Posted by Strider on 5/22/2009, 10:11 pm
So, for reasons even I don't fully understand, I re-downloaded and completed the Last Remnant demo (I suspect it's part masochism and part not-having-my-DS-with-me-ism). Although my complaints about the crappiness of the demo and the poor PC controls remain, my final impression is more positive than my initial ones.
Although I have yet to see any mention or direct reference to the series, The Last Remnant is pretty clearly a spiritual sequel to the much-maligned Romancing SaGa games. While it misses a couple of the Romancing SaGa trademarks- you learn new attacks after battle, not through the spark system- a lot of it seems very familiar to me... The way characters gain stats gradually rather than in discrete levels is very Romancing SaGa, the system of different weapon types with a set of unique 'arts' is very Romancing SaGa, the use of 'formations' for your parties in-battle is very Romancing SaGa, and the equipment system seems to be a pretty direct derivation of Romancing SaGa 3's blacksmithing minigame. It appears that your party members will manage their own equipment and upgrades, but this seems unnecessary given the relative simplicity of inventory management.
There are a lot of things that feel like slight misfires; the game's visual presentation is pretty, but is plagued by a certain amount of pop-up. It confuses me that they feel the need to have characters fade in and out in-battle; it would seem to me that if I were writing a game whose hook was large-scale battles with 25 individual characters on each side, I'd take the time to write a driver that could consistently render them all at once. The music is thoroughly forgettable, and the voice work runs the gamut from mediocre to obnoxious; I'm also not sure how I feel about "Let's kick some A!" as a battle cry in a straight-up high fantasy setting.
The main hook of The Last Remnant, as alluded to above, is that your 'party' consists of up to twenty-five individual members, organized into five 'unions'. Unions act a bit like traditional characters in battle- rather than giving commands to individual characters, you're giving commands to entire unions, which individual characters interpret themselves. Most of the time, this actually works pretty well- however, the game's battle system seems to be designed to be a more tactical experience than it really is. A tactical map shows the location of your unions in battle- but but you lack the ability to arbitrarily move units, and while you do get a "morale" boost for attacking enemies from the flank or behind, this doesn't seem to have any appreciable effect on the combat performance of your units. In the end, it's something that shows a lot of promise, but never really rises above a standard CRPG combat system.
There were some highfalutin quotations out of Square about how this was "the first RPG for the whole world"- they were apparently aiming to combine the eastern and western-style RPGs with it. Maybe there's a lot of branching plot and a lot of subquests that weren't apparent in the demo, but I've gotta say- I really don't see where they're coming from with that. Square's idea of 'western' elements seems to be upping Bald Space Marine Quotient on their main villain by about 50%... Needless to say, I'm not terribly impressed.
Despite all of this, on the most part, I enjoyed it- it's not a great game, but I'd pick it up if I had a 360 and saw it for cheap.
- HC
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