The Last Remnant’s battle system is perhaps a bit confusing for most gamers, making the title difficult to get into.
With PS3 JRPG fans a little worried that The Last Remnant may not make its way over to the PS3 after all, it seemed like a good time for me to give some impressions on the game so perhaps you won’t be too sad. Despite hearing that it was a very mediocre game with extreme slowdown, I thought the hard drive installation and my love for Bladestorm would have me enjoying the game more than the average gamer. The hard drive installation helps considerably, but whether I enjoy the game or not is still to be determined.
From the screenshots of the game, it looks like your typical Japanese RPG: young male protagonist, generic JRPG heroes and characters, fight screens, towns, etc. As a JRPG fan, I’m actually not one that really enjoys a lot of “innovation” in my JRPGs – let me grind away and find treasures and give me an interesting storyline with entertaining characters and I will love it.
The Last Remnant changes things up a bit, and it’s so jarring that I may not have what it takes to see this game through. First of all, the battle system is just crazy. It’s no longer managing a bench of a dozen or so characters with only 3-4 in battle at a time, but instead you’re managing small squads of heroes and soldiers. It seems like it’s possible to command up to 5 squads of 2-5 members each, and you give general commands for each squad as opposed to specific commands such as “Cast Cure” or “Use Special Move X”. That in and of itself is fine – I love RTS games after all. But even after a couple hours, I still couldn’t understand how the squad battles worked – is there strategy in the combat or is it all fake strategy where your decisions are really pointless?
On top of that, other JRPG mechanics have radically changed here as well. You can save the game at any time (pretty crazy for a JRPG!) and after every battle, all your characters are at full health. While these sound like convenient innovations, the one thing that boggles my mind is that there’s no actual leveling up of the characters. There’s strange formulas that work out based on how you put the characters in the squads, and basically the ideal way to play through the game seems to be to avoid all random encounters altogether so you get stronger later – quite an unintuitive way to play the game as a JRPG fan. Combine that with the fact that most of the game seems mostly about taking on random sidequests in the same levels over and over instead of an overarching adventure, and I think I’m going to put this aside for now and try it later if I’m feelin it again. I might have to move onto Star Ocean: The Last Hope for my next JRPG fix.
