Rating of
4/5
An Original Square Enix Game in the 7th Gen
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/29/16
As we all know, the era of HD gaming, which began in the 7th Generation, has not been kind to RPG fans, nor to the two-headed king of RPG publishers, Square Enix. The Japanese mega-corp simply could not adapt to creating HD games, they claimed, and instead chose to cram “Final Fantasy 13” down their fans’ throats time after time after time.
Even worse than that, Square Enix (and Mistwalker, for that matter) made some extremely questionable decisions when they decided to release new RPG IPs as Xbox 360 exclusives. Anyone with any business acumen would have told Square Enix, had they asked, that Xbox consoles are owned primarily by DudeBros, those mainstream gamers who love Sports and FPSes, but little else. An RPG released as an Xbox exclusive would have little to no hope of gaining any kind of fandom or mindshare, especially when it’s a new IP that isn’t part of an iconic series like ‘Final Fantasy’ or ‘Dragon Quest.’
Worse still, Square Enix initially planned to release “The Last Remnant,” the new IP in question, as a fully multi-platform game, but later canceled the PlayStation 3 version. The PlayStation 3 is the console people bought for RPGs last gen, and were sorely disappointed. If anything, Square Enix did the exact opposite of what they should have done with “The Last Remnant.” Except that they did do one thing right: They released an improved version of the game on Steam.
Presentation
Japanese game developers have traditionally stuck with crafting their products entirely in-house. “The Last Remnant” marks a change in that mindset and shows a willingness to adapt with the times by adopting the Unreal Engine as its basis. Granted, the Unreal Engine isn’t exactly a beauty queen, with tons or texture pop-in and other issues, but it did allow Square Enix to produce a new, random, one-off RPG without taking a decade to craft the engine from scratch before using it once and tossing it.
Character models in “The Last Remnant” have a few issues. Some of them look good, whereas some of them have baggy-eyed derp faces that make them hard to look at. There is a lot of diversity among the cast of characters, though, as the game world features four unique races of humanity – Mitra, Qsiti, Yama, and Sovani – with only one, the Mitra, resembling humans as we know them. The other races more closely resemble the ‘Star Wars’ series Gungans (minus the duck bills), giant carp/ogre hybrids, and tall four-armed cat people who wouldn’t look out of place in an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. Regardless of how they look, the motion capture used to bring characters to life is fairly terrible. It’s fine in combat, but when characters walk around in cutscenes, they look so unbelievably slouchy and awkward that it’s cringeworthy.
The environments are likewise competent, and occasionally show streaks of creativity, but mostly consist of samey-looking caverns. There is no overworld to speak of. Instead, the player is presented with a large world map with ever discovered location showing up as a selectable dot.
“The Last Remnant’s” worst graphical flaw, however, is the incredible amount of screen tearing in the game. Even something as simple as panning the third-person camera around while exploring causes tearing, and there is no way around it in the game’s option menu, nor in forcing v-sync in the GPU control panel. This screen tearing was so bad that it earned “The Last Remnant” the dubious honor of being the only game I’ve ever played that gave me motion sickness. It never had me to the point of actually puking, but it did make me dizzy and uncomfortable.
The audio is almost entirely well done. The soundtrack is extremely solid, but for one extremely grating track that appears early in the game and gets re-used often. The voiceacting is extremely well done, with far fewer recognizable anime dubbers included, and proper pronunciation of simple words like ‘marquis.’ It is particularly impressive that the enormous cast of recruitable characters all have unique voice-work in battle.
As a PC port of a console game, one would expect “The Last Remnant” to have issues of some sort. After all, the physical version was sold under the Games for Windows banner. Fortunately, “The Last Remnant” is a very solid piece of software that never gave me any technical issues, not even minor ones.
Story
“The Last Remnant” takes place in a mysterious fantasy world populated by four diverse races of humanity. Human-like Mitra, frog-like Qsiti, fish-like Yama, and cat-like Sovani live side by side in cities built around enormous, ancient magical artifacts called Remnants. Each city-state is protected by the bond between its leader and its Remnant, as the leadership are able to call upon the Remnants to protect their populace from incursion by monsters, savage beastmen, or other city-states with a chip on their shoulder.
The game’s core narrative focuses on protagonist Rush Sykes, the son of a pair of Remnant researchers working at the Remnant Academy which is, itself, sponsored by the world Congress, where every city-state’s Remnant master holds a seat. Rush and his sister, Irina, are living an idyllic life on an island off the mainland while their parents are away working at the Academy. Their simple happiness is interrupted one day when a group of thugs led by a Remnant-wielding thug (with white cornrows!) appears out of nowhere and kidnaps Irina for unknown reasons.
Rush vainly tries to follow the thugs, but instead finds himself caught up in a full-scale battle between the army of the city-state of Athlum and some beastmen. Rush falls-in with the army and soon finds himself becoming close friends with the Marquis of Athlum, David (pronounced Da-veed) Nassau. David and his generals promise to help Rush figure out what happened to his sister.
Rush’s sister, however, turns out to be a secondary plot point, as the main source of conflict in “The Last Remnant” turns out to be a mysterious general going by the title, The Conqueror, appears out of nowhere, marching across the continent, and proving to be unstoppable due to his never-before-seen ability to steal Remnants from their masters and bind them to himself.
The struggle to stop The Conqueror is full of interesting twists, and the game itself has plenty of solid character development for the central cast. There are also a large number of optional characters that can be recruited by completing side-quests, each with their own fully-fleshed-out backstories and personalities.
Overall, “The Last Remnant” is far more enjoyable than a lot of Square Enix’s recent ‘Final Fantasy’ games, and certainly better than anything by Gust, NIS, or Compile Heart. The game’s setting, while generally well-developed and interesting, does leave some loose ends about the Remnants themselves, and never fully explains their origins, nor gives an accurate portrayal of the game world’s history/mythology. I feel like a game that focuses so much on Remnants as to have the word in the title should have explained that a bit better.
Gameplay
“The Last Remnant” is a rather interesting take on traditional turn-based RPGs. Instead of having a single party made-up of individual characters, the player is free to construct a party of ‘Unions,’ each of which contains up to 5 characters and acts as a cohesive whole. Enemies also form Unions of 1-5 foes, with multiple Unions on each side making up a typical battle scenario.
I really, really like the idea of Unions in combat, as there have been plenty of RPGs in the past with huge casts of characters that only allow the player to use 3-4 characters at once. “The Last Remnant” starts with a relatively small party maximum, but by the end, the player is free to create up to 5 Unions with a maximum of 18 characters divided between them (I always went with 4 Unions, with two 5-man Unions and two 4-man Unions).
Unions can be made of any characters the player has recruited in any combination. There are guilds (and one special recruiter character in Athlum) where the player can hire characters for gold (and complete a wide variety of guild tasks for rewards), but most of the generic hirelings have terrible stats and aren’t worth the space in the party. This becomes especially apparent when completing the game’s large number of side quests, each of which typically causes the quest-giver to become a special ‘leader’ hireling with better stats and possibly access to special Remnant powers. With the huge number of special characters to recruit, I never even bothered hiring any of the generic ones.
Unfortunately, the Union-based combat in “The Last Remnant” isn’t without a downside. Because there are a lot of characters in battle at once, the game takes away the player’s ability to fully command their team. Instead of being able to issue each member of each Union a command at the beginning of each turn, the player simply chooses from a somewhat-random list of commands with vague descriptions like, ‘Attack with Combat Arts!,’ or ‘Hurry Up and Save Them!,’ or ‘Set Up the Field!,’ which cause the Union members to use semi-random skills in their repertoires that match the intent of the command. The fact that these commands are semi-random and don’t always appear when needed is vexing, but strategically building Unions with members who have diverse and complementary skillsets can get around most of the issues. Certain extra special abilities that target all enemies for huge damage or summon a monster ally to act as a bonus Union do not appear reliably enough, even though they are often necessary to clear a given battle.
Vagueness and lack of player agency dog other aspects of the game as well. Instead of using a traditional leveling system, “The Last Remnant” uses a rehashed version of the stat-growth system from “Final Fantasy 2.” Yes, the one everyone hated because of how unbalanced stat-growth was. The player’s party is given a Battle Rank, which goes up by defeating enemies and is equivalent to ‘level,’ more or less, but individual character stats and their growth are tracked separately. If the player’s Battle Rank gets too high, enemies will stop rewarding stat growth to party members, which can lead to weak and atrophied Unions if the player isn’t careful or does too much battling early on. This stat growth system was apparently incredibly unbalanced in the Xbox 360 version, but fixed in the PC version, making it far more difficult to screw everything up. Like stats, character’s special abilities level-up through use, which can be annoying when the player is trying to level a specific skill, but the game decides to have the character in question use a different skill. The PC version of the game has a toggle option that allows the player to turn-off as many character skills as they want in order to focus on leveling a few to the maximum of level 5, whereas the Xbox 360 version does not.
It can also be difficult to properly gear party members because the player is only allowed to directly equip Rush, the protagonist. Every other character has a chance to randomly ask to ‘borrow’ a piece of equipment from the player’s inventory upon returning to the map screen, and characters can add plusses (+1, +2, etc.) to their gear by collecting various pieces of monster debris after battles. Other than that, and vague options to influence party members to pursue certain skill sets or develop themselves as ‘All-Around,’ ‘Combat,’ or ‘Mystic,’ when they randomly ask for advice (again, upon returning to the map screen), the game feels almost as hands-off as a strategy game, rather than an RPG.
There is a rather robust crafting and upgrading system for gear, should the player want to equip Rush or build some other stuff and hope it catches a party member’s eye. Crafting involves finding materials after battles or mining it in dungeon environments with the help of a psychotic cyber-raccoon named Mr. Diggs that joins Rush’s party fairly early on. Crafting also costs gold, which is fairly scarce in the game, and is mostly earned by selling monsters that are randomly captured alive at the end of a battle (of course, these captured monsters can also be butchered on the spot for more materials instead of keeping them to sell). Selling enough gold-value worth of items also causes certain rarer items to appear in the world’s many shops, similarly to the way the bazaar operates in “Final Fantasy 12.”
In general, from the information presented on the game’s unofficial Wiki and Steam forum, it appears that the PC version in drastically improved in every way over the Xbox 360 version. I personally never ran into overwhelming balance issues, even though I was dreading a battle with ‘That One Boss’ which most of the game’s dedicated fans insist is way too difficult if the party’s Battle Rank is too high. It turned out that the entire game felt very well balanced, and later additions to the party didn’t seem particularly weak compared to companions I’d had from the outset. The PC version of “The Last Remnant” is also discless, which removes the annoying inability to backtrack and experience certain sidequests that hounded the two-disc Xbox 360 version.
Overall
The PC version of “The Last Remnant” is dramatically improved over the Xbox 360 version to the point that it should be considered the definitive version of the game. With its unique take on squad-based battles and solid turn-based combat, “The Last Remnant” is not only a pleasant surprise from Square Enix, but one of the best RPGs from the 7th Generation, this in spite of some questionable choices regarding its mechanics.
Presentation: 3.5/5
Story: 4/5
Gameplay: 4/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5
