 |
|
9.0 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
THE LAST REMNANT Posted by Dan Pearson on Dec 2, 2008 16:39 (Dec 2, 2008 16:39) |
||||||||||||||||
The mighty story-tellers Square Enix are back, with yet another massive tale of war and relationships, but does The Last Remnant fare any better than the previous titles.
The Last Remnant introduces us to Rush, a young lad who lives on a small island with his sister in relative seclusion. His parents are scientists carrying out work on Remnants, swords that feel from the sky years ago, they vary in size from small classic sword size to the size of a skyscraper, each one is able to grant power to the ones who can control them, be they good or evil. Just before Rush and his sister Irina leave the island to meet up with their parents Irina is kidnapped by a strange being. Rush then takes off in the direction of the beast. On his journey he stumbles onto a huge battlefield and meets up with Emma Honeywell, a General of Athlum and David Nassau, ruler of Athlum, who then join him on this huge 2 disc quest.
 Story-wise there is nothing really much new here to offer, the usual little known character begins to learn new and more impressive powers during the massive journey as well as meeting up with all sorts of people. Whilst this game will be what you have come to expect from Square Enix there are a few changes to the tried and tested formula that make this game stand out a bit more. First off is rather than blindly walking into fights (turn-based of course) the monsters and enemies are shown on the game map, as you approach them they will show if they are alert or unaware, here you may be able to spring a surprise attack on them and gain a very helpful advantage.
The next and the largest difference is in the fighting, in particular the groups, classic games have you meet more people and then you will take turns in using them and their respective moves, navigating huge menus to select a certain type of magic or move, however in Last Remnant you have up to five characters (units) who form unions. To start you will control only one union but as you progress you can get more people including leaders and members from local armies to boost your ranks and control loads of unions at once.
The fighting is slightly different in that you choose from a preselected group of commands like mystic arts or combat arts, they will then just go into battle, or at certain times “a give it all you’ve got” command will come up, allowing the units to use their best moves on offer. This idea makes the battles more streamline, especially when you have numerous unions to control in one battle.
 Graphically the monsters and characters are really impressive, the larger ones are really imposing and there is an interesting range of characters out there including the four armed race Sovani and the small rodent like Qsiti, but the Xbox seems to struggle sometimes as there are a few moments when there is quite a bit of slowdown on the battles, even on the smaller scale ones, where the textures will take a extra few seconds to load on each intro to a battle, leaving a rather bland looking screen until it kicks off in full.
My other gripe is the pacing, it takes a while to get you into the game, the tutorials and explanations on how to use menus is helpful but the game really comes into its own after a good few hours of play. Once you have got past most of the introductions and onto the bigger battles this game really works and becomes one of the better turn based adventure games on the market.
If you love this sort of game, Last Remnant is very different and you will enjoy it, if you are new to the genre though then you are probably best to start off with one of the more widely known titles like Final Fantasy, which are a bit more user friendly.
|
||||||||||||||||
 |
Comments |  |
