Features
Platform: Xbox 360
- The Last Remnant for the Xbox 360 is the first role-playing game in a new series from Square Enix
- Breathtaking visuals, a mysterious storyline, and a massive battlefield provide hours of exciting gameplay
- Battles are fought between multiple friendly and enemy unions — groups of up to five characters
- Commands change depending on the current battle situation or the distance and positions of friendly and hostile unions
- In Deadlock gameplay, the two unions must fight each other until one union has been completely destroyed
Description of The Last Remnant: Xbox 360
Platform: Xbox 360
The Last Remnant for the Xbox 360 is the first role-playing game in a new series from Square Enix. This game delivers breathtaking visuals only possible on next-generation platforms, a mysterious storyline full of powerful artifacts, and a massive battlefield where you’ll be surrounded by countless foes and friends alike.
The Story Unfolds
In ancient times mysterious artifacts, referred to as Remnants, were discovered all over the world. People used these objects for their awesome powers — a choice that eventually caused a rift in the world’s balance. A thousands years later, the story of The Last Remnant begins.
Rush Sykes and his sister Irina are children of scientists researching the esoteric Remnants. One day, Irina is kidnapped right before Rush’s eyes. Determined to rescue his sister, Rush joins forces with David Nassau, the marquis of a small city-state called Athlum. Together they are determined to pursue the criminals and save Irina from her strange captors.
Meanwhile, the world is thrust into confusion as ruling powers bicker over dividing the Remnants’ powers. Soon a mysterious man appears calling himself the Conqueror. His presences escalates tensions as everyone eagerly attempts to answer the question: Into whose hands will the power of the Remnants fall? Before he knows it, Rush becomes wrapped up in this international power struggle and realizes that he is somehow connected to the enigmatic Conqueror.
Allies and Enemies
Before her kidnapping, Rush Sykes lived a peaceful life with his 14-year-old sister, Irina Sykes. Irina is a cheerful, resilient girl who stays upbeat even during the toughest of times. Some mysterious power seems to rest within here, but she herself has no understanding of what it is or what it can do. David Nassau, the 19-year-old who rules over the state of Athlum, spends his days working towards better his homeland. Although he decides to join Rush on his quest to rescue Irina, his motives are his own. Emma Honeywell, the matriarch of the Honeywells clan, Plagus, Blocter, and Torgal round out the allies.
The man known only as the Conqueror and his minions are eager to seize the Remnants throughout the lands. His origin is shrouded in mystery, but it appears that something strange and elusive connects this villain to Rush. Enamored with the Conqueror, Roeas has declared her eternal allegiance to him and acts as the ambassador of the Conqueror’s Army. Although beautiful in form and voice, Roeas is sadistic and menacing on the battlefield. Originating from a large-bodied species with pronounced fighting abilities, Castanea is Roeas right-hand-man. He rarely speaks or expresses himself, so it is difficult to decipher his thoughts — although Roeas seems to understand him easily. In addition, the strongest fighters in the Conqueror’s army are referred to as The Seven. The Seven lead their own troops and report to Roeas and Castanea.
Combat Systems: Morale, Battle Unions, and Deadlock
Battles are fought between multiple friendly and enemy unions — groups of up to five characters who fight together. Players give commands to unions as a whole, who then carry out the actions. Orders in battle are given in a command-select style that is familiar to most role playing gamers. However, The Last Remnant commands are not delivered with standard terms, such as “Item” or “Magic.” Instead, players control unions with specialized commands, such as “Slam ‘em with status ailments!” or “Do area attacks from afar!” Available commands change depending on the current battle situation or the distance and positions of friendly and hostile unions.
The Last Remnant adds a Morale component to the gameplay. Players can check current morale via the gauge across the top of the screen. The higher the morale, the more damage is dealt and less damage is taken by friendly unions, and vice-versa. When friendly and enemy unions go toe-to-toe and engage in melee combat, they enter a state called Deadlock. Once in Deadlock, the two unions must fight each other until one union has been completely destroyed.
Enemy monsters roam the land where they can be avoided or engaged at will. When battle is initiated, the scene changes to a specialized battle map where friend and foe can fight it out. Horizontal lined icons labeled A, B, C, etc. represent the on-field battle unions. Players choose which hostile union they wish to attack on this screen. The Last Remnant offers a wide variety of commands that focus on dealing damage or executing defensive maneuvers. Knowing which commands are most suitable for each situation is the key to winning battles.
The Last Remnant delivers breathtaking visuals, a mysterious storyline full of powerful artifacts, and a massive battlefield.
Customer Reviews
I’ve played almost every Square Enix game there is, and when I saw the across the board bad reviews for Last Remnant, I was a bit worried. But I bought it anyway, and I don’t regret it. Just for some background, here’s my preference for Final Fantasy games, so you can compare with your own tastes and see if TLR might be for you. I thought FF3 (6 US) was the best hands down, FF2 (4 US) and 7 were tied for second, 10 and 1 (for the sake of nostalgia if nothing else) were tied for 3rd. 12 is next, 9 was not terrible, but it was definitely forgettable. And 8 was a steaming pile of garbage.
With that out of the way, there’s one thing you have to accept before you get into this game. If you don’t just accept it going in you won’t appreciate the game, and if you do you will. And that is the fact that the hallmark of this game is the battle system. That was their #1 priority. Story came second, even graphics came second. Don’t get me wrong, I think the graphics are fantastic personally and the story is fine. But the battle system is very impressive and there are a lot of intricacies to it, and it really shows that they were willing to sacrifice other areas of the game for a stellar battle system.
The levelling system has been redesigned as well, although it’s up to your taste whether you’ll like it. You don’t actually “level” your character, instead your skills go up as you use them. For example use a lot of combat skills and they’ll become more powerful, use a lot of magic and you’ll get new spells. Do a lot of physical attacks and your strength / attack power will go up, get hit a lot and your HP will go up. Etc. Again, some people will like this and some won’t, I personally get a sense of satisfaction about hearing that ding every time I raise a level, and keeping track of how much more exp I need to get there, but I can live with this system, it’s not that bad once you get used to it. One interesting aspect of it is that it really requires your characters to specialize, since you want to get access to the more powerful techniques you have to keep using that same type of technique over and over, and using some other type of technique will delay you getting the stronger ones from the original category.
The slowdown and stuttering that everyone talks about is indeed an issue, but one that I hardly notice. It’s completely forgivable as far as I’m concerned and it doesn’t interfere with my enjoyment of the game at all, period. And that’s with the disc in the drive, if you install it to the hard drive it may be even less of an issue.
The main complaints I have about this game are as follows:
- Exploration has been eliminated. I like the fact that I can go anywhere I want, whenever I want in an RPG. This game doesn’t have that. The second you accept a quest, you are teleported to the dungeon / place where the quest takes place instantly. This is just weird, is it really that hard for me to walk there? A side effect of this is that you usually only have one quest active at once.
- Travel is instantaneous. Again I like walking, or taking a boat or something. Opening a map and just clicking something and bam I’m there takes away from the nostalgia feel, makes me lose sense of how big and expansive the world is. You can still travel to any previously visited place at any time, even if for example a bunch of people join your party and yell “We must get to Elysion with haste, Rush let’s go now!” You can still take your entire party and travel around to lots of previously visted places. In fact doing this you might find a few secrets 
But nevertheless, it also makes the game feel more linear that no matter how far away something is, you can get there instantly.
That’s pretty much it. If you’re an RPG fan, if you can accept this game for what it is, I think you’ll find it to be of good quality.
Okay… first of all, I read reviews before purchasing this game. BUT, I’m a huge RPG buff, so the positive I had read/seen about it outweighed the negative.
I’ve only had the game for about a week and a half, but I’ve played it quite a bit. YES, it does have some technical issues. It graphically lags a bit when super fancy-schmancy effects are processed. So they used the Unreal engine and hadn’t perfected said use… big deal. AS LONG AS YOU INSTALL IT ONTO YOUR HARD DRIVE, none of the load screens or technical issues really become that big of a deal.
All that aside, the voice acting is pretty freakin awesome if you ask me. The rest of it plays much like any of the more recent Final Fantasy series, but it feels a little different. Most notable are the combat system (A combination of old-school turn-based and a tactics-type system, with a hint of nutmeg), the item customization system (It’s pretty ridiculous… in a good way), and the treasure digging system! Heck yes, it’s almost like a little mini-game-type nugget that you pick up early on and take with you throughout areas that you explore.
The only problem I’ve had so far was that my party seemed SO INCREDIBLY WEAK early on (once you reach a point at which Rush ventures off on his own for a bit). It was taking me forever to fight anything or get through areas, and I had to take enemies on in as few numbers as possible. It was later that I realized how to put additional party members into a union. It’s MUCH better after that, haha. But that’s what I get for not reading the manual.
Honestly, so far, My only complaint (other than that, ideally, there shouldn’t be any problems, really, with graphical lag) is that in the morale system, you get a severe detriment to morale if an enemy engages you before you can initiate combat yourself, BUT, there’s ABSOLUTELY no way for you to gain any advantage on an enemy. It’s either starting at 50/50, or 75-25 in the enemy’s favor. Unless, of course, I just haven’t gotten that far yet… But, even so, it should be accessible already. It’s fairly difficult to sneak up on an enemy…
If ya like RPGs, and you especially like them with an extra dose of strategy, then go ahead and snag this one ^_^
Oy! I read the reviews and decided to buy this game. I put in 25 hours and got probably a quarter of the way through and got bored. The story seemed good and the graphics are great, but the battle system and growth system don’t engage you. I like rpgs for growing my characters. This game takes that away from you. Growing Mr. Diggs, the side character, was more fun. Here are my problems, which made the game slow and boring:
1) Battles – no control. Concept of unions is cool in order to get a bunch of characters into a fight. It gets old when you can only really select four general commands, which are random. Usually, you end up with the same commands over and over again, which makes it difficult to work up experience in other areas, such as healing, which rarely comes up
2) Experience – you don’t really gain experience, you gain HP separately, AP separately, strength separately, etc. After a while, you have no idea who is growing what.
3) Speed – I loaded this game on my hard drive and the battle load time is still slow (about 10 seconds). Given that the battles are boring and you do about 50-100 per area, you really start to waste a lot of time for nothing new per battle.
That’s my beef with the game. At the end of the day, you spend 95% of the time battling, as one review put it, and the battling/leveling up system isn’t interesting. The game tries to engage you by having you hit buttons at the right time, which to me sounds like the developer’s solution to making it more interesting after they realized that they’d spent a ton of money on a game that turned out to be boring in its main aspect.
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