THE LAST REMNANT review

The Last Remnant is an RPG developed and published by Square-Enix. It was released on November 2008 for Xbox 360 and will make its debut on PC this month. A PlayStation 3 version will be released eventually but no date have been announced so far.

Story
Last Remnant tells the story of Rush Sykes, a young man (obviously effeminate looking since this is a Square game) who is looking to save his sister from an evil wizard. Rush will discover that a bigger evil plan is behind this kidnapping and he will try to save the world. The story is alright, it is not awesome but it is far from being mediocre, it is a classic story of good versus evil. Unfortunately you might get lost in the main story because you are likely to forget the major events. The reason for that is that you will spend most of your time doing sidequests instead of the main quest. There are about 75 sidequests in the game. For each progression event you accomplish in the main story you unlock 2 to 5 sidequests. Most of these sidequests have no link to the main mission so they are pretty much irrelevant story wise. On the other hand, the characters of The Last Remnant are diversified and adds a nice touch to the story. Futhermore, the world in which these characters evolve is also interesting and well developed.

Gameplay
The combat system is fun but it will frustrate some players as you don't have full control over your party. Characters are called units and parties are called unions. You create unions from available units and then you are ready to get into a fight. You cannot control specific units, you can only control the general actions a union will execute.

It seems Square developed the game quickly since the different locations are pretty basic. There is no 3D world map where you can walk to go to different places. There is only a 2D map where you chose a specific location and you are automatically teleported there. Even the cities are not fully rendered. You have a city map and you can chose between 2 to 5 areas to go in the city. The use of invisible walls to stop you from going to certain places in the cities feel really cheap in 2009. Furthermore the same dungeons are used again and again and again: you can have up to ~6 quests in the same location.

The biggest flaw in the game mechanic is the way Square designed the character leveling. It is the worst system I have ever seen and it almost kills the game. Basically you have 2 choices. You can play normally, fighting monsters as you encounter them. You might have fun but you will not be able to fight the god-like bosses. The other option is to run away from every single monster (a lot of fun...) until you reach specific areas with strong monsters. You fight them over and over to level up and then continue to run away from the weaker ennemies... The reason this works is because you characters have attributes/skill points as well as a general battle rank. The goal is obviously to have more points but a lower battle rank. Strong monsters increase your points more than weak monsters. Fair enough. But your battle rank increase pretty much the same if you fight weak or strong monsters. The higher your battle rank is, the less points you get for each fight. The only way to maximize your points is to avoid normal (weak) monsters at all cost and only fight strong monsters.

Sounds and graphics
The Last Remnant uses the Unreal 3 Engine. The battles look really good. While most games don't benefit a lot from installing them on the Xbox 360 hard drive, this game does. I would go as far as saying that this is mandatory for this game in my opinion. If you don't install it, the battles will not be fluid. This solves the problem in the first part of the game but on the 2nd disc (OMG you will have to change disc after ~30 hours of gameplay!!!!11111 OMG!!!!! Multiple discs = Epic Failure, think of Final Fantasy 7! ;p) with multiple unions, you will get slowdowns in big battles.

The environments, even if they are simple and lack some details, also look good. On the other hand, Square was really lazy when it came down to polishing the game. The game uses cheap tricks to try to hide, miserably, the lack of animations. For example, in the big battles with reinforcement troops, instead of seeing the reinforcement units arrive you will get the following: an animation of doors opening (from a fortress or castle), black screen for 2 seconds (Uh?...), units magically appearing on the battle field, animation of doors closing. But wait, it gets even more pathetic at the end of disc 1. When you reach the end of disc 1, you really completed the first part of the story. The game could end here and the second disc could be labelled as The Last Remnant 2. Instead of having a nice little ending with a cutscene you get a freaking black screen (not even static 2D pictures) and you hear a narrator explaining the events since the next part of the game takes place later. I have never starred at a black screen for so long. Weak!

I also need to talk about the loading times. Even after installing the game (this is on Xbox 360 so this means the WHOLE disc is copied to the hard drive, you cannot get faster than this) the loading times are terrible. They completely kill the rhythm of the game. Let's take a classic example. You are in the city, you want to see your map since it is the only way possible to move around, so you press the button and you are greeted with a short loading screen (yes, a loading screen for loading a simple 2D static map...), press the button again to go to the world map instead of the city map and you will see another short loading screen. Chose a destination on the map. Long loading screen. Move your character around and encounter a boss. Long loading screen. Cutscene. Long loading screen. Fight. Long loading screen. Cutscene. Long loading screen and you are finally ready to play again. It completely kills any momentum the game could have, it is that bad.

Multiplayer
This game doesn't support multiplayer. You can't blame Square, I don't know how they could come up with an interesting multiplayer mode for this game.

Conclusion
This game is more than a deception. It has some major flaws and it feels cheap. This looks like a budget title, not the type of game you would expect from a major company such as Square-Enix. In my opinion, it is obvious that Bioware (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect...) is now, by far, the leading company for linear RPG games, a crown that Square once owned but started to lose with Final Fantasy 7 (to their defense, Final Fantasy 6 was so awesome, how could they do better?). The big battles are quite fun though, I had one that lasted about 1 hour and it was really great. Square-Enix released free downloadable add-ons for the game but unfortunately it is far from being enough to redeem it.

Score: 4/10