An RPG made for people who think min/max'ing is the the most important part of gaming.

User Rating: 5.5 | The Last Remnant PC
The Last Remnant (Henceforth referred to as simply "TLR") was a game I skipped due to several reasons, the least of which being that it was developed by Squarenix. Besides the horrible glitches and frame droppage that nearly every review site complained about in their own critiques of the game, I never really liked the idea of playing an RPG in the Unreal Engine. It is, by far, the absolute worst 3D engine ever created and even on the most powerful PCs exhibits huge texture pop-up in ways I haven't seen since the Sega Saturn version of Daytona USA. TLR never appealed to me, and I had no intention of playing it...that is, until another elitist RPG nerd like myself urged me to buy it.

Well, that and it came out for the PC. On steam.

Unlike the Western RPG, Japanese RPGs have always been in a constant state of flux. Other reviewers may instead use the term "Evolution", but I'd hardly call what has happened to the standard JRPG over the past two decades an "Evolution". If anything, the constant change and shoe-horning in of new gameplay elements has caused the JRPG genre to lose its focus and fall into a hopeless malaise that only the most hardcore weaboo would consider an improvement over the 8 and 16 bit JRPGs of the past. Instead of sticking with the tried and true JRPG elements such as outrageous over-the-top fanfic-level storylines and inventive party members designed to squeeze reactions out of you (Usually immense laughter) JRPG designers have begun cramming in uneeded "systems" in an effort to match the complexity of their more successful (As of late) western counterparts.

In most cases, this doesn't work. You end up with hideously flawed JRPGs that are either too tedious to play or have combat mechanics too convuluted to make any sense of. One look at the PS3 game "Cross Edge" or the 360's "Enchanted Arms" and their abysmyally awful Kouldelka-esque quasi grid-based combat system should convince you to believe me when I say that most modern JRPGs are "trying too hard". They want so desperately to do something new that they forget what worked for them in the first place and back themselves into a corner, design-wise. Granted, sometimes it does work, like with the Star Ocean series crafting system or the airship battles in Skies of Arcadia...though most of the times it does not.

To cut right to the point, TLR is a JRPG where the myriad of uneccesary changes the designers made to the game contribute to it being one of the very "strangest" titles I've ever played. That's the nicest way I can put it.

When you first begin the game, you'll notice that combat is a very "Hands-off" affair. Like some sort of desktop general style strategy game, you are unable to mincro-manage your characters and must issue them commands in combat via such obtuse instructions such as "Go all out" and "Play it safe". While you can select an option to see what each of these commands will cause your individual party members to do in each fight, it isn't very conducive to roleplaying and makes it feel like you're battling the combat system rather than the monsters. After a few hours of play, I found myself selecting commands according to what they would cause my party members to do, rather than actually looking at the very uninformative descriptions. I can't imagine anyone clicking "Play it safe" and expecting your party members to actually do so. To make matters worse, most of the time you'll never find a combat option that allows you to heal...even when your fighters clearly need to.

Making combat even more of an annoying chore is the fact that you cannot equip your party members with new equipment. Though you can upgrade your main character's gear, you cannot, in any way, alter the weapons or armor of your party members. There is a slight chance that some of your fighters will ask to take a new weapon you've found, but it's a rare occurence and is seemingly done at random. The only way to outfit your recruits with new equipment is to use an ini-file cheat that while effective, has the unfortunate drawback of sometimes resetting the condition of the character you modify. In short, there is no real way to micro-manage your party at all, which greatly limits the amount of control you have over each battle's outcome. Esentially, combat becomes a crapshoot where you can lose just as easily and convincingly as you can win.

Last but not least, combat is further crippled thanks to the inclusion of a Final Fantasy 8 system of enemy level scaling that rewards people who avoid random battles and punishes those of us who are very meticulous in our questing. Like Square's shameful FF8, TLR automatically ramps up every boss to your level and forces you to rely on the aforementioned "crapshoot" effect to win a battle.

A common predicament for me was having to build levels to simply survive the trek to a boss, then leaning my head against my palm as I realize the boss has been level scaled so far up that it now has skills that wipe out my entire party in one hit. Though I eventually discovered a way to de-level the bosses a bit (By removing half of my party and entering boss fights at half power) it lost effectiveness by the end of the game. Eventually, my desire to finish every quest and defeat every optional guild bounty monster caused the bosses to become so powerful that absolutely no amount of leveling would make them possible to defeat and I quit the game only one boss away from the final battle.

Combat isn't the only area in which TLR fails to deliver. Like most post-90s Squaresoft games, it does an excellent job at creating a bland and stereotypical storyline that reads like a 16 year old's livejournal. Your main character "Rush Sykes", who has the face of a mule and the personality of a garden slug, is forced into a war when his sister gets kidnapped by the dark colored eye-patch wearing "bad guy". Slowly, Mr. sykes becomes more and more of a loser as he showcases his ineptitude and inability to lead...especially after "rescuing" his sister and realizing that she's stronger than him. After that, it's more of that typical "War against the evil empire" business where you never really understand what's going on and feel like you're being laughed at somewhere by a bunch of snickering Japanese game developers who are taking notes about how easily the American gamer can be duped into playing garbage.

TLR's only saving grace is its music, which is simply phenomanal. While Square Enix did mention that they wanted TLR to be the first RPG geared towards the American Gamer, I didn't expect them to go so far that they'd ditch the whispy JRPG muzak with guitar-laden heavy metal battle music. It almost makes me want to get into fights simply so I can hear the metal riffs again. Sadly, the piss-poor combat mechanics put a damper on my air guitar performances.

Throw in the general bugginess of the Unreal Engine 3 and you really have to dig deep to find a positive aspect to TLR's design. Even with 8GB of total ram (With 4GB of actual, functional 32-bit application RAM) the Unreal Engine's textures take a few seconds to load during every level spawn. Nothing screams "Unpolished" then an engine that can't utlize more then 1 GB of RAM thanks to its Xbox 360 imposed hardware limits. Like Bioshock, TLR exhibits the same texture loading problems and does nothing to cover it up.

In the end, the only peopkle who will enjoy TLR would be hardcore Square-Enix fans and young gamers who are one of those psychotic types that read fifty FAQs and min-max every tiny detail of their game until they are merely going down an extremely linear, strict and incredibly unenjoyable walkthrough-assisted path. There is nothing wrong with making a game where only one way is the "correct" way, but TLR takes that to a terrifying new level by forcing the player to deliberately under-level his characters in order to keep the bosses relatively weak.

So if you enjoy very limiting combat options, a horribly glitched engine, a 14 year old's fanfic disguised as a JRPG story and Final Fantasy 8's auto-level scaling scheme...The Last Remnant is your holy grail of gaming goodness. For everyone else, it's the absolute worst present you could ever give the gamer in your life...so buying it for your worst enemy is actually not that bad of an idea.

The Last Remnant is basically Final Fantasy 8 in disguise. A miserable failure of a game whose flaws are only invisible to the most unredeemable of fanboys.