The Last Remnant

Yeah, I've been playing it for the past few days, and it's about time I drew some bigoted conclusions about it as a whole.

Final Fantasy: The Last Remnant, and yes, it might as well be a final fantasy game. Sure it doesn't have the title, but it's made by Square Enix, and as much as people have been bitching their insignificant lives away on forums everywhere, it looks and feels like every game in the Final Fantasy series, so suck it up, this game could just as easily have the title too... which is actually a worrying thought.

The story jumps right into the tragically predictable kidnapping scene which only left me thinking there was more of it to encourage us to associate with the main protagonist a little more, but meh, I guess we'll just have to roll with it. He then magically appears sometime later thousands of miles away witnessing a gigantic battle with no apparent explanation, shit kicks off and long story short, he becomes acquainted with the rest of the main characters, who mostly seem to take pity of the kid and help him save his sister.

(Yeah, way to go, sis, just stare at the pretty flame why don't you. Geeze.)

The story as a whole is typical of a FF game, compelling, the odd twist here and there, but above all else well executed. Now then, obviously good storytelling aside, gameplay bashing:

The combat system sucks. The moment you decide to take on one of game's bosses things go downhill even more worryingly, like some kindof mountain based trainwreck descending over an unsuspecting village populated by the game's players. Your combat options are vague and vary every single turn. You could spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to arrange your dudes to get the best outof them, but I have doubts even the fanbase will be able to figure this clusterfuck out.

The enemies vary nicely, but their numbers do too. Running into one sprite and deciding you don't like the look of it isn't going to mean it'll be your dudes against just that one. Every enemy seems to have some kindof panic button built in; you start winning and all its mates start barging their way onto the field, flanking you without any warning.

If you can brave the battles long enough to get along the main story arc, don't. Whatever you do, don't follow the main story arc. Apparently you're not supposed to. You'll discover this yourself if you try to, because you won't be able to. Every consecutive battle to progress the story has a drastically higher difficulty than the last, forcing you to grind away at the sidequests for days on end, but even those can change quickly from killing a bunch of disabled carebears to fighting this:


(I actually looked this up, turns out this GIGANTIC DRAGON has 140,000 health. My dudes collectively have 7k. Oh, and every turn it can hit them. All of them. At once. Every turn. Dickmove.)

Ugh, I could go on, really, there are so many flaws in the combat system it defies description. I really was enthusiastic about it to, it started out so well... Hell, some of the characters are even likeable, which is rare of a JRPG. The plotholes are kept to a minimum, a certain female paladin-character dies halfway through only to be immediately replaced by her identical daughter in the next scene, but that's about it.

If you've made it this far, you'll have figured it out already, if you've just scrolled down this far to see the conclusion: Don't bother buying this game.
It's not worth the money, and while it feels like Final Fantasy, it doesn't deserve the title. The combat syetem ruins it. Square Enix have let me down here; I'm not so sure about their ability to make good games anymore. Not after this.

Quote :

Whatever you do, don't follow the main story arc. Apparently you're not supposed to.

that made me lol. i hate games pretentious enough to have (made up word----->)ununderstandable (<-----made up word) plots. Nice review btw. I haven't played it and i'm very unlikely to because the only RPG i got into was an MMORPG. you said that the positioning of your characters was key in game. does that mean you have to set up the classic tank / healer /dps combos? i only mention that because of what you said about the dragon hitting everyone at once, that sounds like a classic dragon cleave mechanic from WoW, but i'm probably just getting it all wrong since the only RPG i've played was a bit of FF7 and the combat was totally diffrent.

Radical Ewok wrote:

that made me lol. i hate games pretentious enough to have (made up word----->)ununderstandable (<-----made up word) plots.

It's not really that the plot is ununderstandable, it's that the difficulty curve of challenges along it is ridiculously steep. I like the story, I really do. I wanted to know what happened next, so I tried to persue it. I just couldn't, and it kinda ruined the experience for meafter the tenth attempt at a single boss encounter.
This dragon is actually a sidequest, but the boss I have to fight to continue the story is even harder.

Essentially, (and I wanted to explain this in greater detail, but the original review had an extra three paragraphs as a result), at my current point in the game, I can have up to 15 dudes on the field at any given point. I can arrange my dudes into groups of up to 5 dudes, and I can have up to 3 groups at any given point. Each dude of course has his own stats, equipment, abilities, fighting style. You can not only pick which dudes are in the same group, but you can also pick formations, which have bonuses to some things and defeceits to other things.
Complicated yet?
Basically you have to have some kindof super space brain to manage it with any major success, but even so there are issues. If my group is engaged in one on one combat with another group when they're attacked, then those attacks will get flanking bonuses. The vastest majority of battles will have some kindof challenge, which is good, but not when that challenge is slaying the same pesky weak bugs over and over because they keep appearing halfway through your victorious last turn of the fight to shit all over your dudes. Of course, most of the time you'll drag yourself through these fights without too much problem, but that's because they're pesky bugs, and you're far more powerful than they are.

The boss battles are the issue. The combat system just falls apart like a chinese motorcycle, and all the flaws become clear. I'm going to cite this dragon because I still haven't beaten it. The dragon can engage in one-on-one combat (deadlock, as the game calls it), with up to 3 of my groups at once. It gets a free attack against any group that it can engage in deadlock every turn, plus a breath attack at the end of the round which hits anything it has in deadlock. If I'm lucky I might get the option to break from deadlock and heal, which is nice because it means that group won't get hit. I might also get the option to attack with some of my dudes while one at the back keeps their health up during the round. Unfortunately, I don't always get these options, specifically when I need them.

It's the same story with offensive options. I don't always get the options I want, much less the ones I need. Say I want to stop the nasty dragon from using his uber spell that silences and paralyzes one of my dudes, I'll just use silence, right? I mean I have 3 dudes that can use it. "Sorry, no can do", says the game. "This turn your mage group can attack with spark spells, heal the meatshield guest party, or pummel it with melee." Fuck you game, I know what I want to do, and I have enough AP, why can't I do it?

Oh, and health is shared between group members. Your dudes have their own health, but that only contributes to a total health of the group. This is good for small fights, 'cause the critters can attack one ude all they want, but they have to take the group down as a whole. Unfortunately this backfires against bosses with high damage outputs; this gigantic dragon has a number of attacks that deal enough damage to take down the whole group in one, except it only hits one dude. I have to sit here and watch it chomp off some dude's head, and then the rest of the group dies spontaneously as a result! This also means splitting up my dudes into smaller groups to stop them all getting hit won't work; without the health of a full group of 5, they all die in a single hit, and the option to revive is about as rare as you'd expect with these terms.

Oh, and you can't customise your dudes' equipment individually... or at all. In fact the only thing you can customise about them is their fighting style and where they are on the field. Oh, and also the enemies on the XBOX360 version have significantly reduced health.