Sunday, July 18, 2010

First review! The Last Remnant




Yet Another J-RPG from the famous developer and production company that is Square-Enix, released in 2008 (360) and 2009 (PC). Although created by the same company that made Final Fantasy, this game only shares its developer’s name and genre, nothing more.

The plot of the story is, Rush, our protagonist, has his sister Irina kidnapped and you need to rescue her. Why? Because she holds a special “gift”, she can control Remnants. Remnants are artefacts, treasures of another world, but another way to describe them would be as “visual gods”, seeing as that’s how the world of The Last Remnant treats them.

Naturally, since Irina has such a gift, certain “parties” would be interested to use those gifts for their evil gain. Barely a third into the game, another party is introduced, The Conqueror. Not much is known about The Conqueror, who’s dressed in a blood red garb, which I admit, looks pretty neat. That’s as far as I’m spelling out about the story, as I don’t want to spoil any more, the Wiki page is there for that. So basically, it’s sister gets kidnapped, rescue sister, do ??? to The Conqueror. A very basic story if summarised like that, which thankfully gets buffed up a lot thanks to the various side quests in this game.

The side quests are the “butter” to this game, as they provide a lot of information, whether it be about the world, Remnants, or the four races (Mitra; Human, Qsiti; Upright walking frog-like creatures, Yama; Big buff walking fish-like race, Sovani; Feline race with four arms). The side quests are where a lot of the content is at too. If you follow only the main storyline, chances are you’re missing out on at least two thirds of the game! in both content and information. Side quests also add very tangible rewards, whether it be items, cash, components, or more potential characters (leaders) to use in battle. Quests are where you will be doing a lot of your grinding too, which make them even more important.

The gameplay splits into two, a field section and battle section. In the field section, you can see monsters, but the number of actual monsters being represented by each single monster is never known, unless they are a rare, or boss, though the actual value is never above 6 per monster. Then you also have “dig points” which you can harvest treasure or components from, or sometimes even both. There are of course, still treasure chests, who could forget about those?

The battle system is what really separates The Last Remnant from any other J-RPG. Yes, it is still turn based, but it features very large battles, battles you’d expect in a real battlefield environment. Instead of individual units, you have unions, which are made up of individual units. The unions themselves feel more like a whole character, as each union is a separate entity, and you direct each whole union rather than individual characters.

There is also “critical offence” and “critical defence”, with the former doing more damage and bringing forward the next teammate’s turn, and the latter either parrying or counterattacking. You will need to press the correct button at the right time. Think of these like quick time events. Sometimes, these are crucial to winning some of the harder battles.

The union with the fastest mobility (not shown) will act first, then the second will, and so on. Your battle formations for each union, positions where each character is placed in a union may have effects on mobility, specific skills, and stats.

You get a few commands for each union per turn, such as “Take out the leader” or “Heal the others”. These commands, while very vague in face value, allow you to view the commands that each unit takes for that particular action with just a single button. Naturally, you can only select one command per turn. This is where it gets tactical. Should you heal the union that’s close to dying? Should you standby and wait for them to come to you? Should you use an AoE (Area of Effect) attack and wipe out everything in one go? (Okay, that one has pretty much only one answer), should you revive that union that just got wiped out last turn? Because of the size of the battles, things such as speed and mobility are important. If two opposing unions are far from each other, then it takes a whole turn for them to actually engage in combat. You can get flanked after you are deadlocked (when one union is already actively engaging another union), rear assaulted, or massive striked. The same applies vice versa also. Flank attacks, rear assaults, massive strikes, certain abilities and skills, and critical hits raise “Morale”.

Morale is important, because it affects attack, defence, and to a certain degree, the chance that specific skills will become available. This also works vice versa, so if you have low morale, prepared to be hit hard. When a rival union reinforces the enemy’s forces, your morale will take a hit. There is also individual union morale, which plays an important role too, but is influenced more easily, decreasing when taking hits and increasing when dealing damage.

Skills in this game are your main damage dealers, split into many categories. There are; combat arts (directly related to wield styles), mystic art and item arts. What skills you can use in a specific command is determined by AP, current and amount needed to actually use a skill(s), and the skills that have actually been learnt by the character. All skills are learnt with experience, as in, use it over and over again, and it’ll either eventually upgrade or you’ll learn a new skill in that class.

Combat Arts are pretty much just striking with your weapon, whether it be a blade dance, poking strikes, uppercuts etc. They have the potential to be extremely powerful, but cannot strike more than a single unit at a time. Some skills are exempt though. There are a few different wield types, all with their own advantages and disadvantages. Some such as one handed allows for use of a shield, while two handed cannot, but allows for stronger attacks. Requires AP to use.

Mystic Arts encompasses magical spells, whether beneficial, or harmful. They can do direct damage at close or long range, cause status effects, or affect morale. Many mid-level and high-level spells are AoE, which is useful for unions with more than a single unit, or if many enemy unions are in close proximity. These Require AP to use.

Item Arts are consumables, which range from healing/reviving herbs, to traps which cause other adverse effects. This type of skill requires you to be fairly wealthy, as 97% of the time, you won’t be getting the required items for using said arts by ways of monster drops. The big plus about these arts is that they’re generally faster, as in, they’ll come up first or in front of most other arts/attacks in a battle turn, and require no AP to use.

Weapon customisation is, to say the least, interesting. The items needed can be hard to get sometimes, but the extra effects or attack/defence boosts are usually always worth it. At the very least, you can view the stats of a given item before you spend your cash and components to upgrade. Aside from customising your normal weapons (some can’t be), you can also make new weapons and accessories through the customisation shop too. These are usually non upgradeable, and some require extremely hard to get components, but at times, they can be quite worth it for the stat boosts and effects.

You can only directly equip Rush’s weapons and accessories. All other characters will either upgrade their own once item prerequisites are met (they ask for components too), or if you have a better weapon than theirs of the same wield style, then they’ll ask for it. They will only ever ask for accessories from you, and never buy their own (cheap bastards!).

The Last Remnant has a very….distinct leveling system, because it’s not much of a leveling system. Battle Rank, or BR, is directly affected by the number of enemies you defeat, and how strong they are relative to your BR. It rises faster when you fight a lot of harder enemies, and slower when you fight weaker enemies. BR doesn’t affect your character’s stats, at all. You get stat gains and skill gains after every battle, if you fought enough enemies in that battle, or if you fought a hard enough enemy. BR just gives a average rough estimate of the number of enemies you’ve killed.

Some enemies scale with BR, though not by means of stats or HP. Some enemies use certain skills only above a specific BR, while others gain a level to certain skills, which can make some normal enemies harder once you reach a certain BR. This goes for boss fights too, though the threshold for the skill upgrades seems to be a lot higher for them than normal enemies.

The environments look absolutely splendid, and the art style is unique, not really Japanese/anime-ish, rather, more westernised. Seeing the Remnants towering over the towns certainly looked impressive, but I was rather disappointed I couldn’t to see them up closer. The graphics themself are good, but not amazing, since it is running UE3. Which also means long load times, and texture pop in. The PC version has reduced the load times, and has made the game a lot prettier to look at.

The game’s music score is one of the best to date. The catchy everyday sounding tunes, to the heavier guitar in the more intense battles are addictive. My only complaint here is that in battle, a given music track may switch abruptly at the end of a battle turn. It does this to gauge how well you are doing, but honestly, having a song cut out right at the middle is pretty annoying, not to mention the laziness to blend the music in.

The game itself is aimed at an international market, so Square-Enix has hired a bunch of English voice actors (naturally) to do the English dub. On the PC version, there is an option to switch the Japanese dub, but the game is fully lip synched to English. I prefer the Japanese myself, but whatever you choose first will likely be the one you’ll end up enjoying more. This option needs to be added to more games, though it does take a lot of disk space.

It almost goes without saying, that a J-RPG isn’t especially tailored for keyboard and mouse, and TLR is no exception. There is in-game support for a 360 controller, which I recommend you use if you play it on PC.

After you finish the game, you can make a new save for a new game plus, which carries over….certain items which I will not disclose here. You basically replay the game with said items, on normal mode or hard mode. You cannot choose in-game. Hard mode enemies have more HP and hit considerably harder, so it’s not for the faint of heart.

Square-Enix seriously took a huge leap of faith from the traditional Final Fantasy formula, and made something completely original, with a new target audience in mind. It may still be turn based, but it’s hardly like anything they’ve released before. The battle system, while very complex, can be very fun, especially with the bigger battles. The world is interesting and sucks you in, once you’ve done a few side quests to get up and running. The music is superb, with the exception of the abruptly changing track problem. If you can overlook the graphics glitches on the Xbox 360, then this game is definitely worth picking up, especially at the price it’s at now. An install to the hard drive can also increase overall performance substantially. It’s a shame that The Last Remnant is probably the last game with this sort of system that Square-Enix will make, because it had great potential to become a contender against their very own Final Fantasy series.

NB: There is a demo for the game on Steam, which shows off the battle system and main gameplay, but without tutorials.

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