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Review: The Last Remnant has more tech issues than enjoyment
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When Square Enix announced that The Last Remnant would be using Unreal Engine 3 (the game engine behind Mass Effect, BioShock and Gears of War), fans were more than excited. Square Enix, the folks behind the Final Fantasy, were betting on the role-playing game leading them out through the holiday months, but the game has quite a bit of issues.
But before we get into that, let‘s talk story. The game follows a kid named a Rush. He and his sister are playing around in the forest when they get a message from their parents who are working scientists. After they get some bad news, Rush’s sister, Irina, is suddenly kidnapped by some mysterious dude with some flying creatures helping him out. Once Rush wakes up from being knocked out, he runs around looking for his sister and finds himself in the middle of a war. Somehow, someway he finds himself involved with the people of a city called Athlum and they help him look for his sister. You go on a variety of quests and whatnot, battling all types of creatures ranging from humans to big reptilians to rabbit looking humanoids. They races also fight alongside you, which leads us to the battle system.
The battle system is a twist on the turn-based systems that a lot of RPGs are known for. But instead of battling using one character at a time, you battle using up to three or four characters at a time, which is called a “union.” You can control several unions at a time which could count up to 10 to 15 characters at once. But don’t get it twisted; it’s not like a real-time strategy game at all. Just like in turn-based battle system, a union is treated as one entity and you decide how you’re union will attack either physically, magically, healing, and variations of the three. Half the time, however, you really have no idea what’s going on because all of the characters you control look almost identical to the characters you’re fighting (unless it’s an insect or some other animal). Plus, the learning curve is pretty steep in terms of learning what your attacks actually DO to your enemies. It just feels like there’s no strategy at all to the battles and all you have to do is keep pressing attack, heal when your health is low, and then you win the battle.
But the battle system is the only thing that needs a fix. During battles, you may be a bit confused, but then you’ll become annoyed the game starts skipping and pausing as if you’re disc was scratched. I literally took the disc out to see if it was damaged because the skipping and pausing was so bad. It’s unbelievable that a game would be allowed to hit stores shelves with issues this bad. Another frustrating aspect of the game is the load times. Every time there’s a cut scene it’s preceded and followed by a loading screen. Every time you walk into a new area, building, or map there a loading screen. It seems like when you turn your character around there’s a loading screen! The game is on two discs. You would think there wouldn’t be that much loading time if the game is spread out.
These issues make the game tough to enjoy because the cut scenes, environments, and animations are very well done and impressive to watch. The idea of the union sounds cool on paper, but it didn’t seem to translate well into the game. There are some really cool characters, like the dude with four arms holding four swords and the reptilian with a gigantic hammer, that would be awesome to control individually but the game isn’t made that way. All the elements for a spectacular game is there, it just seems like it wasn’t executed well enough.
Q’s Rating: 2.5 out of 5
G4TV: 2 out of 5
1up.com: D
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