Last Dream impressed me in some ways but disappointed me in many others. I love how you can customize the difficulty. Instead of picking just a difficulty level you can also choose the encounter rate for enemies as well as changing the save system to suit you. I also liked the character upgrade system. You can learn a variety of skills that gives you a wide variety of play styles. The story is very deep, even for a JRPG. Past that though begins the bad. First off the game has no quest log. As I said the story is pretty deep and you’re given no way to keep track of quests or keep track of story updates. Another issue that ties in to this is the poor map system. Even if you are diligent and write down all details on paper the map hinders you by not having much detail outside and zero detail indoors. I found certain places such as the Forest Tower to be almost maze like and all the map would show is that I was in the tower itself. Even outside certain locations such as the Forest of Despair didn’t show up. Other times the vague instructions on where to find certain creatures for a quest seemed way off where I actually found them. Another issue I had was that there is almost no way to regain MP for your characters. You can fish but I only know this from forums as this is never mentioned in game during my play through. I found a couple MP potions but only two and after eight hours of game play. Basically it makes any long excursion into a hostile cave or area a chore as often I have to retreat to go use a Tent or find an Inn so that my Mage can actually do their job. Considering there are tons of different potions and other items at shops any town I go to I don’t see why MP potions weren’t an option or even having an MP regeneration skill. The issue that finally broke me was the fact that there are areas, such as Mt Gerra, where you are forced to walk across lava or other surfaces that actively hurt your characters. This is expected behaviour and you’re just supposed to keep healing as you go which is such a bad idea. The puzzles in game were a mixed bag. Some were pretty decent and others I found annoying. My last gripe is that you can’t access the main menu during a battle. So for instance if I know that I am going to lose a fight I can’t just load a save or even quit to the main menu. My only two options are play it out and reload after or hit Alt-F4 and exit the game then relaunch.
I played Last Dream on Linux. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any bugs or spelling errors. You can choose to manually save or save at specific points in game. If you choose manually saving there are twenty save slots. There are no graphics options at all aside from v-sync. Regardless of whether you enable v-sync or not the frame rate is capped at 60 FPS so it’s kind of pointless. That being said it runs at a constant 60 FPS even on my Intel onboard graphics. I used my Logitech game pad without any issues.
Game Engine: Mkxp
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 926 MB
Input Used: Logitech F310
CPU Usage: 2-14 %
RAM Usage: 3.6-4.4 GB
Frame Rate: Constant 60 FPS
There are some good elements to Last Dream but they’re buried under the mountain of design choices I didn’t like. I played through ten hours and forty four minutes of the campaign. This was enough time to get a ship and make it to the Eastern Continent to start doing various missions there. I paid $3.29 CAD for the game but even that steep discount didn’t make up for the shortcomings.
My Score: 4.5/10
My System:
Intel i5-12600K | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | Intel UHD 770 | Mesa 23.0.4 | Western Digital Black SN850 500GB | Trisquel 11 | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.7.5-gnu