The Last Remnant is about a kid who's sister become kidnapped and he ventures on a journey to save her. The game is mainly marketed of it's "strategic" combat system where you can flank, intercept and such while still being a "faithful" JRPG.
Ahh, what a wonderful music for such a shitty game, ( 1 / 6 )

When you start up the game you are greeted with awesome music and some really sweet battles and I love large battles. It gives me chills in all the Total War games, but this game is nothing like Total War. The graphics use the unreal engine are alright (when it gets going), although this game is especially slow on loading textures in relatively small areas, which will mean that you're going to watch a lot of low-res textures (this might be fixed by defraging the hard drive though). The art style is a joke. If you didn't like Final Fantasy IX for it's art style you're going to hate this game because it's inhabited by giant fish people, small rabbit-frogs and orcs... no wait, those are just guards. All especially bred to be as cartoony as possible. The main characters are ridiculously emo-looking, and I mean all the main characters, which is why this style needs to die, right now.

The biggest problem with this game however is the combat system. It sucks ass because it has nothing to do with strategy. Since it uses turns you cannot in reality intercept someone because you never know who they're trying to go after. You "flank" your opponents by sending more than one unit towards them, if you're opponent is then fighting more than one squad in the same time you'll flank them and this is regardless of squad size so 1 squad vs 2 squads equals flank but the nice thing is that the squad can be surrounded and that happens when they're fighting over 3-4 enemies I believe. When the fighting starts it only looks like a giant brawl without any kind of structure, and since the game deals with relatively low numbers of units it wont look as epic as the brawls in the Total War series where they're mostly chaotic because here the characters take turns to hit each other. You get 3 squads in which you can have max 5 people in them it's kinda strange that they would even be able to flank someone and quite fitting it all turns into a brawl. Your performance of the battles are entirely luck based because you never really directly command your units in battle. If you want them to heal themselves you gotta wait until they're bleeding to death before the option is even available. I thought this didn't sound so bad before I bought the game but in practice it ruins the "tactics element" of it all, if you could call it that.

So basically you can't flank your opponents if you don't outnumber them and you cannot directly control your squadmates. This is a game where the player doesn't have much control over and you would probably have better control when trying to win at fucking slot machines! The control you do have is where to send your squads, vague pointers on how they should fight and who goes in what squad. Oh and by the way, you don't get to choose their equipment either. Poof, now a RPG element are gone too.

Do I even have to say more? The story mayhap? When you meet (what the fuck his name was) you befriend him and the story turns over to him for a moment while he tries to make his vassal state independent from another vassal state. Yes, this game deals in Feudalism (kind of) and you get to follow his struggle for his state's independence for a little while. He promises you that he will find your sister in the process but it have to be done methodically. The story isn't half bad I think and it would be really interesting to follow up on if only the game actually let you control the battles. It becomes increasingly difficult to control the outcome of the battles and you would probably lose quite a few battles because you simply cannot control anything that's happening during the course of it.

Decent story and graphics, poor characters and art style and a bad gameplay. If you could control the game it would be alright but a game that cannot interact with the player isn't worth spending many hours of frustration on. And don't even get me started on the giant learning curve, why is it so big? Because no one tells you squat and the game is so unorthodox in almost every way. There's a stat that is different for each character that seems more like a characteristic. It changes with levels but what does it do? No, this game is hopelessly bad, don't even try it. (1/6)



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