At first glance, "The Last Remnant" seems to be trying pretty hard to stand apart from the rest of the Japanese role-playing game (JRPG) competition. It is made by Square Enix, possibly the most trusted name in JRPG owing to the "Final Fantasy" series. The game is a port from Xbox 360 to PC, an uncommon for the genre, and the battle system looks more like a turn-based RTS thanks to dozens of characters on the screen at once. Unfortunately, the game's shallow storyline and ultimately gimmicky mechanics make this lazy port only for the serious genre fans.
"The Last Remnant" creates a fantasy world filled with mysterious and powerful artifacts called "remnants." The game tells the story of Rush Sykes, a teenager on a quest to find his sister after she is kidnapped. He happens to befriend the leader of the nation of Athlum who agrees to help him, and they soon get wrapped up in a conspiracy involving Rush's parents and a mysterious villain called "the Conqueror."
While generally immersive and even emotional, the story still seems a bit shallow overall. RPGs such as "Remnant" have been telling the same kinds of stories for years, while others like "Fallout 3" and "Mass Effect" have become deeper and more mature with their themes and plot lines. Just being well-written doesn't cut it anymore.
The game's pacing is highly traditional. While the story missions are there, very often you'll need to grind mobs in side quests for hours to get more experience, slowing down an otherwise well-paced story. Like most RPGs (though not the two previously mentioned), your success depends on how much time you invest in the game rather than how much actual skill you have - a system that depends fully on entertaining combat.
And while the combat system in "Remnant" is its most unique feature, it is pretty schizophrenic. Rather than controlling a few party members, you control entire squads, translating into battles of a much larger scale than traditional RPGs. But after a while, you realize the scale is the only thing that distinguishes "Remnant." You still issue the usual orders of attack, cast a spell or use a healing item, the only difference being that multiple characters do it at once. Easily controlling dozens of units rather than just a few is definitely fun to watch, but still feels gimmicky in the long run, and many of the early sequences where you control only a few units anyway feel generic and repetitive.
The visuals are lackluster technically, but it's hard not to be immersed by some of the sweeping outdoor environments and otherworldly locales throughout the game. Character models, however, aren't very detailed and look like the typical JRPG archetypes. Considering the relatively low level of detail, the game slows down far too often, particularly when there are lots of characters on screen during a battle.
The lack of graphical optimization is one part of the problem that makes "Remnant" seem like a lazy port. By default, all the tutorials show the controls as if you were playing with a 360 controller and have to be changed to a keyboard configuration. And, for some reason, the only things that work on the mouse are the buttons; there is no cursor, meaning all the menus have to be navigated with the keyboard. This is an absolute pain, and really makes no sense.
Though still somewhat hackneyed, and a rather lazy port, "The Last Remnant" pulls off just enough cool stuff to make it worth purchasing for serious RPG fans or those who liked the underlying game in the 360 version, but couldn't deal with the technical issues. Everyone else can wait for Square Enix to get with the times.
You can reach this writer at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
