The Last Remnant

Ever since the SaGa series coming to the US, they all sucked, well guess what? The Last Remnant is no different than the SaGa series apparently since the game was produced by the SaGa game developer. Everything is bad for this game. Grinding system is bad. Everything sucks about this game. If you lose the boss fight, you'll hate this game more. Square Enix has been declared the worst failures in an attempt to make a SaGa inspired game like a disastrous masterwork. Stupid-donkeys they are. Don't check this game out. You'll start hating Square Enix if you do so. Square Enix has learned their lessons that making bad RPGs will destroy the video game industry. We don't want that. The Last Remnant is SaGa Frontier Xtreme. Stupid game title.

This game had mixed results, for the most part I enjoyed it, but it needed a lot of improvement as well. The game features a boy named Rush who at first is on a quest to find his sister. He first mistakenly thinks he sees her in the middle of a rather big battle, but it turns out to be a lady knight. He ends up joining up with her and a king named David as the king agrees to help Rush find his sister. Their quest takes them to many lands, but after they find his sister the game is not nearly over as now they must find out the plans of a man simply known as the Conqueror. There is more to the story and like the recent Final Fantasy XII, this games plot could use a bit of simplifying to help it be more understandable. It could also use a lot less sidequests in it as there are so many that if you do them all it takes away from the main story because you end up spending hours on the sidequests to the point you forget key points of the story. There is also something a bit off with the story as most role playing games that do not feature a romantic storyline with the main character and someone else tend to be weaker. Here it almost seems Rush and the king have a thing for each other. I am not knocking it, but I do prefer my leads to have a female romantic interest, perhaps a side character would be fine. It is not anything directly said, but I kind of picked up some vibes from those two and the ending really made me think in Japan that was the case. The fighting in the game is rather fun and annoying at the same time too. You fight in groups and the action is turn based, however you only really issue basic commands for the units and the computer decides what attacks they perform and such. This will prove to be a pain at first, but once you get into it, the fighting will become more easy to do. In the end you can control a maximum of five units with like five people or six people in them max. I found it much better to have only four units as I was able to defeat the last boss using that many. Not that the last boss was much of a problem, he was rather easily handled, a lot harder to kill is this dragon right before the final fight, but I remedied the need to fight it by slowing down time and running around him. Did I mention you slow down time to engage most enemies? Well you do, you can link together numerous battles using this speed slow down and really have massive battles. String together to many and you are doomed. There is more to the fighting, and it is a bit difficult to get used to, but once you get the hang of it, it is not so bad. The last thing I will mention is the strategy guide to this game, I shelled out twenty bucks for it and it was one of the worst strategy guides I have ever bought. The guide would not tell you where components could be found to make your comrades and your weapons stronger, but it did nearly tell you every bit of dialog in the game. Excuse me, but people buy the guides to find locations of things, not to find out the entire story. It had horrible battle strategies too, nearly every boss battle they say to multi deadlock the enemy and hope for the best, I used a tactic of holding back a unit or two to possibly heal or revive a party and it was a lot more effective than attack with everyone. In the end a few fixes in the story and battles would not hurt, but as it is it is a rather good game. The loading is a bit of a pain though, what is with the Xbox 360 that it takes so long to load?

well ya, played for a few hours, what did i find? a boring basic game with no charm, was a fan of the old final fantasy games and such, but this game.. well the battles were boring, played themselves mostly and the computer played everything so quickly i didn't know what state i was in since the computer did so much while i was sitting there watching the battle play itself, just such a simplistic console RPG on heavy rails to the point i thought it was supposed to be a movie and not a game, not worth playing story? didn't interest me at all, found it very dull and generic currently i have many gigs free on my hdd free, which is better than having this junk installed, skip this watered down, generic, bland, basic console ported RPG.. sucks, go play some nes final fantasy instead, much better.

don't waste your money, you have been warned

I played a number of PC RPGs in recent years, games like Neverwinter Nights 2, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Drakensang, Sacred, Silverfall, etc. They all had some things in common: boring story lines, characters I did not care about, unimaginative art design and tedious game play. Fallout 3 was especially bad, because even the technical side was horrid. With envious eyes I looked upon the consoles which were regularly graced with RPG gems by the Japanese masters.

With The Last Remnant, the wait finally comes to an end. Greatly surpassing the original Xbox 360 version in the technical aspects as well as game play improvements, the game has everything I look for in a great RPG. The story, though slow to unfold in the beginning, is simply captivating, the characters have depth, distinct personalities and back stories and one simply can not prevent oneself from caring about them (the excellent voice-acting, I only played with the Japanese voices btw., did help a lot). Especially the ending left me with the distinct I-want-to-cry-but-I-suppress-it feeling in my throat. That alone is testament to the greatness of game. No western RPG every did that for me.

The game play focuses mainly on battle, the game features one of the more innovative battle systems in recent history. Instead of issuing orders to single characters, you give general commands to groups of characters, known as "unions", specific attacks and techniques are chosen by the game in accordance to the type of order you gave. This might displease micro-managers, who like to control every single aspect of the battle, especially in the earlier parts, but later in the game, where you have to fight large scale battles with dozens of enemies and at least a dozen of your own characters, I would not want to have to issue commands to every single character. Who gets attacked and how effective attacks will be is also largely determined by the position of your unions on the battle field as well morale, which can make an attack weaker or stronger. It also means that unions can be flanked or attacked from the rear, which means they can not fight back in these circumstances. This makes the battle system quite complex and you have to really think about what you are doing. This is especially true because you have no control over level ups and stats increases and you can only equip the main character, so overpowering the other characters with ultra weaponry will be next to impossible.

As for the visuals, the game is simply stunning and breathtakingly pretty. The artwork is top notch, (though you can only access small parts of them) cities are full of detail and have distinctive and unique design and flair and their design is very creative. The same goes for characters, monsters (my favourite is the cyclops, a summon) and dungeons. Especially the large desert map had me sit back and think "damn, this is nice". The battle effects and combat animations are also very well done and I simply could not get tired of watching the animation of one of the super weapons deployed in battle. Just wow.

Again typical of Japanese RPGs is the excellent soundtrack. The battle background music is engaging and never starts to feel repetitive or become annoying.

Unlike many other Console-to-PC ports, the controls have been nicely adapted to the PC. The traditional WASD configuration and the integration of the mouse is fluid, intuitive and fast.

Graphically, the Game is very well done. Granted, it could have been done better and I miss many features that I came to love with Crysis, such as volumetric lighting and ambient occlusion. Especially the fact that the game lacks an option for Anti Aliasing is a big negative, forcing it via the driver is not easy and if you can do it, it drastically reduces performance. The game does support soft shadows, but they as well cost a lot of FPS. (Crysis did that better, must be the engine.) But I can accept that, seeing as the game was originally made for a console which are naturally less powerful than PCs, which limits the effort of uprating it to PC quality.

All in all, this was one of the best and most entertaining games I played in quite some time and I can only hope that Square Enix decides to release more of their games on PC.