The Last Remnant came out in 2008, which was rather early in the HD console era. Blue Dragon had been released in 2006, but Final Fantasy XIII was still over a year away. The Last Remnant was, in fact, the first Square Enix developed JRPG for an HD system.
At this time there were many speculative new JRPG franchises vying for our attention: White Knight Story from Sony/Level-5, Lost Odyssey from Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Mistwalker, Infinite Undiscovery from tri-ace, and there was also that one with the jumping and the guns — what was it called? Resonance of Fate. It was a creative period.
Square Enix were trying different things too. HD games meant higher production costs: as a direct reaction to this, Square Enix decided for the first time to use a third party engine, Unreal Engine 3, in place of something developed in-house and at greater cost.
The Last Remnant was the first Square Enix game to release in the east and west simultaneously. It was also the first for which mouth animations were synced to the English, not Japanese, voice actors. For these reasons and others, it’s easy to see The Last Remnant as a guinea-pig project, used to test the water for some ambitious future plans. If so, this attitude carried over to the gameplay as well.
The game has been released in three, somewhat distinct forms: The Last Remnant for XBox 360; The Last Remnant for PC, which rebalanced things somewhat dramatically; ad The Last Remnant for PS4, remastered for Unreal Engine 4.
The original XBox 360 release had a lukewarm reception. Today it is still considered the worst way to play the game. In additional to the technical issues (no doubt resulting from Square’s unfamiliarity with Unreal Engine), the most damning and lasting complaint is that grinding out fights can result in over-scaled enemies and potentially unwinnable scenarios. Both this and the technical problems were fixed for the PC version.
Perhaps these are the reasons The Last Remnant hasn’t enjoyed the popularity and sequels it deserves — or perhaps it was just too different to what people were used to. The director of The Last Remnant, Hiroshi Takai, came from working on the Romancing SaGa series, which played differently to the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quests games more of us are familiar with. Perhaps SaGa players were more comfortable gaining new skills based on how much you use them, stats increasing individually following a battle rather than during a level up, and having less guidance in where to travel to next. But I don’t think anyone was prepared for the matrix of numbers and jargon they are hit with during their first battle, which Takai himself describes as dense, confusing and overwhelming for players.
Beyond the middling reviews, baffling battle displays, graphical glitches, and even beyond an uninspiring main character, some players pressed on. Perhaps, like me, they had seen the trailer and considered Yusuke Naora’s invigorating character designs too exceptional to give up on. Or was it Nobuo Uematsu’s stellar soundtrack, one of his best, that inspired them to keep going?
Those who did found that The Last Remnant does not deserve to be ignored. These are the reasons.
Reason #1: The Massive Battles
I remember when I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time. I was transfixed by the dynamic, cinematic action of the camera, that swooped and panned and zoomed. Even when you used the same attack, the camera would act differently. That felt to me like “the next level” of turn-based JRPG battles, after years of being obsessed with the 2D games which now seemed static by comparison.
If Final Fantasy VII was the next level, The Last Remnant is the next-next level. It has a similar self-directed camera, but what it brings to the table is scope. There are ten times as many characters to follow, across ten times the space, with ten times the graphical fidelity, where every swing and slash and burn is a finely tuned audio-visual treat. Moreover, now the battles develop more than ever, with new soldiers and bosses and locations introduced as they progress. All together, they are an absolute event to behold! And when you beat the enemy you’ll see your small army, all ten or fifteen or so of the assorted knights, spearman, wizards and rogues, cheering together in a barely organized crowd, and it’s a beautiful thing.
Other JRPG fights are described as battles, but they are really fights, brawls and scuffles — your party of up to five versus a few monsters. The Last Remnant earns the description of “battle”: encounters with many groups of monsters where each group of your own characters is a whole party of its own.
Doesn’t that just feel more appropriate for a JRPG, with their storylines of epic scale? Warring nations, powerful evils, discoveries of ancient civilizations. There seem to be a lot of “ragtag bands” taking up jobs that a military platoon could deal with much more effectively. Other JRPGs, like Suikoden, do make you feel like you’re rallying an army. But The Last Remnant makes you feel like you’re fighting with one.
What about the battle system itself?
It wasn’t until the end of the first disk (the game was divided into two disks in the original 360 release) that I started to understand what a great system Square had come up with. The last boss of the disk is a buff dude with a hammer, Jager, a giant fire moth, and some groups of bandits. It took me third or four tries, but when I beat them I was thinking “Wow, that was a surprisingly tactical fight!”
What do I mean by tactical? Well, on the first attempt I got absolutely wrecked, and thought I must just be underleveled. But I kept trying the fight, and just by changing my team composition I was able to turn an utterly impossible looking situation into something not too tough. The trick was having the right number of groups of the right size to kill the underlings quickly, giving a boost to your morale that helps you survive against the hammer guy and moth. Three large units didn’t work, because though you did a lot of damage you couldn’t hit enough targets at once, leaving too many enemies to overwhelm you. Five small units didn’t kill the enemy units quickly enough, but four worked nicely.
This opportunity to out-think the fight rather than out-level it is what makes it strategic. In many JRPGs, you go in underleveled, or you go in overleveled, but what you can do in terms of tactics to bridge the gap is limited. That’s why this discovery pleasantly surprised me.
That isn’t all this game has to offer. As alluded to above, you don’t have exact control over your units. You choose which enemy group you want to attack and an indication of how you want to attack them, but the specific moves that your units will attempt is chosen randomly, or semi-randomly, by the game. This random element makes decisions in battle more interesting, resulting in one of most common tough decisions in battles: do you attack the enemy group that is most threatening and perhaps puts your group in the best position on the battlefield, OR do you instead choose to attack a suboptimal group because you rolled more useful or powerful attacks against that group?
You also get a bonus for attacking enemies that are engaged with another group (ie. flanking them), but leaving yourself open to flanking or breaking an engagement with an enemy is risky. How does that change your decision? What about if you want to train a weaker skill instead of using a more powerful one? It’s not always easy! There are often good arguments for more than one choice. There are long term vs. short term options. There are risky vs. safe options. And which you decide on really can change the outcome of the battle.
How about this: in many JRPGs the muscle of your party rely on a boring, standard “Attack” command, but in The Last Remnant there are almost as many physical “combat arts” as offensive magical attacks. Each has its own AP cost, attack type modifier, strength/technique modifier, and level based on how often it is used. Each is learned at a different rates, semi-randomly. This makes for a far more interesting battle system then one where you can rely on “Attack”. It also creates the interesting situation where different combat arts are better suited to different characters. One party member will do their maximum damage with a “Peerless Cascade Strike V”, and another with the same role in the team will do similar damage if he uses “Swift Dragon Tail IV” (the “Swift” part meaning the attack gets a bonus based on the character’s speed instead of their strength). This means a) more character building strategy, and b) more flavor to your characters.
I have to say, though, that very little of this is explained well in-game. Your first battle in this game will be a baffling deluge of menus, numbers, HUD elements, terminology (Deadlock, Multi-Deadlock, Raidlock?) — not to mention an unintuitive sense of space: groups and characters seem to teleport around the battleground between camera transitions and this takes some getting used to as much as the battle mechanics do. But there are no in-game tutorials or guides, and even if you look it up online there are elements of the game (such as the entirely unexplained unique stats for hero characters, like Torgal’s “Management” stat and Emmy’s “Love” stat”) which still don’t seem to be understood!
It’s a massive shame, because once you “get it”, this is a VERY satisfying battle system.
Reason #1.1 This Battle Music
Reason #2: The Places I Want To Return To
After battles, this game’s second most obvious attraction is the beauty of the world it takes place in.
Take the towns. Heartwarming, mystifying, evocative towns and cities are a staple of the JRPG genre. When games like FFXIII broke tradition and took them away fans felt homesick. The Last Remnant, on the other hand, knows what side it’s bread is buttered. It has towns, and it does them really, really well. The towns here feel exactly like we want them to feel. They are comfy and inviting but also epic. They feel like places that humans — or “Mitra”, I should say, as well as Yama, Quisti, and Sovani — really live in. NPCs look to be going about their business. This, and lots of other visual details say “this city wasn’t built for the player: he is just visiting”.
Every city has consistent threads that tie it to the world-as-a-whole, such as the titular remnants, giant mystifying structures that dominate each city’s skyline. But each city is also distinct, and indeed the diversity of atmosphere and architecture is outstanding. They are big, they are small, they are prosperous and poor, and they exist in every type of environment from desert to wetlands. They feel expansive: beyond the places the player can walk, the streets and the people on them continue, stretch onwards into the distance. Some locations, like the dramatic circular stone walkways of the Balterossa spirale markets, are hard to leave, simply because they are so nice to walk around in. You feel like a world-tourist, in the best possible way.
When I enter one of the game’s inns — Pub Drachenhauch in Nagapur, or The Babbling Brook in Melphine — I feel almost as if I could sit down in the chairs. The locals are unwinding, or having animated conversations at the tables.
It would be nice if each pub had a unique layout. The diversity of the cities are not reflected by the interior spaces, but that’s only a small shame. Another thing I would add, in an imaginary The Last Remnant sequel, is that people you know (quest givers, the bar staff, party members who wait in the pub) would wave at you, beckon you over, say hello and invite you to a drink before you talk to them — things that make you feel like you’re a part of the pub environment, rather than just an observer.
That’s the sort of development I would want from JRPGs in the future, rather than removing towns altogether.
The quality of city design on display here is comparable to that of Mass Effect and Final Fantasy XII, both of which I consider to be exemplars. My main complaint with Rabanastre in Final Fantasy XIII is that it is perhaps a little too sprawling. Walking the long lengths of those many streets leaves an impression, but at the expense of convenience. Cities in The Last Remnant feel big and bustling, but the traversable space is actually much, much smaller, You also have the option to warp around a bit, saving some time. I wouldn’t say one approach is better than the other, and I’d say there is probably an even better balance in the middle, but that’s the difference as I see it.
On the topic of FFXII, the streets of Elysion do share a certain character with those of Rabanastre. So to do the the fives races in this game have parallels to those of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Fans of the Ivalice games will be comfy here — The Last Remnant is both original and familiar.
Reason #2.1 This town music
Reason #3 Exploration
Exploring the world takes place mainly on two levels: first, the fields, dungeons and towns that you job around and fight enemies in; and the map screen, a menu which takes you to those aforementioned areas. As you find new exits from the field and dungeon levels, new options will appear on the map screen.
The Last Remnant has a moderately high level of exploration freedom for a JRPG. You often aren’t told how to find the next key town — it’s down to you look look around the levels available to you and find the right path. You might end up at towns that you aren’t required to visit at all, or dungeon that are used just for sidequests. I appreciate being allowed a hand on the reigns. When you find a new area on the world map, it means something to you. It’s exiting. There is a palpable sense of adventure.
Another way to find new areas in this game is talking to townsfolk. Sometimes, even a nondescript stranger will give you a useful hint that will unlock a new area of the map. Giving seemingly minor conversations this level of importance can make talking to people more exciting, as if each chat with an NPC is a new room in a dungeon and you don’t know what it could lead to.
(This made me realise something: if all important conversations are highlighted with an exclamation mark, there is much less fun in talking to other NPCs. Yes, quest givers in The Last Remnant are still highlighted with an icon, but these aren’t the only people worth talking to. There is plenty of filler text, but I was happy with the overall result.)
As for the levels themselves, there are a few things worth saying. First, each time you enter a level, your minimap is empty, but evey level has a map hidden in one of the chests. This awakens you and urges you onwards owing to that reliable little Zelda-esque hook of “got to find the map”. It’s simple but effective and satisfying.
I wish the levels were like Zelda dungeons in other ways too, with puzzles and smart layouts, but unfortunately the level design in The Last Remnant is universally bland, most levels functioning as generic caves with branching tunnels and the odd open space. Some levels have unique obstacles (pulley lifts, moving platforms, befuddling mists) which only make things worse as they slow you down without challenging you in any interesting way. There are no puzzles and whatever hidden treasure is to be found is without fail unexceptional. The worst level design in the game by far is Numor Mines l2. That. Fucking. Elevator!
The roaming monsters make up for the level design a little, leading to slightly more interesting situations that you would get in the average JRPG dungeon. Monsters come in a variety of sizes and some are faster than others or move in unique ways (birds are slightly faster than the hero, and eyeballs teleport around erratically). Most will chase you though some are stationary. If you get into a fight with others monsters in close proximity, they will all join the battle. You can find yourself trying to dodge around diverse packs of predators to avoid a dangerous fight. It’s nothing Earthbound didn’t do in 1995, but it’s better than the standard.
There is also a mechanic where you can throw out a circle around you to capture multiple enemies in one battle. The bigger the fight the better the item drop rate. I don’t know what the first JRPG was to turn the roaming monsters in the field in to a bit of a game in itself, but this is a well executed example, if simple. We’ve now moved past the age of random encounters and I think increasingly in JRPGs these field mechanics will dictate part of our enjoyment of a game.
This liveliness in the monster ecosystem makes up somewhat for the dull level design, and you’ll be excited to find new areas just to see what new monsters they bring. This is tied closely to my next point.
Reason #4 The Item-Game
AKA How Can Grinding For Animal Teeth Be This Addictive?
All JRPGs are designed to be compulsive, but the The Last Remnant captured me more than any other game has for years
A big part of improving your squad is searching out the materials they need to upgrade their equipment. Rush’s weapons can be upgraded directly, but things get a bit weird when we look at the process of strengthening the equipment for his comrades. Though they have equipment slots and inventories like Rush, you can’t just hop into a menu and equip them with a more powerful weapon. Rather, they will take loot after a battle and when they have enough materials they will upgrade their weapon themselves.
Most of your effectiveness comes from the stats of your weapon, not your level. This changes the sort of grinding you have to do — for materials, not levels — and even makes it feel less like grinding. You choose to go to a particular location for a particular type of item. You can feel like a hunter stocking up, preparing yourself for the battle, rather than a dupe meeting the requirements of a level-gate. It’s deliberate, not arbitrary. You go to the plains where the Vile Plants live because you know the Vile Plant Branch is what your monk needs to craft a new hat. It’s not complex, but it’s engaging, and doesn’t bore or nauseate me in the way that grinding for EXP does.
This is true even though the ironically named main character, Rush, moves at cripple-speed. The game is objectively slow, but it still keeps my attention, and that says a huge amount.
Components are mostly got from winning battles, but some (grasses, ores, flowers, gems, that sort of thing) come from harvesting. Using a harvest point is a simple matter of “select-and-get”, as simple as it could be. But what it has to make up for this is a mascot character called Mr. Diggs.
I wouldn’t have enjoyed gathering nearly as much without the Mr Diggs. He’s the cutesy part of this game — like Final Fantasy has Moogles, Tales has Katz and Normins, The Last Remnant has Mr Diggs. Perhaps that evidence of the game trying to appeal to western tastes, because while Moogles are everywhere in Final Fantasy, Mr. Diggs is the only cutsey part of The Last Remnant, and his appearances are is contained to the gathering portions of the game. The most tedious mechanic of the game is given a little excess of personality to make it more bearable (I guess that’s good design, in a sense). If The Last Remnant has been more popular, maybe Mr Diggs would have gotten his own spin off game. I think he deserves it.
Back to the monster drops, though.
Between those you get from battles and those you get from harvesting, are TONS of components in this game. Hundreds, easily, possibly over a thousand. Each monster has common, uncommon, rare and very rare drops, plus there are additional items for “splitting” the monster after “catching it”, PLUS items that can only be dropped by the monster if you have obtained the “magazine” for that monster type
Here’s one GameFAQs poster bemoaning the system:
ok, lets say you need a Thick Treant Branch. You look em up on the wikia, and see most treants drop em. but you need the daily or weekly
so you look up the Treant Weekly and you read this “TheTreant Weekly improves the drops for all monsters of the Treant Family. You can get it by completing the task 57 of the union of the golden chalice guild.”
then you look up task 57 of union of the golden chalice guild.
“Requires Rank 5” “after underwalt” create Divine Francisca.
alright first you need to get Rank 5 of the guild to get that you must first get rank 1, rank 2, rank 3, rank 4 and eventually rank 5
then you look up on how to improve your rank
rank 1 — kill Dominator (found in Blackdale)
rank 2 — kill Prometheus(found in Lavavender)
rank 3 — kill Ore Cruncher (found in Numor Mine)
rank 4 — kill Death Tank (found in Aqueducts)
rank 5 — kill 2x Brynhildr (Mt. Vackel/Ancient Ruins)
…
it just keeps on going and going. to do this, you need that, to get that, you need to get this, to get this, you need to get that to get that you need item X to get item X you need item Y
It’s an endless chain I tell you!
all this just to get a Thick Treant Branch
What I found most frustrating about the system is that for all these hundreds of components, there is no encyclopedia. If you have one of a component in your inventory, but you need two, you’ve got no way of looking up where you got the first one without turning to the internet. And when a party member says they want a component to upgrade their weapon, let’s say it is a War Dragon Talon, you’ve got not way of knowing if that is dropped by a Dragon, Brynhildr or Abelisk… or is a different type of dragon you haven’t even encountered yet? And even beyond that, you don’t know if you need a magazine in order for one of those dragons to drop the item anyway — if it isn’t dropping, is it just bad luck or do you need the magazine? — and if you do need the magazine, do you need the daily magazine or the weekly one? With all these questions, it is maddening that there is no in-game reference for the components and the monsters that drop them.
So, yes, are times I have found the game hopelessly obtuse, bloated, frustrating, and time-wasting. But there are also times that it flows so well this component grind is the main reason I’m playing and enjoying the game! And I forget entirely why I ever thought there was a problem with it! When things are moving forward it is one of the most addictive grinding systems out there.
Every time you find a new area, you are excited because you know you’ll find new components (both from harvesting at new spots and from the new monsters you’ll be able to fight). You know there is the chance that in the new area you’ll finally find the component you need to upgrade your weapon or the component your companion has been nagging you about for three hours now. The monsters and components you will find might also allow you to complete guild tasks. Quests give you rewards including magazines, which unlock the ability to farm MORE rare components. You get Fenris Weekly and remember that your teammate needs a Fenris fang to upgrade their weapon.
I think this works because:
- This game can be pretty damn punishing, so every weapon upgrade is welcome.
- The components you need to get these upgrades are teased, or foreshadowed, by the requests that your teammates make.
- Finding a new area is not a guarantee you will get to upgrade your weapons. It’s a CHANCE that you’ll find the components you will need. Each new area is full of potential.
- Even if you don’t get the specific components you need right now, you’re sure to find something new in the new area anyway. Those new items might be something you need later. Every component is filled with potential too, even if you don’t yet know what it’s for.
I usually make a conscious effort not to get too occupied by the grinding side of videogames, but The Last Remnant make it easy for me to turn into a compulsive component snatcher, and I have to respect a game that gets its claws into me in this way.
Reason #5 The Characters/Unique Leaders
Lots of JRPGs make gathering a party a central theme, but there is no other game that makes me feel like Griffith from Beserk establishing and leading the Band of the Falcon.
You have 15 active character slots to fill by the end of the game. You can fill them with cookie-cutter troops if you have to, but what you really want to be looking for are the unique leaders. These are characters with their own portrait, backstory, voice-acting and sidequests. There are about thirty of them in the game. Each fan of The Last Remnant has their favourites. Caedmon gets a lot of love. Personally, I like Glenys. But unless you’re following a guide you won’t find them all, perhaps not even many of them, so if you see a YouTube of somebody else playing the game you bound to be filled with envy because they have a cool looking character that you don’t. You can’t avoid itl because all of the unique characters look cool!
Collecting as many unique characters gives me a feel a bit like catching Pokemon, or perhaps more like getting all the characters in Suikoden. Then when you battle with them, you form a real attachment.
You put these characters into “units”, three to five of them per unit. Perhaps this is just me, but I find I have a sort of enhanced emotional reaction to seeing these characters fight together in groups, as opposed to how it works in other JRPGs . It’s easy imagine the characters that fight together in a group regularly have a closer relationship. They have each other’s backs; they would become war buddies. You don’t get that in Final Fantasy, where the number of characters you have out at one time is set by the game, you have less choice in who fights together, and the other half of your forces are invisible in the background, which feels contrived.
Before long you have you have gathered a band of strong-willed individuals, you’ve intentionally arranged them into groups with particular fighting roles, and you’ve watched them kick up dust and spill blood together on the battlefield, and you really do feel like the commanding badass of it all.
This is only enhanced by the theme of indirect control of these characters that is consistent from the game’s battle to how it handles upgrading weapons. As already explained, you don’t choose specific actions for every soldier in battle, but broad orders for the group — it is as if the specific attacks are chosen by the characters themselves.
When it comes to improving your party members, you again don’t dictate their path. Instead, they will ask you for certain upgrade materials for their weapons, or ask you if they should learn one skill or another.
As a result of these choices, you get you a slightly greater feeling of members of your party being living characters, as you can’t control them like puppets. They have their own wants and preferences.
(The choice may have been inspired by Dragon Quest IV’s battles, where you have control over the hero but not the secondary characters, but in that game you still have complete control of other character’s equipment. I can’t think of other games that take that away from you. How it is handled in The Last Remnant feels unique)
The only thing that is frustrating is that pretty much every character you come across, whether in the story or an optional unique leader, is ten times cooler than the drippy main character you are stuck following for the whole game. I’ll get to that in another article.
Conclusion
The Last Remnant is a weird game, aesthetically and mechanically. It tried to have worldwide appeal, but all things considered, I’m not surprised we never saw a Last Remnant II. It was too Japanese to appeal in the west and too different to what the Japanese are used to to appeal to the Japanese!
But I don’t think it deserves to be ignored. Those of us that stuck with it were rewarded with a unique experience that has never been matched or mimicked. Perhaps that is why there was an appetite for The Last Remnant Remastered, released recently, 12 years later.
