Review: The Last Remnant

Non-game related... LIONS WIN. Wasn't pretty, but really I don't care when a win is a win.



Recently finished playing The Last Remnant and I was impressed by the game. The game is classified as a JRPG. You take on the role of Rush, who seems to fill a typical lead character: young, male, not bright, impetuous, and brave. It starts with Rush's sister getting kidnapped and he must now head out to rescue her and happens into a battlefield. You meet up with a group of individuals that pull you into much bigger problems happening in the world.

The characters are interesting. The story is interesting. The battle system is also interesting.

The characters range through a bunch of types. The game takes time to setup up side quests for a large number of unique leaders. These side quests are used to tell the individual stories. One of the stories I enjoyed was that of Loki. Loki's story is that of a despicable bandit who is offering his services to bid. But once you have put him into your squad you get a chance to talk to him and find that he was born under a bad sign and the whole village treated him as a bad egg. Over time he engaged in more and more atrocities, until he happens upon a blind girl who he decides to help when she blindly offers friendship. He is now on a mission to correct her eyesight which he needs your help to do so.

The story starts simply, but expands. The world is filled with these items called Remnants that are able to do incredible and magical things. Remnants seem to be a combination of magic and futuristic items. So there is this guy called The Conqueror who is forcibly gathering Remnants in his bid to join the political congress. But things are not always as they seem. Rush's family is special as is Rush himself. What bothered me but also intrigued me was how you were kept guessing as to what was going on in the world. There was just a lot of mystery.

The battle system is pretty different for me. Instead of running 3 to 5 single players, you end up controlling between 3 to 5 groups of individuals. These unions each have a formation, one or more leaders, and soldiers. The leaders and soldiers each have individual skills and abilities, but in the union their health and ability points are pooled and they act in concert. It can get pretty frustrating at time as you don't tell them what to do specifically, but instead give them very general commands as to what you want them to do, not helpful when the group is in dire need of health and that is not an option. You get up to 5 options which can feel pretty random.

One beef with the game is you really feel like you don't have any control of how your characters progress. I think this leads to your characters being week on the first playthrough. Given my limited time to play games being a father and all, I turned to the Last Remnant wikia to help make the most of my character ability progression. The other beef I have is with the amount and length of load times. I spent around 150+ hours on the game over the last 9 months and probably have a couple of hours (or 10s of hours) waiting for the load screens.

Otherwise, I am impressed.