The Last Remnant

The Last Remnant is a game I wanted to like. If you like turn-based role-playing games, you probably will want to like it too. The longer you play it, though, the less appetizing it becomes. The Last Remnant is a game that falls short in nearly every way it can. While playing I occasionally found myself having fun, only to run into frustration, technical flaws, and confused game design. This is not a good JRPG.

The Last Remnant tells the tale of Rush Sykes, a young man who witnesses his sister’s kidnapping. Rather than ask his researcher parents for help, he sets off to save her himself. In this world of monsters and mystical remnants of a lost civilization, that can prove to be a perilous task indeed. As the game progresses, you’ll learn that this is much more than a simple kidnapping for ransom. Rush and his sister have a special significance.

The problems begin with technical issues. Simply put, The Last Remnant is a coding disaster. Square Enix may have licensed the Unreal Engine 3, the same tools used to make Gears of War, but the developers clearly did not know how to use it. There are such serious framerate issues during combat that what you see on your television sometimes resembles a slideshow. It sullies the entire experience and can even get in the way of gameplay since The Last Remnant has a critical system that requires you to perform timed button presses. The trouble continues with loading, which is laborious given the number of times you go in and out of a fight or change rooms. Once it does get loaded, you’ll find awkward texture pop-in which can hurt the visual fidelity of cutscenes and kill any power or emotions they might convey.