The Last Remnant (Xbox 360)

"Let's kick some ass!"
11/28/2008 1:18 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

Not to extract you from the medium to which we are all so wonderfully addicted, but I was thinking of this past summer's moving production of "Hair" in Central Park while playing The Last Remnant, the big game this year from Square Enix. In "Hair," the brilliant, heart-tugging actress of a thousand faces Allison Case plays Crissy. Case sings the song "Frank Mills" as if she may never find what she's looking for in relationships, and maybe even in life -- even though she's unrepentantly idealistic and brimming with youthful peace and love to give.

Less than halfway through The Last Remnant, I felt like Allison Case's Crissy: I had many hopes and expectations for the Square Enix game, anticipating my life in the game and feeling more alive for its diverting turn-based entertainment.

See, the epic one-player offering promised I could bring along as many as 25 other characters for my team in search of Remnants, artifacts and obelisks with powers so, so awesome. Plus, with two disks of gameplay, I thought the role-playing experience would be a compelling one, not only full of Square's lengthy computer movies, but also Kurosawa-like battles that wouldn't let me down. Because it uses the Unreal Engine 3 as its software, I thought commanding these massive, violent encounters would be a slam dunk: tough strategy that yielded powerful, satisfying results.

The story? Everyone wants more and more Remnants, kind of the way everyone wants cold, hard cash, and they'll do anything to get it. This tale of woe and war due to greed isn't new, as old as the haves versus the have-nots plot that is also present in The Last Remnant.

After a half-hour movie and a tutorial that lets you engage in battle for the first time, you begin to see some potential problems with the game. You witness utterly beautiful graphics of unknown worlds, giant Remnants (especially one in the center of town that looks like a massive sword) and huge battles -- but they're somehow banal. The characters don't react with the appropriate drama and emotion, and the script is, at best, run-of-the-mill. You've got an M-rated game with a PG action film's immature script that's B-movie in quality -- at best. And the characters' movements, especially their hands, seem forced and generally not lifelike.

Once in battle, you'll see frame rate issues. To me, that's not the worst thing in the world if the rest of the game is top-notch. But I still had to wonder about these graphic jitters, because there were just a few characters battling on-screen at a time. Maybe they should have waited for the Unreal Engine 4 to release the game.

And maybe the whole approach towards leveling up should be revisited. You've got to kill the little monsters before you get to the big monsters, and a lot of them are the same: scorpions, giant flies, things like that. Once you tell the battle system how to proceed, you're generally just watching the carnage, with the exception of having to press the occasional button quickly to land a superior blow. And you know they wouldn't have added this option if they didn't think you'd be bored with the battle system in the first place.