Hideo Kojima has shaken Japanese game development. At TGS 08, he made the controversial statement that Japan was trailing behind Western output in terms of the technology and overall quality of games. Such hard hitting news has brought a predictable knee-jerk reaction from Japan’s most prolific development studio, Square Enix, in the form of this Westernised RPG: The Last Remnant. What’s immediately striking about this game is how Western it appears visually. The Last Remnant’s RPG foundations are built upon Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, most recently used to render action-oriented shooting games such as, obviously, Unreal Tournament 3, but also Gears of War 2 and the recent entry in the long running Turok series. Consequently, The Last Remnant is more akin to these games than it is to the kind of RPG that Square Enix are renowned for.
The game’s emphasis on combat is designed to appeal to a more Western audience, threatening to undermine the more subtle RPG tendencies that it has to offer. The battle system is different to that found in the Final Fantasy games. Instead of being a purely turn-based affair, it delegates your control to a single leader over your team, allowing your soldiers to behave realistically in battle. The modification of this traditional aspect of Square Enix’s RPG genre has both good and bad points. To its credit, the battle system produces a heightened sense of realism: allies and enemies don’t simply stand on the battlefield, waiting for their turn to attack. They act and react in a believable manner, affected by the morale that changes according to how the enemy is fighting and how you, as the leader, choose to fight back. This, coupled with the immense number of soldiers in your team on-screen at once, (up to seventy in total), gives The Last Remnant a suitably epic feel, reminiscent of the historical Total War series famous in the West. Also, the game does away completely with random battles: those often frustrating and pointless encounters which get in the way of the combat you actually want to engage in. This further streamlines the battles in the game, getting you straight into the user-friendly and impressive-looking action that they offer.
Unfortunately, in creating a game based on the assumption that by design it can be more appealing to the West, Square Enix have ventured into unfamiliar territory. By diluting their traditional RPG experience with an action-oriented flavor, some of the battle system elements in the game don’t quite work as well as others. For example, they’ve included the rather odious Quick Time Event, a system where killing an enemy is ensured merely by repeating a series of on-screen button presses against the backdrop of a flashy movie showing your character kicking butt. As with all the Western titles which have included them such as Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Quick Time Events are repetitive and a poor substitute for actually taking on the enemy without derivative button-pressing aid. The graphics, while impressive and familiar to gamers not acquainted with Japanese RPGs, do put a little strain on the action. The frame rate sometimes dips when the battlefield gets hectic, and there’s some scenic pop-up in the more expansive environments.
It seems that Square Enix aren’t as comfortable or familiar with the ins-and-outs of the Unreal 3 engine as its creators, Epic, are. Because of this, The Last Remnant often feels like a traditional Japanese RPG awkwardly and indignantly shoehorned into Western clothing and custom. It’s perhaps a little too Western, discarding its Japanese heritage for the sake of selling well. For example, the game world is too Tolkien-esq, retaining little of the charm and humor that made the Final Fantasy games so appealing. The fights are gritty, and the characters overwrought and po-faced. This might fit the tastes of some adventure fanatics, but the overall result is hidden too easily amongst the piles of competent yet overly familiar Western games it apes. While it does take some positive (and unfortunately, negative) elements from these games in revising its battle system, there are some drawbacks which exist beyond the technicalities of gameplay.
The characters seem to be stuck in a generic post Final Fantasy VII narrative. All the typical features are present: the angst-ridden hero setting out to defeat an evil empire whose leader he has some strange connection to, his undergoing of the obligatory search for mystical artefacts which will bring balance to the world. Perhaps it’s here where Square Enix should have taken inspiration from Western RPGs, specifically ones like Bioware’s Mass Effect, rather than stick to its own tired storytelling.
There’s nothing particularly bad about The Last Remnant. Despite its flaws, it does remain a competent, if unremarkable RPG. Square Enix have endowed it with their distinctly Japanese artwork and monster designs, which have always stood out in their games. However, that’s really their only distinct mark on The Last Remnant. Everything else is designed to appease the mass tastes of the West rather than their own multinational hardcore RPG fanatics, and due to this the game seems rushed in time for the ultimate Western tradition: the Christmas games rush.
