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The Last Remnant
December 9, 2008 | 5:23 PM PST
by: Matt Furtado
Kombo's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.
What the Game's About
Square Enix is mostly known for their undying and unparalleled skills when it comes crafting the greatest RPG titles in gaming history. Straying away from their usual formula, Square Enix decided to take a chance and try something new with Last Remnant. Allow me to introduce you to Rush Sykes, the innocent bystander who gets dragged into a massive world conflict quite suddenly. When his sister Irina is kidnapped by soldiers, Rush takes forth on a journey to rescue his beloved sister and ends up intertwining himself in a power struggle between a political conflict which finds itself circling the magical artifacts known as remnants. Due to their magical nature, the remnants are constantly studied and surrounded by curious scientists, such as Rush's parents.
What begins as a minor quarrel between pro- and anti-remnant factions eventually becomes a fully escalated war. A man known as the Conqueror appears and takes control of the remnants. He has the power to control every remnant no matter the power or size it may be. Although peace is eventually achieved for a time, it quickly ends and war is once again afoot in the world with the remnants power at the core of the conflict.
What's Hot
Never before will you be greeted in a game like you are with Last Remnant. Immediately after starting the game you are thrown into a massive battle, and you won't want to look back. The massive, Lord of the Rings type of battles are the true appeal of the game. At first, the battle system appears as a shallow basin with little no options. Instead of controlling individual part members during battle sequences, you'll have to recruit soldiers and leaders and form squadrons with up to 5 members. Each member of the squadron will carry their own unique attributes, abilities, weapons, and magic. Despite each member having their own strengths and weaknesses, you don't have the power to initiate any of their own individual commands. You issue each squadron commands using the turn-based system on the battlefield. This is very different from typical RPGs because you don't have direct control over every member's actions, such as attacking or using a more advanced technique. Instead, you are required to issue one command to an entire platoon of soldiers.
The battle system gets deeper and more advanced as you build up a more diverse army to fight with. As you gain more units under your command, you'll quickly discover the depth of the battle system is nearly endless. As your units use their abilities more and more in battle, these skills level up and open up newer more powerful techniques, plus improve characters various stats. You should check each character's abilities and stats to see which characters might work better together and organize their platoon accordingly. Initially, you'll find yourself doing fairly well in battles without having to put too much thought into formations, organizing members according to stats, etc., but as you progress further and further into the game, you'll find yourself struggling against the truly vicious enemies. The battle system becomes more and more clear the more you use it and gain an understanding of your enemies' weaknesses, battle formations, and the best way to use your troops in battle.
To mix up the battle system a tad bit, you'll find some quick-time events to keep your attention. Successfully hitting the quick-time event can give you a boost in stats, counter attack, and some other options.
I'm sure you can tell the battles are the real essence of the title. Once you get the chance to fully engage in battles of Lord of the Rings magnitude, you'll really find yourself immersed more than ever before in the battle system and game. When you have a dozen platoons at your command and you issue your orders and formations, you really feel the appreciation of the battle being held because you get to see your best laid plans in motion. While you do get to them on a smaller scare during minor skirmishes, they don't carry the same passion they do when you are battling dozens of enemy squadrons against yours.
What's Not
Everything about The Last Remnant sounds amazing, doesn't it? Last Remnant is a beauty. With an amazing artistic design and graphical presentation, Last Remnant is one of the most graphically impressive titles to be released, thus far. Sadly, this comes at a great price, which you thank the Unreal 3 engine for. Like many Unreal 3 engine using titles before it, Last Remnant suffers from this godly engine. There are texture loading problems, atrocious frame rates, and freezing issues. Can all this be blamed on the Unreal engine? Well, no, we can't attribute all these problems on the engine alone. However, you can be sure they are one of the causes. The other members at fault for the major problems that plague this title are the development team themselves. You'll find periods in the game where ground textures won't appear for nearly 10 seconds. In other, more extreme cases, you'll find that characters don't have texture, much like Gears of War had at certain points.
Once you get by the texture problems, you are greeted with the ever so friendly frame rate problems. There is no other way to describe the frame rate other than atrocious. It gets so laughable that the game will literally freeze for a few seconds during battles or end up moving at a snail's pace whenever something of value happens on screen.
If you install the game to your 360 HDD, you'll find that a number of these problems are slightly fixed. However, the installation of 12GB may not bode well for those of us with a 20GB HDD. Given the problems still arise even after installation occurs, it may not even be worth installing if you are pressed for space or even worth installing if you have a 120GB HDD with plenty of space.
Final Word
The Last Remnant is a mixed bag. The battle system, musical score, and just magnitude the game gives off are simply amazing. Even though on a fundamental standpoint the game sounds like an instant classic, the game is plagued with nonsensical technical problems. Slowdown, freezing, and lack of textures make this game on the breaking point of being unbearable to even play. Had the development team taken another six months and perfected their use of the Unreal 3 engine and the tools at their disposal, this title would be one more of Square Enix's instant classics. There's always next time, I suppose.
What the Game's About
Square Enix is mostly known for their undying and unparalleled skills when it comes crafting the greatest RPG titles in gaming history. Straying away from their usual formula, Square Enix decided to take a chance and try something new with Last Remnant. Allow me to introduce you to Rush Sykes, the innocent bystander who gets dragged into a massive world conflict quite suddenly. When his sister Irina is kidnapped by soldiers, Rush takes forth on a journey to rescue his beloved sister and ends up intertwining himself in a power struggle between a political conflict which finds itself circling the magical artifacts known as remnants. Due to their magical nature, the remnants are constantly studied and surrounded by curious scientists, such as Rush's parents.
What begins as a minor quarrel between pro- and anti-remnant factions eventually becomes a fully escalated war. A man known as the Conqueror appears and takes control of the remnants. He has the power to control every remnant no matter the power or size it may be. Although peace is eventually achieved for a time, it quickly ends and war is once again afoot in the world with the remnants power at the core of the conflict.
What's Hot
Never before will you be greeted in a game like you are with Last Remnant. Immediately after starting the game you are thrown into a massive battle, and you won't want to look back. The massive, Lord of the Rings type of battles are the true appeal of the game. At first, the battle system appears as a shallow basin with little no options. Instead of controlling individual part members during battle sequences, you'll have to recruit soldiers and leaders and form squadrons with up to 5 members. Each member of the squadron will carry their own unique attributes, abilities, weapons, and magic. Despite each member having their own strengths and weaknesses, you don't have the power to initiate any of their own individual commands. You issue each squadron commands using the turn-based system on the battlefield. This is very different from typical RPGs because you don't have direct control over every member's actions, such as attacking or using a more advanced technique. Instead, you are required to issue one command to an entire platoon of soldiers.
The battle system gets deeper and more advanced as you build up a more diverse army to fight with. As you gain more units under your command, you'll quickly discover the depth of the battle system is nearly endless. As your units use their abilities more and more in battle, these skills level up and open up newer more powerful techniques, plus improve characters various stats. You should check each character's abilities and stats to see which characters might work better together and organize their platoon accordingly. Initially, you'll find yourself doing fairly well in battles without having to put too much thought into formations, organizing members according to stats, etc., but as you progress further and further into the game, you'll find yourself struggling against the truly vicious enemies. The battle system becomes more and more clear the more you use it and gain an understanding of your enemies' weaknesses, battle formations, and the best way to use your troops in battle.
To mix up the battle system a tad bit, you'll find some quick-time events to keep your attention. Successfully hitting the quick-time event can give you a boost in stats, counter attack, and some other options.
I'm sure you can tell the battles are the real essence of the title. Once you get the chance to fully engage in battles of Lord of the Rings magnitude, you'll really find yourself immersed more than ever before in the battle system and game. When you have a dozen platoons at your command and you issue your orders and formations, you really feel the appreciation of the battle being held because you get to see your best laid plans in motion. While you do get to them on a smaller scare during minor skirmishes, they don't carry the same passion they do when you are battling dozens of enemy squadrons against yours.
What's Not
Everything about The Last Remnant sounds amazing, doesn't it? Last Remnant is a beauty. With an amazing artistic design and graphical presentation, Last Remnant is one of the most graphically impressive titles to be released, thus far. Sadly, this comes at a great price, which you thank the Unreal 3 engine for. Like many Unreal 3 engine using titles before it, Last Remnant suffers from this godly engine. There are texture loading problems, atrocious frame rates, and freezing issues. Can all this be blamed on the Unreal engine? Well, no, we can't attribute all these problems on the engine alone. However, you can be sure they are one of the causes. The other members at fault for the major problems that plague this title are the development team themselves. You'll find periods in the game where ground textures won't appear for nearly 10 seconds. In other, more extreme cases, you'll find that characters don't have texture, much like Gears of War had at certain points.
Once you get by the texture problems, you are greeted with the ever so friendly frame rate problems. There is no other way to describe the frame rate other than atrocious. It gets so laughable that the game will literally freeze for a few seconds during battles or end up moving at a snail's pace whenever something of value happens on screen.
If you install the game to your 360 HDD, you'll find that a number of these problems are slightly fixed. However, the installation of 12GB may not bode well for those of us with a 20GB HDD. Given the problems still arise even after installation occurs, it may not even be worth installing if you are pressed for space or even worth installing if you have a 120GB HDD with plenty of space.
Final Word
The Last Remnant is a mixed bag. The battle system, musical score, and just magnitude the game gives off are simply amazing. Even though on a fundamental standpoint the game sounds like an instant classic, the game is plagued with nonsensical technical problems. Slowdown, freezing, and lack of textures make this game on the breaking point of being unbearable to even play. Had the development team taken another six months and perfected their use of the Unreal 3 engine and the tools at their disposal, this title would be one more of Square Enix's instant classics. There's always next time, I suppose.
November 20, 2009
