Random Game Talk - The Last Remnant

Sometimes I like picking up a game that splits the room when it comes to public opinion of it. Just watching the back and forth among those who've played it, half saying it's great, the other half saying it's terrible, just winds up peaking my interest to the point where I simply have to try it for myself. The Last Remnant is one such game. I'd originally picked it up for next to nothing at a Steam sale a few years ago, but it was only recently that I finally got off my duff and made a concerted effort to play it from beginning to end.

On the whole, I liked the game quite a bit, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it was amazing. The Last Remnant certainly has its flaws. However, I didn't find them to be enough to ruin the experience. I can see why some people never warmed up to the game, though, because it's an RPG where you have to love the battle system in order to enjoy the game. If it's not your cup of tea despite playing the game for several hours, it's probably time to bail and look for something else.

I'm not going to go into minute detail about the inner workings of the battle system since there are no lack of guides out there already that do a fine job of it. What won me over about it was two things: you had actual armies you were putting together and the approach to positioning and squads (pardon me, unions) was kinda novel.

Usually when an RPG goes for anything tactical either you get something on par with Baldur's Gate, or the developers completely shift gears towards making a strategy RPG instead. In either case, you'll have individual, specialized units that you move around the map, while the enemy behaves in a similar fashion. So it's like moving chess pieces around with fixed abilities that will stay that way unless they get replaced with a completely different unit. Move that warrior, smash that orc, get that mage casting her spells, that sort of thing.

There's a lot going on in most battles.

In TLR this is different, though, because you build unions that fight for you. These have several people in them, and they can be of all sorts of specializations. They could be straight up brawlers, going in swords swinging. They could be magic users, casting spells and melting faces. They could even be support classes that spend most of their time buffing friendly units while casting terrible afflictions on enemies. So, players have quite a lot of choices in terms of how they build up their unions. They can make highly specialized ones where everyone is a warrior, for instance, or start making interesting hybrid squads. It opens the door to a lot of nuance when building an army, and it's on a scale you don't often seen in an RPG.

I went with somewhat specialized unions, keeping some more focused on bonking things over the head with large, metal objects, and others more inclined to lob fireballs and bathe baddies in acid. However, I did make a point of squeezing in utility soldiers that could do stuff like heal or add a quick buff on to the group, as I found it rounded out my unions a little better. There was only one small union that I made entirely of melee soldiers, but these were three of my finest fighters, and the way they worked together pretty much turned them into an elite death squad.

Cities in TLR are soooo pretty.

Still, I spent quite a lot of time pouring over who I wanted in each union. By the time you get a decent way into the game, you can have up to 18 people in your army that actually fight battles, divided into a maximum of five unions (and a minimum of one for those who like a fair bit of masochism in their gaming experiences). Meanwhile, I had a roster of 50 or so soldiers that I could choose from to send to the front. It actually took a lot of hemming and hawing on my part to decide who I wanted in my party, and even then it took some field testing after to be absolutely sure I was happy with the teams I had.

So, even before stepping foot into a battle, there's so much to fiddle around with. The battles themselves are good too. They a lean more toward the tactical side of things because positioning of one's unions and that of enemy unions matters. Ideally, you want to find ways to flank the enemy so that you get an advantage in a fight while cutting off enemy groups before they get a chance to do the same thing to one of your own unions.

It results in this dance as unions sweep across the battlefield for the best possible positioning when engaging a target. This also has the added advantage of swinging the momentum of a battle towards one side or the other. The better you flank enemies, surround them, cut them off, and generally beat the tar out of them, the more a morale bar will shift in your favor, which is good because when this happens your unions have better defense and attack output. Conversely, screw things up and your guys' morale will drop, resulting in their attacks shifting into wimpy mode while they also start taking more damage. I really liked this because not only do tactics come into play during a fight, but the better you do the more your rewarded, and also there's the constant specter of getting steamrolled if you screw up too much.

Great giant robot design, or greatest giant robot design?

All this plays into what can be a pretty challenging experience, emphasis on "can be". I say this because the way that difficulty scales in TLR is a bit clumsy. Enemies in the game scale to your own army's battle rank. Battle Rank is basically levels in the game and represents your whole army, not an individual unit, as units gain individual skills and stats on a steady basis as they do more battles instead of having a formal level up system. With this, Battle Rank is the closest thing we have to actual levels instead.

Anyway, what knocks the difficulty out of whack is that level scaling of enemies doesn't stay lock stepped with your own army. Instead, it follows specific plateaus. So, you might have a certain boss or group of trash mobs around level 40 and your own army's Battle Rank is 40, making for an evenly matched fight. Alternately, your army could be Battle Rank 45 while they're still 40, so the fight turns out fairly easy since your army out levels these creatures by a good clip. Then your army hits Battle Rank 50. Unfortunately, this was a threshold that triggered the enemies you were fighting to scale to their next plateau, which happens to be level 55. Now they are much harder to fight because they out level your own army.

This makes difficulty a lot tougher to dial in. Whether you want a challenging fight, an easy fight, or something in between, there's no real way to know what to expect or how to prepare your army such that it tailors battles to your own preferences without consulting an online guide so that you have an idea what the different level plateaus of enemies are. It just feels so awkward, and I can't help but feel that a steadier form of constant, gradual level scaling would have worked better here.

There are some boss attacks in this game where the only appropriate
response is, "Well, fuck..."

As much as I've gone on about the battles, which, really, are the meat and potatoes of the game, it does have a story, and it's the one thing about TLR that irks me above all others. I just couldn't get into it. A lot of the characters aggravated me, and the plot didn't explain things nearly as well as it should have.

Rush was just a dolt through much of the adventure. He was raised on a fairly isolated island, so it's not as if he had a lot of friends to interact with and develop social skills or decorum, but the way he interacted with most of the people in the game was just too casual. He let his emotions constantly get the better of him, and seemed to be trying to get chummy with everyone. Just the way he went about it irritated me so much. He seemed to tone it down later in the game, which was a relief, but I may have been suffering from a light case of Stockholm Syndrome and just accepted Rush for the goof that he is.

I actually liked the supporting cast a lot better. Blocter and Pagus, while being a tad archetypal, were so likable. I sort of warmed up to David too, but that may have been the calming affect of his amazing hair, also some of the mercenaries I picked up along the way had their charms. So, that helped a bit.

Just look at this town and tell me you wouldn't want to at
least go for a holiday there.  It's so cozy!

However, what really hurt the story for me was how it didn't feel like it fleshed out several aspects of it as much as it could. More than anything, it felt like TLR was jumping from one epic moment to the next, magical glowing thingies blasting around, explosions, giant summonable doodads, which are a central part of the game world, and crazy, huge battles. These were really cool to watch, don't get me wrong, but the game went light on context, which was a bit of a drag because I was actually quite curious about this world and wanted to understand it more. Unfortunately, every time I felt like swooning and saying, "Tell me more!" the game replied with a rather kurt, "Nope!  More explosions!"

But at least the explosions looked pretty, so that's something. Really, the whole game looks pretty thanks to the fantastic art direction it has. One thing I don't like about a lot of RPGs is their insistence on just adhering to Tolkienian preconceptions of what a fantasy world "should be". It's been like that since the days of pen and paper, and not much has changed in the mainstream entries of the genre that choose to visit realms of elves and dragons.

TLR's world just feels so unique compared to a lot of its contemporaries. First it does away with stuff like elves, dwarves, and such, instead having various sentient species that look like fish people, lizard folk, and cat men walking alongside humans. It makes for a very different change of pace. At the same time, the designers weren't completely in your face about how they went about things. They could have just gone with straight up anthropomorphic animals a la the Breath of Fire series, but they didn't, which was nice.

This boss will shoot babies at you.
Baaaaabiiiiieeeees! =O

The really oddball designs come in the form of many of the monsters in the game. There were moments while playing where I thought to myself "What the hell is that?" Monsters in this game can look so weird sometimes, and I love that. There was this Hell's Gate thingie that got summoned once for a boss fight, and it was just ridiculous how over the top it looked, especially when is started lobbing demon babies at my guys. Great stuff.

Things did take a step back when it came to environments. There were a lot of places that are pretty typical in a role-playing game: dark, dank caves, open fields, mountainous regions, that sort of stuff. There are only so many locales that one can adventure in, so these sorts of places are pretty unavoidable. However, the cities in the game looked amazing. There was a ton of detail in them, and each one had its own unique flavor of architecture, making them stand out from one another. I particularly liked the more rural villages I happened upon. They just felt so cozy!

Even the music feels different here thanks in no small part to the liberal splashes of butt rock that Square-Enix managed to throw into the game. Usually when I think of RPG music, it's along the lines of sweeping orchestral scores, or some sort of ambient electronic soundtrack, not crunchy guitars and wankery solos. So, I've gotta tip my hat to Squeenix for going this route, and actually managing to do a good job of it.

And while I'm still in Laundry List of Things I Like mode, I might as well squeeze in all the other bits and bobs about TLR that tickled my fancy in one barely coherent paragraph, so here goes. Side quests and random things to do when not chasing the game's big bad. This game has a lot of that. Hunt rare monsters, do little side quests to help the locals, collecting drops from enemies that can be used to build new weapons, and supe up existing ones. There is a ton to do when you want to wander off of the beaten path for a while, and I loved it. Taking a break from the action to just soak in the sights and futz around was really relaxing and gobbled up far more time than I expected it would.

The Last Remnant has a lot of really cool scenes but not enough context
to tie everything together nicely.

So, in the end I rather liked The Last Remnant. I wouldn't hold it up as one of my favorite RPGs of all time. There are plenty of other games in the genre that I've enjoyed far more, but this one is still quite good. It's the battle system that really did it for me. Between micromanaging my army and the tactical nature of combat, it gave me a lot to do. Everything else was just gravy, except for the story. That could have used some work. I'm glad I finally got around to playing through TLR, after not touching it for years. Would I recommend it to others? Sure. If you like tactical combat and a deep party system, it's worth a play. Just wait for a Steam sale, though, as the game tends to sell for insanely cheap then (somewhere in the $5 - $10 range). It's just a shame that The Last Remnant didn't sell too well when it came out, as I wouldn't mind a sequel to it, and the game left itself wide open to one. Oh, well...