Last Remnant : The WORST Strategy Game Ever

Last Remnant: The Proposal

So one day some guy at Square Enix brings the Last Remnant game doc to whatever committee they have to decide what games they should make. He says:

And that’s the least of it.

When you create a Strategy game, you would normal think that Strategy plays a large role in it. In order to function in a strategy game, you would expect meticulous control over every minor detail of your teams and characters. It is pretty much the only requirements to call yourself a Strategy Game.

For those of you lucky enough never to have played this game, I will explain.

More To Do Than Fighting…?

The game itself has very little to offer outside of battle. You run around and talk to people in towns and do tedious things like buying/selling/modding items and equipment. You hire and fire members of your team and mercenaries to lead them. The only real differences between Leaders and Soldiers are better Stats/Abilities and a very small amount of character design and personality. They really don’t “lead” in any way. So what little bit of customization the game offers is really not engaging or interesting at all.

The items in the game would be interesting… if the stats they gave you were realistic, change-able, or in some cases shown at all. Your attacks and spells will miss whenever it would be least opportune no matter what you wear because there is no accuracy stat. Each character will hit as hard as it feels like with no true regard to their stats. I’ve had 2 units with the same strength and same weapon, but one of them always hit for more than double the other one.

The Story is interesting and entertaining for the most part if you’re willing to look past how annoying the main character is. There are a few cheap and contrived plot devices sprinkled throughout that keep you from truly caring about the characters, but it was enough to keep me curious about what would happen next… And then I saw the ending. The ending is a complete cop-out that is only more of a cop-out if you watch the short snippet after the credits. Nothing that happens in the story really matters ever, and even if you think it does mean something at some points, keep watching and it will soon reverse it.

When you have control of your character in a dungeon, it is normal dungeon crawling like any other game. The monsters are on the field and you go into a battle if you touch them. There is a time-slowing ability that helps you avoid/chain fights together, which makes it a little more interesting.

The Art Of Strategy-Based Combat

When you enter combat, each of your teams (up to 5 members per team) works as one unit. This means that if you attack an enemy with 1 health point left, your entire team’s turn is pretty much wasted after the first member flicks him.

Each team also shares a combined health total and so do enemy teams. The only problem I really have with this is the fact that some enemies have abilities like Surefire, where they can instantly kill one of your team members. But if the enemy team has 5 members and only 1 health point left, all five of them will be alive and able to attack because you cannot kill just one of them with any of your abilities.

Action Points are basically the equivalent of Mana or Magic Points. Every action you team members take in battle cost AP, except for using items or a generic attack. You build up AP every turn.

When you are choosing what each team’s actions should be, the game gives you up to 6 different options which are decided at random. They will give you two options to heal yourself when you have full health. If one of your teams is dead, you won’t even get the option to resurrect them sometimes. If your team has 300 Action Points, it won’t give you any option to attack with more than 4 of those Points, meaning instead of hitting for 50,000 damage, you hit for 12,000 that turn… for no good reason. They will sometimes not even allow you to do nothing if you want to stay back and avoid damage. There are some times (maybe 25% of the time) where they give you an option you might construe as ideal.

There are also Special moves that some Leader characters can performthat will in many cases turn the tide of a battle. The availability ofthese options are entirely random, so you might spend 2 hours fightingtrash enemies before you finally get to the boss, but the Special Movethat would make the fight possible will not be available. Your teamswill be wiped out. You will need to start from the very beginning 2hours ago. At random.

In battle, your units have the ability to re-assess their actions based on the conditions of the battle. This means that if your team gets hit hard by an unexpected attack, they can change their plans and heal themselves… or so you’d think. In reality, half of the time re-assessing will make your player decide that instead of killing the boss you’re fighting with the action you miraculously got to show up in your random options, he will instead learn the ability to drop an ice cube on the boss for about 5% of the damage he would have dealt. The boss will counterattack, and Game Over.

So in the end, you are not given the ability to decide what your characters do, and even if you do get the opportunity to do something CLOSE, there is a chance he won’t listen anyway. So what you get instead of a strategy game is the far more time-consuming version of simulating a football game in Madden 2003. You have no control over what happens and the only thing involved is stats and a random number generator.

Bosses in this game are incredibly difficult. They usually require several attempts to kill and over an hour per attempt in many cases. At the end of the game, the bosses will be so difficult that they will require more than 10 attempts. When you finally kill one of these bosses, it will usually be because you randomly got to use a Special Ability at a good time finally or because the boss decided not to use his anywhere near as often as he did every other attempt. The only exception to this is THE FINAL BOSS. The big finale for this game that takes 60 or so hours to get to the end if you never die is a joke. The final boss takes about 15 minutes to kill and he is actually easier to kill than the mini-boss dragons you have to kill to get to him. The only thing that could possibly be worse than this anti-climax is the huge cop-out bullshit story that you see via cutscene afterward.

As a side-note there are enemies that use the ability Self-Destruct when they get low on health. It hits everyone near them for more damage than any team can actually have in health… BUT IT DOESN’T KILL THEM. This is just one infuriating example of why this game is so horrifying.

Other Special Features

The textures don’t load until 3-10 seconds after the scenes load. For some god awful reason the cutscenes are all in-engine, too, so the textures load slowly in those too. I’m all for optimizing the engine so that you can avoid having loading scenes, but the problem is THERE ARE STILL FUCKING LOADING SCREENS. It would have taken an extra second or two on the 20 second long loading screens that display before every scene/battle/sneeze to avoid this problem. The art is truly beautiful once you see it, but it really destroys the immersion.

There is nothing more annoying than the sound clip that plays nearly every single time your main character’s group takes an action. Especially when the main character is as annoying as he is. “Let’s kick some A!” …like the letter A. Why would you even record this voice clip if you didn’t want to use the word ‘ass’!? Why wouldn’t you just say butt? Even more enervating is the fact that other characters say ‘shit’ a few times in the game.

Conclusion

I wanted to like this game. I spend $60 and 80-something hours doing every single side quest and progressing all the way through it. I suspended disbelief when one of my characters died dramatically… and then was replaced 2 minutes later by a near-exact replica. I didn’t put down the controller and hurl the discs out the window when one of the main story elements said that David wasn’t allowed to use one of his weapons without permission from a higher ranking lord…. but he used it whenever he felt like it in battles throughout the game. I gave this game every courtesy I would give a game I knew would get good after the initial rough patch. And the rough patch never ended.

I have never played a game that made me so furious. I have never actually thought to myself “Is it worth the $1000 it would cost me to replace my TV to allow myself to throw my Xbox controller through it?” I didn’t give any spoiler alerts in this article because the game was spoiled when it was a sketch on a whiteboard.