We Just Played The Last Remnant for PC
Last year's The Last Remnant for the Xbox 360 tried to push console role-playing games in new directions by including larger-scale battles with battalions (or "unions") of characters massed to fight as a group. The game took place in an unusual alternate-fantasy world where talking cat-men with...
Last year's The Last Remnant for the Xbox 360 tried to push console role-playing games in new directions by including larger-scale battles with battalions (or "unions") of characters massed to fight as a group. The game took place in an unusual alternate-fantasy world where talking cat-men with four arms routinely served as royal guardians, and where, like in many console games of this sort, many of the human males that served as main characters were young, slender, and had fabulous hair.
Get ready for turn-based console-RPG battles on your PC.
We got our hands on the PC version of the game and have played through the early part of it, and have found the game to so far be a faithful translation of the original console game. Like in the Xbox 360 version of The Last Remnant, the PC version of the game starts with the story of Rush Sykes, a plucky young lad who sets out to rescue his kidnapped sister, without the help of his workaholic parents (who are off toiling on a potentially world-saving project involving ancient artifacts known as "remnants"). Over the course of the game, he meets various characters (who may or may not be cat-men) to join him in his quest and eventually lead into battle as part of the game's larger-scale combat system.
Keeping a close eye on your union members and building up huge enemy chains will let you quickly develop them into more-powerful heroes.
Like with the majority of console role-playing games since the original Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior from the 8-bit NES, The Last Remnant's combat is turn-based, and alternates turns between your party's characters (and their planned attack abilities) and your enemies' turns. Each character in The Last Remnant will have various different abilities that will be specialized in such areas as casting magical spell effects or swinging a sword, and additional abilities that can be performed at a cost of "action points," or AP; but interestingly, you won't have direct control over them beyond giving general orders, so you'll effectively act as both a general and a soldier at the same time. However, by attacking and defeating enemies in sequence, you can perform longer and longer "chains" that will net you more experience points so that Rush and his buddies will gain levels (and the new abilities that come with them) faster.
You will come to know the face of your sister's captor as you explore The Last Remnant. POTENTIAL SPOILER: It may or may not be a very pretty man.
The PC version of The Last Remnant seems to run just fine and we encountered no framerate hiccups or significant technical problems of any kind as we played. The game was built using the Unreal Engine and this powerful technology seems to do a good job of translating the colorful graphical look and intricate, cat-man-filled world that first debuted in the console game. The Last Remnant is scheduled for release later this month on PC.
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