The Last Remnant Review - Xbox 360

The Last Remnant Review -

There’s probably a long and interesting story behind how this game got made. Even when it was barely announced, it seemed bizarre – Square Enix uses the Unreal engine to make an Xbox 360 game? Four years ago, that would have made a great April Fool’s gag.

Sad to say, the story doesn’t have a happy ending. The Last Remnant has been in the works for two years or more, runs on proven technology, and comes from a developer that employs some of the most talented creators in the videogame business. Despite all that, it’s a mess, a couple of good ideas buried underneath an avalanche of technical glitches and bland storytelling.

Engine Trouble

Before anything else, Remnant is a nightmare of programming. It’s riddled with intrusive load times – a “Now Loading” screen seems to pop up before almost every battle or cutscene. During those battles and cutscenes, the animations are constantly spoiled when the framerate bogs down into the low single digits. The mapping routines are incredibly shoddy. Huge textures blip between different levels of detail in the middle of key cinematics.

All that makes it hard to enjoy a combat system that actually has some potential to it. There’s a lot of strategy to preparing for an encounter in The Last Remnant. Your party of characters doesn’t attack one at a time – instead, they get together in formations called “unions.” Unions attack the same targets and share a common pool of hit points, so they stand or fall as a team.

Building strong unions involves considering a lot of different factors, like the individual strengths of each character, how they complement each other, and what formation they should use in combat. A union combining similar characters amplifies their strengths, but it also exposes shared weaknesses. Coming up with a balanced group usually gives them the best chance at survival in the end.

On the down side, all the fun is in planning for battles. When it comes time to trade blows with the bad guys, Remnant practically plays itself. The camera perspective makes it hard to tell where different unions stand on the battlefield, and you can’t control a union’s movement in detail anyway. They always charge straight towards their target, which is a pain in the neck when you want to set up a flanking move (or keep the enemy from flanking you). Most of the time, all that the player decides is if a union will attack, hang back, or heal. Then the chips fall where they may, at an average of maybe 10 frames per second.

Dungeon Hack

Exploring the game world’s many caverns and ruins doesn’t add much excitement, either. The 3D background graphics are fairly pretty – in general, Remnant’s graphics look nice when the framerate isn’t dying – but the dungeon layouts are simple and the puzzles are rarely challenging.

If you’re hoping for a story that makes up for all these problems, well, it’s time to give up hope. The plot starts out slow, and it only gets slower. Rush Sykes, the spunky hero, is relatively well-acted considering how he’s written, but he’s written as a preternaturally clueless teenage goofball without the brains God gave a deep-sea tube worm. (He’s also fixated on his sister to a degree that goes well beyond disturbing.) None of the supporting characters get much development to speak of, and some bright penny decided that several of them should speak with grating upper-class-twit-of-the-year British accents.

Since the Square Enix localization crew has been maligned enough by its association with this game, it’s important to make a distinction here. The English dialogue isn’t badly composed, and the English voice acting isn’t badly directed (except perhaps for those overdone accents). It’s not up there with the company’s best work, like Chrono Cross or Final Fantasy X, but the translators and editors did a decent job, all things considered.

Most of the problem is further up the line, with the scenario writers who decided that this story and these characters were worth hanging a big-budget game on. Ideally, in a game like this, the story makes the gameplay mean something. When you care about characters and the events they’re involved in, you don’t just play the game for the sake of playing the game. You play the game because you want to see the next twist in the plot, and you want to help these people that you’ve grown to like make it to the end of their adventure. That’s what sets apart some of Square Enix’s best games, and unfortunately, Remnant doesn’t have it.

Found In Translation

What it does have are a couple of unanswered questions floating around in its wake. For one thing, what is it that Americans are supposed to like about this game? It runs on American-made graphics technology, but gamers have never been particularly nationalistic about that kind of thing. Is there supposed to be something uniquely American about Rush’s self-destructive stupidity? When it comes down to it, The Last Remnant just doesn’t hold up in the long run. The concept behind the battle system is solid but dragging it through uninspired dungeons and a tired story can make putting in that second disk a chore.  

Article by: D.F. Smith