The Last Remnant

[Bells]

Loved
Unique Battle System: The battle system in The Last Remnant is a mix of traditional turn-based RPG gameplay with some tactics thrown in. Instead of having a party of characters, the player has a party made up of unions of characters, with abilities determined by the characters making up said union. Rather than give each character commands during battle, you choose a tactic for each union, commanding them to attack, heal themselves, or cast spells as a group. Not only does the system lend itself to awesome, large-scale battles, it also allows for a great deal of union customization, adjusting your troops to fit your particular play style.

Cinematic Flair: Battles in The Last Remnant occur are visually dynamic, with sweeping, dramatic camera angles making the fighting nearly as entertaining as the movie-quality CG cutscenes. In particular, cutscenes featuring the game's main villain, The Conqueror, will make you wish Square Enix had stuck with the original plan to make him playable. Completely bad ass.

Spectacular Sounds: Between the voice acting, which is extremely well done despite one very, very annoying character, and the rousing, adventurous music, composed by The Black Mages guitarist and Square veteran Tsuyoshi Sekito, The Last Remnant is truly a treat for the ears.

Amazing Sights: When the texture's finally pop in, The Last Remnant is a visual feast, with highly detailed environments, compelling character design, and some truly unique monsters. All of these elements combine to make the world of The Last Remnant a consistent, believable place.

An Epic Adventure: People tend to want a lot of play time out of their RPGs, and The Last Remnant delivers in spades. Even skipping many of the side quests in the game I still managed to pack in over forty hours of gameplay from start to finish, with only a couple of hours devoted to replaying particularly difficult boss fights. With additional gameplay on the way courtesy of downloadable content, The Last Remnant should last you a good long time.

Hated
A Grand Yet Bland Storyline: It's not that the storyline in The Last Remnant is hard to follow – it's just a bit too bland and generic to make you want to follow it. It's your standard RPG storyline, complete with plot twists and devices so familiar that you can pretty much guess what's going to happen long before it does. There is one truly emotionally charged moment, but for some reason the developers decided to lessen it's impact in a rather cheap fashion moments after it happened.

Unnecessarily Complicated: Certain elements of the game are far more complicated than they needed to be. The item creation system requires you to hunt for parts with no indication of where they are located, and monsters drop parts instead of treasure, leaving you with an inventory filled with junk you aren't sure you should sell. Instead of equipping characters other than the main one, they either request loot to strengthen themselves after battle or ask if they can borrow items you create. Rather than simply having healing items, characters learn item arts that require a combination of items to pull off. Basically the game takes some of the more enjoyable aspects of traditional RPGs and replaces them with tedium.

A Technical Mess: Square Enix decided to use the Unreal Engine 3 for The Last Remnant. This wasn't a good move. Instead of the high level of polish we've come to expect for the company's games, we get horrible texture pop-in and hideous frame rate drops in mid battle that really take away from the brilliant cinematic feel of combat. Character exclamations in battle tend to get out of sync with what's actually happening on screen as well. Loading the game to the hard disk helps the frame rate and sound sync issues but does nothing for the pop-in.

Long Load Times: When playing the game from the disc, load times between area transitions and battle transitions are very lengthy. What's worse is special attacks actually have a load time as well, so battles actually pause for 10-15 seconds while the animations for said attacks load. Another issue solved by loading the game to your hard drive, but a two-disk game that weighs in at 12GB won't fit on the 20GB hard disk my 360 came with. One solution is to load the first disk, then remove it and load the second once you make the transition, but we shouldn't have to do that.

Brutal Pacing: While I enjoy a nice, lengthy battle, I do not enjoy a 30 minute siege battle followed by a 30 minute boss battle followed by another 30 minute boss battle with no chance whatsoever to save in-between. With the level of challenge presented in The Last Remnant, a chance to pull off a quick save in-between epic fights would have been nice.

I picked the Kotaku Review because i actually like their reviewing style... although it seems a bit harsh on the game. So, how did the first Square-360 Exclusive did in it's debut? Anyone looking to pick this up??

[Mirai Gen]

Even if you consider the margin of error among reviewers, it's still getting incredibly low scores all over the board. I'm going to pass. I usually don't trust reviewers to tell me what game I'm going to like or dislike, but wow.

[Bells]

It's really sad for microsoft though... im sure as all hell a handfull of people are going to take a second thought regarding picking up FF13 for the 360 now (considering that the Porting for the 360 will only be made once the PS3 version is concluded and final...)

[Jagos]

But FF is an ensured franchise. To NOT have it on the 360 would be ludicrous.

[Regulus Tera]

To be fair, Mirai, almost every negative review I've seen of this game complains mainly about it not being Fallout 3 or Mass Effect. They are, in other words, bitching about Square Enix not making WRPGs.

I find the review system inadequate anyway, since they tend to give out scores based on hype and not on actual quality, but that's a topic for another time.

[Jagos]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Remnant#Reception

I unno... They all blast the weaknesses especially the fact that it loads so poorly. That's one reason I don't play the PSX Chrono Trigger. It was ported without much regard to anything regarding playability.

Though it does seem interesting and Game Informer (though being a high roller on most games anyway) did give it a 7.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

The most damning criticism I've seen is the poor AI with the computer some times making really stupid moves.
And that was what prevented me from getting it because if I'm playing a tactical RPG I want a good opponent.

[Mirai Gen]

To be fair, Mirai, almost every negative review I've seen of this game complains mainly about it not being Fallout 3 or Mass Effect. They are, in other words, bitching about Square Enix not making WRPGs.
That's not true at all. Most of the complaints start out with how incredibly broken the Unreal 3 engine is in this game, IE long loading times, broken framerate, shitty animations, etc. All the reviews talked about how bad this was, to the point of quitting.

It carries on with how frustrating, tedious, and long the battles can be. In fact the only time I saw either of the games mentioned was at the very end of IGN's review, and that was just talking about graphically.

Just look at IGN.

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/933/933121p1.html
However, it does have serious limitations. The fact that you're not giving direct commands and only get a choice of a few general options can be amazingly frustrating. If you choose to heal, The Last Remnant might not pick the target that needs it the most. Sometimes it didn't give me the option to heal at all when I wanted to. Not having complete control over your unions speeds up the process of fighting smaller battles, but made me despise the game during tough fights. What's worse, you don't have control over what items your party members equip. Only Rush is customizable. The rest of the crew will sometimes ask you for accessories, weapons, or upgrade components, but you have to wait for them to do so. If you have a really cool extra accessory or weapon that you want to give to one of your party members, you can't. And they might never ask for it even if it is leaps and bounds better than what they currently have.

Now let's jump to 1up
http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3171517&p=4
The first real annoyance I faced was the quick-time-event-based battle structure. Random QTEs (on offense and defense) afford you a slight advantage if you press the correct button when it pops up onscreen -- but you never know when that'll happen, forcing you to pay careful attention to the screen and watch every slothlike frame of animation. Fortunately, you can set the CPU to handle the random button-mashing, freeing you up to choose your battle commands, then while away the intervening minutes reading, playing a handheld game, or doing your laundry (which is how I spent the time).

For tougher encounters, I paid a little more attention, but the game offers no explanation of exactly what your moves do while in battle. The only indication that one move is superior to another is that it uses more Action Points. Individual attacks don't matter -- just have each unit attack with whatever move uses the most AP while one group heals. Unit placement on the field doesn't matter, either; while the battle overview map gives the illusion of crafting a strategic offensive, you can't position your troops to flank the enemy or surround a unit. That's all decided for you by the computer, when you randomly receive an "Attack from side/back" command option.

The problems continue with inventory management during battles...or, rather, the complete lack thereof. You have no idea how many items you have left for healing or bringing people back to life until the battle's over -- completely unacceptable when battles can rage for up to two hours. But the lack of command consistency is the battle system's ultimate flaw: Sometimes your unions (what the game calls groups of characters) can mix commands, like healing magic and attacks, while other times, if one person uses a healing spell, everyone else in the union does nothing for the rest of the turn. Sometimes you're given general options like, "Heal them!" but can't choose who to heal. Or, worst of all, sometimes you just want your units to do nothing...but even if they're nowhere near an enemy, that's not always an option.

It sounds like a decent game that was made entirely too long and ridiculously frustrating. More reviews will be coming out and it'll average out the score, but yeesh, that sounds like a real headache.

I mean normally I dislike reviews because they place emphasis on Game A, B, and C that came before what they're reviewing. But when they specifically mention your lack of control and functionality behind the very game's core combat engine, I'm out. I can't handle frustrating bullshit.

[Regulus Tera]

BIG PWNING

Dang man, you left me no openings. D=

I admit my defeat, then.

[Jagos]

I really shouldn't but...

Maybe we should play something else... (http://cdn.maxim.com/36501-37000/36835_mk_board_em.swf)

Hopefully, they fix this for the next one in the series. It does have good concepts and I would love to see more epic battle fighting RPGs like this, Star Ocean and Dragon Force.

[Mirai Gen]

I'm so glad I linked that in NGY thread, it is endless hilarity.

[bluestarultor]

This game sounds like the Magus Sisters, only ten times more frustrating. If I'm going to play a tactical game, I damn well want to be able to strategize and be able to rely on my units to do what I damn well tell them to.

I mean, being in the (currently delayed) process of MAKING a tactical battle system, the last thing on my mind is to take the power away from the player unless they got hit with a confusion spell, aka for damn good reason, and even then, I built in a ton of ways to negate it so they didn't end up sitting at their keyboard uttering profanity as they stepped randomly around the field while the enemy killed them.

Seriously, while the idea that giving your little avatars "suggestions" is intriguing, it's just a plain bad idea until we advance AI a bit further. I'd love to be able to eventually have discussions with my little avatar about the merits of my suggested action, and maybe be convinced that he's got the better idea. It just isn't there, yet.

[Had'ohken]

First post is filled with toast! OK, to be honest, I was interested in this game for a while, but after reading how badly Squeenor mishandled the use of the Unreal Engine with this and Undiscovery and on top of that how the battle system is like an SRPG system lite, I lost interest. Not having direct control over the party member's actions is a big no-no in an RPG, especially if you need to do something specific. It sucks, because I'd actually rather micro-manage that shit than be left with generic commands.

[Magus]

They should've just copied the Ogre Battle way of doing things since it sounds somewhat similar, with the sort of tactics chosen as opposed to full control, controlling parties of characters as opposed to single units, etc., and then made it 3D of course.

Then again they should've just produced/published a new Ogre Battle game and left it at that...