The Last Remnant Review

Written by: Lewis Denby Posted: 25th February 2009

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Cut-scene heavy RPG anyone?

The Last Remnant Details:

	RPG
	PC/Xbox 360
	Square-Enix
	Square-Enix

16+

Out Now

If there's one thing Square Enix should be commended for, it's bringing the relatively niche JRPG genre to a mainstream Western audience. Their Final Fantasy series, particularly around its mid-point, became a benchmark for console role-playing, bridging the culture gap masterfully and captivating players with intriguing storylines and beautiful art design.

In some ways, The Last Remnant feels like a natural progression, taking the genre and bringing it one step further into the mass market, fusing traditional turn-based role-playing mechanics with a heavy strategic battle element, as well as toning down the stat-heavy nature that still puts certain players off the RPG genre. Sadly, in many others, it also feels like a bizarre step backwards, in its clumsy design, poorly optimised technology and woeful presentation.

It starts in typical Square Enix fashion, with lengthy cut-scenes info-dumping the world's history and introducing the teenage fantasy soap-opera with a fair bit of panache. But it immediately feels badly organised. Whatever your videogame culture dictates, I maintain that a twenty-minute cut-scene is simply too long. Never mind that the game starts with an epic battle before it drags you into this nonsense, it's still not acceptable. Never mind that the tale of a young man searching for his kidnapped sister amidst a politically-charged and conspiracy-laden backdrop is a vaguely interesting one. If you can't tell a story in your game world, rather than exclusively in pre-rendered movies, you're doing something wrong.

In fact, you'll spend so little of The Last Remnant actually PLAYING The Last Remnant that it becomes almost instantly tedious, a feeling that rarely lets up until the later stages of the game. Not only is there an astonishing amount of cut-scenes, each area of the world is ludicrously small, and running just twenty metres in a given direction usually results in yet another loading screen. You'll see a lot of those. Every time you reach a cut-scene, there's a loading screen. Every time you enter the world map, there's a loading screen. Every time you engage in battle, there's a loading screen. Hell, loading a save-game results in TWO of them: seemingly one to load the file, and another to load the actual game world. The Unreal engine is capable of rendering vast areas without a single stutter. What's going on here that requires so much chopping-up?

The Last Remnant is a slog to get through. Even when you're actively controlling the thing, it's often just boring. The main quest keeps the story captivating, and there's a nice range of side-quests to keep you occupied. But the repeated necessity to grind away at "optional" combat, just to level up enough to tackle the main story, is tedious. The best RPGs make the levelling process effortless and interesting, working it into the world and the sub-plots to create a seamless whole. The Last Remnant doesn't even try.

For all the horrifically slow pacing and clumsy design, there's actually a rather interesting combat system at the heart of The Last Remnant, undoubtedly the game's saving grace. Instead of focusing on an individual character throughout, you instead control an increasingly large squad of characters, and strategically position and tweak them during the turn-based battles. The amount of options is somewhat overwhelming at first, and the series of tutorial screens does little in the way of instructing you on how best to utilise them. Soon, however, it becomes second nature, and failure in combat is rarely frustrating, as you know that, next time round, things could easily pan out differently based on your fine-tuning. You also level-up as a group, rather than an individual, and the numerous stats have been excised in favour of a straightforward overall levelling system. This really only affects the action, but then that's really all The Last Remnant is about. That and cut-scenes. And loading screens.

And it might seem awkward to keep harping on about those, but they really don't make any sense. There's not even a right lot to load. The art design may be predictably excellent, with a whole host of wonderful races and interesting city-scapes. But it's hardly pushing the technology to its limits, and we've seen games that really stretch the Unreal Engine and render far larger arenas than this. Perhaps more crushing is a common tendency for the game to slow down almost to a halt the minute more than a few enemies turn up on-screen. The Last Remnant doesn't technically require you to install it to the hard-drive, but you're asking for trouble if you don't. With frame-rates occasionally in the single-figures, it becomes essentially unplayable otherwise.

Elsewhere, a sloppily-translated script voiced by utterly inept actors goes some way to spoiling any illusion the game may have otherwise created. Combine this with a musical score that jumps between fittingly epic and embarrassingly cheesy, and the atmosphere really starts to collapse. There's no excuse for putting so little effort into these atmospheric elements in narrative-heavy games. Film and television wouldn't get away with it. Why do we put up with it so willingly in this medium?

Ultimately, combat system and epic story aside, all The Last Remnant really has going for it are ideas. Solid ones, admittedly, but when the execution is so dismal it's difficult to care. While it's by no means awful, it'd be difficult to recommend a game that remains such a chore throughout. Square Enix can do far better.