, so I don't know if this is a good or bad thing. The music, it's doable. Average to above average by a composer I have to admit I'd never heard of. The game is also blessedly short, with an average playtime anywhere from 30-60 hours, depending on how much you want to invest in it. Me, I'd rather invest in Enron or Fanny Mae, personally. And if you're a stickler for things, I guess you could argue that the pure uniqueness of multi-squadron-on-multi-squadron siege battles really is kind of, in an almost imperceptibly small way, somewhat exhilarating, swords clanging and spells blazing out on a wide open, miles-wide field. The item synthing, too, is pretty wide open and involved, but considering you can get a couple of really good swords early in the game and not need to synth a blessed other thing until the end of disc 2, I don't know how much of the item creation you're going to utilize. There's literally hundreds of items and ingredients for synthing, and I ended up needing only a few of them to make just 3 swords and two shields throughout dozens of hours of gaming. Definitely a wasted opportunity.

Oh let's face it, the entire game is pretty much a waste. You will throw your controllers for miles and miles and miles. You will hurl obscenities that would frighten even the hardest core of sailors. You will regret having wasted sixty dollars on one of the most disappointing outings from what used to be two of video gamedom's most respected and hallowed game makers, Square and Enix. Well, not if you read this review and take my final bit of advice: avoid at all costs. Your controllers and your kidneys will thank you for it later.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 12/26/08

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