You’d be forgiven if, when watching the surprise announcement of The Last Remnant Remastered coming to Switch, your first thought was “What?” Though the The Last Remnant has largely been forgotten in the current gaming industry, it once hopefully represented the future of Square Enix, with the president of the legendary company even describing it prior to release as the “cornerstone” of their entire global strategy. The Last Remnant was one of the first major releases from Square Enix on HD consoles (beating Final Fantasy to the punch by a couple years) and it was also the first title simultaneously released worldwide from the company. From its conception, it was ambitiously designed to be a project that would appeal to the cultural interests of both the east and the west. By all counts, The Last Remnant was supposed to be a smash hit that would change the industry forever, but after being met with lukewarm reception and low sales, it fizzled out with barely a whimper and was swept under the rug.
All of this is to say, it was rather strange when Square Enix decided to remaster a game few asked for and put it out on the PS4 this past winter, and that re-release did little to rekindle interest in the ill-fated IP. Now it’s found its way to the Switch (perhaps out of some last-ditch effort to get audiences interested) and while it isn’t nearly as bad as some may make it out to be, The Last Remnant Remastered proves to be too inconsistent an experience to rise to greatness. There are some great ideas here, and it deserves to be commended for the effort it put into breaking genre conventions, but the final product just never ties together all these cool ideas in a meaningful way.
The story is set in a high-fantasy world of warring city-states in which humans and many animal-inspired races coexist, though none of these other races have histories that are all that fleshed out. Our main hero is Rush Sykes, a naïve boy whose parents are researchers at an academy that studies Remnants, powerful magical artefacts typically used in battle by various city-states. Rush’s sister, Irina, gets spirited away by a sinister magician and his flying Remnant, and Rush enlists the help of David, the Marquis of a nearby city-state, and his posse. What starts as a simple quest to retrieve Rush’s lost sister quickly snowballs into a much larger conflict with a mysterious antagonist named “The Conqueror” over the fate of the world and the source of the remnants scattered throughout.
As far as JRPG stories go, the plot of The Last Remnant Remastered is about as ‘okay’ as it gets, featuring a wealth of clichés and predictable plot points that are all par for the course. Writing and characterization is all over the place throughout, too, with Rush coming off as a rather unlikable idiot and many of the main secondary characters having few defining traits to make them memorable. This is all capped off by the hit-or-miss voice acting, which can lead to some unintentionally comical scenes with uncomfortably long pauses between characters that are supposed to be having ‘natural’ conversations. You’ll likely reach the end of this one satisfied with how the story went, but we didn’t find ourselves wishing to hear more stories set around these characters or the overall world. For a game that was supposed to boldly launch a new direction for Square Enix, it’s rather disappointing that the plot turned out so ho-hum.
Luckily, the SRPG-like battle system proves to be a far more memorable element of The Last Remnant Remastered, offering up an experience that’s quite unlike anything else found in other JRPGs. Rather than taking control of a small party of three or four characters at a time, you’re placed in charge of potentially dozens at a time, which are all organized into smaller groups called “Unions”. Battles are still turn-based in nature, but place much greater emphasis on positioning and placement. For example, attacking an enemy union engaged in combat with another union will allow you to flank them and do extra damage. Strategic moves like this will then move the morale gauge at the top of the screen forward or back a certain distance, which will affect how likely your units are to block attacks and land critical hits. If you’re not careful with how you direct your units or group them, it can be all too easy for enemies to crush your morale and, in turn, your party members.
Rather than having you issue commands to each of the units individually, you put out more generalized commands to unions that encourage them to use skills in certain areas. For example, you may ask one union to use combat arts and its members will then fulfill the order to the best of their ability, with some using one of their combat arts and others just using basic attacks. Though fascinating in how unconventional it is, this system of generalized orders leads to a rather irritating flaw in the battle system.
The problem is that the orders you can offer aren’t consistent, and almost seem to be picked at random each turn. For example, two orders that typically show up each turn are those that allow you to tell your units to use combat arts or mystic arts, but sometimes one of those won’t show up in a later turn for no discernible reason. Similarly, we’ve sometimes been faced with the same order showing up twice in the same turn, with one copy being notably more effective than the other. Why is this the case? Your guess is as good as ours. Not knowing what you’ll be able to do next turn makes it difficult to plan out longer term strategies in certain battles, and proves to be frustrating in the long run.
This speaks to a much larger issue with The Last Remnant Remastered as a whole, and its utter failure to explain many of its complicated mechanics in a satisfactory way. The worst offender of this is the character progression system, which eschews the typical level-based structure of an RPG in favor of something much more esoteric and confusing. Using a weapon causes characters to learn new arts in that weapon class at random intervals, often mid-battle, and the stats they gain afterwards are seemingly handed out with no rhyme or reason whatsoever. Why did their HP rise after that fight? Why did this character change classes? What does the “Authority” stat do? What about the “Love” stat? Hopefully you have a wiki on hand, because there are no answers to be found anywhere in the game itself.
To make things even worse, The Last Remnant Remastered can count itself among the few RPGs that can actively be played wrong. See, every cleared enemy encounter causes your “Battle Rank” to slowly rise, which both allows characters to learn new arts and makes all enemies progressively stronger. You can’t lower your Battle Rank once it’s gone up, so if you happen to get a decent amount of the way into the plot and realize that you have a poorly specced team, you’re basically out of luck. Raising new characters to be on par with your older ones is a monumental task when you have to pit them against enemies that are scaled way higher than them, and it only becomes more difficult a task as it goes on due to the Battle Rank steadily rising from your grinding. Backwards as it may seem, the Battle Rank system means that you’re best served fighting as few enemies as possible until you hit a certain point where things go hard the other way and you’re best served fighting every enemy. By the way, the Battle Rank is never explained to you in-game, it’s another hugely important element of progression that’s simply left to be ‘figured out’.
There’s nothing wrong with an RPG experimenting with new progression mechanics and battle systems. In fact, it’s something to be welcomed and celebrated. But in breaking new ground, it’s inescapably important that the RPG communicates the importance and meaning of its new mechanics to the player. The Last Remnant Remastered completely ignores this; not only does it bafflingly refuse to explain hugely important aspects of its progression and battle system, but it then actively punishes you for not understanding those elements. Luckily, there’s a wealth of fan-curated online guides that explain the important points, but when you have to read a guide before playing a game due to a well-founded fear that you could very well completely and irreversibly screw yourself further down the line, something is wrong at a foundational level in the game itself.
It’s a real shame, too, because once you actually know what you’re doing, The Last Remnant Remastered can prove to be a wonderfully enjoyable experience. Battles are kept interesting by their strategic depth and the presence of occasional “Critical Trigger” moments that offer up mid-battle quick time events which can grant extra damage. Character growth is manageable and fairly customizable once you understand how various stats and class changes are triggered. Dozens of hours of side quests and several whole locations are just waiting to be experienced, if you know what steps to take before they’re permanently locked away. Under the surface, there’s a stellar RPG to be found here, it’s just all buried beneath opaque mechanics and poorly written tutorials; this is the sort of game that, if you enjoy it at all, you do so in spite of all the ways that it bizarrely tries to make itself uninteresting and confusing.
The overworld isn’t fully traversable, you instead go through a series of self-contained dungeons, cities, and semi-open environments scattered as points across the world map. Dungeon designs are about as straightforward as they come, but things are made blessedly less frustrating through the absence of random encounters. Every enemy roams the world freely, granting you the chance to avoid fights you don’t want to be in and allowing you to initiate the ones that you do. This is even turned into its own clever mechanic, where you can slow down time and ‘chain’ together several enemies, causing a more difficult fight that grants better rewards. Still, it’s a bit frustrating that most enemies don’t drop any gold, instead dropping parts that you then have to sell for gold back in town. The universal lack of direction can make it difficult to know which parts are ‘safe’ to get rid of and which will be necessary for character progression later on.
This being the remastered version of the original release, there’s plenty of quality of life changes and updates that have been made that improve on the overall experience. This port is based on the later PC release of The Last Remnant, which means that several mechanics (like that cursed Battle Rank) are made a little more forgiving and palatable, while new additions have been made to smooth out slower sections. For example, you can tap the ‘L’ button at the start of a turn in battle to drastically speed up the animations of all the fighting that follows, which shortens battle time considerably. On top of this, you can even hold the button down in the overworld to speed up traversal, a welcome feature borrowed from many of the recent Final Fantasy re-releases. This is all brought home by the enhanced graphics and presentation, which look pretty sweet whether playing docked or handheld.
A big complaint about The Last Remnant when it released was the heinous texture pop-in that made many scenes and environments feel oddly janky as they noticeably loaded in new textures. All those performance issues are gone now, and the new character models and textures have a pleasingly detailed appearance that can look surprisingly realistic in many places. This realism is made possible in large part by the impressive dynamic lighting, which draws some of the best shadows we’ve seen yet in a Switch game. Granted, the underlying structure certainly feels dated by modern standards, a lot of environments are just a bit too ‘flat’ and basic, but the environments are at least presented in the most colorful and eye-catching way possible. Compared to even the recent Final Fantasy remasters, we’d rank The Last Remnant Remastered quite favorably by its visuals.
This is all backed by a well-produced and diverse soundtrack that keeps things interesting from stem to stern. All the typically epic, sweeping tracks for overworld exploration are present and accounted for, but The Last Remnant Remastered likes to surprise every now and then with an unconventional track that takes things in an interesting direction, like the Dream Theater-esque main battle theme that incorporates plenty of hard rock elements. It’s clear that a lot of thought and time went into making this soundtrack just right and we’re thrilled at the quality of the final result here, even if we’re miffed that the same attention to quality wasn’t paid to the rest of the game.
Conclusion
The Last Remnant Remastered is the sort of game that we wish we could recommend more highly. Though it has plenty of interesting ideas, like the Union battle system and the SaGa-esque character progression, these are all so mired in obscurity and confusion that their impact is considerably lessened or nullified outright. The Last Remnant Remastered is the best ‘bad’ RPG out there; it’s a game that undeniably has some excellent qualities, but it can never manage to get out of its own way. If you can get past the hokey tutorials and confusing mechanics, The Last Remnant Remastered on the Switch stands as one of (if not the) best versions available, as the enhanced visuals and quality of life improvements are now offered alongside the ability to play on the go. We’d give this one a very light recommendation; if you’re an RPG nut and you have the mettle to get through the more frustrating entries of the genre, this is the game for you. If not, we’d recommend you take a pass.
Comments 51
Square Enix really are just releasing anything they can for quick money aren't they?
@Bunkerneath Money money money
Big props for saying "Scuppered" in the headline.
While it’s not the most brilliant JRPG out there, it’s so much more interesting that FFXIII. I do feel that the lukewarm reception to TLR made them think twice about making FFXIII anything more than it became.
It's a good game but you do need to read up on it's mechanics online to fully understand it.
$20 is a great price for it too. I have put many many hours into since it originally came out on the 360 and then on the PC.
It's irritating that we went from paper manuals to digital manuals to no manuals and game journalists don't talk about that.
I don't hate the game, but the last thing they needed to do was take the SaGa framework and make it even MORE complex.
I mainly bought it because of the low price point and nostalgia of a game I sort of remember playing years back. It's not fantastic but it will tide me over until Fire Emblem next month.
@Bunkerneath This is one of those Xbox exclusive games where square kicked off the "I guess Xbox owners don't like RPGs" stereotypes.
Xbox: Nah, we just don't like bad RPGs.
Square: We'll release it on Playstation & Nintendo, they'll appreciate it.
PS&NES: This sucks
Square: It's because it's an old Xbox game, we shouldn't put games there anymore.
Though the game is not that great it certainly is enjoyable from time to time. I have a feeling more obscure RPGs like this will continue to come as long as Switch is selling. Last year a remastered of a meh RPG from Tri-Ace also got released exclusively for PS4 and PC called Resonance of Fate 4K / HD Edition. Almost no one bother to review it except Destructoid and gave it the same score as this. I had a feeling that same game will land on the Switch someday too in an attempt to at least get a few bucks from Switch owners who hadn't try it.
Do not forget score Pokémon Sword/Shield a 13/10
"To make things even worse, The Last Remnant Remastered can count itself among the few RPGs that can actively be played wrong"
I dont know man, it was a standard thing when true RPGs were released
"5" sounds just About right.
Been sitting in my Steam account for ages now - tedious and boring would sum it up for me.
Nice, detailed review. The game sounds like a pain, unfortunately, so I'll be passing on it.
@nessisonett Doubtful. FFXII is a genuinely fantastic JRPG... one of S-E's best that generation.
@BlackenedHalo the only one I remember is FF VIII. Apart from it you can not be great at the game but if you find you level up and you're happy when you beat that boss
Thank you for that review. Will remove it from the wishlist... There are two many good JRPG to spend time on broken mechanics
You're the man @SwitchVogel when it comes to RPG reviews. Always a good read.
For me its a solid 7, but im a geek for this kind of games I understand and can agree with the 5.
But in my opinion its better then for example FF xII
Square Enix were in their hibernation season for most of the 7th gen.
I'm really surprised to see the 5 honestly, because I feel like this site has a tendency to inflate scores. This game was broken in a lot of ways on initial release, and I gave it up because of that, but I've been playing through it on my switch for the past week now and really enjoying it. It's not amazing, but it does enough things well , and I like the battle/progression system. Solid 7 in my opinion.
Well i guess i can take it off my wishlist as there's no need to wait for a sell know.
5 it's so low. 7 for me. But..... there's one thing that I hate a lot of this game: where is the Japanese voices??? Really only English? Jrpg must be played in Japanese
What? a 5, To be honest that score does not reflect that game... If you have ever played Arc Rise Fantasia on Wii, then its along those lines of enjoyment not bad actually.
@tr573 totally agree on 7
@Ralizah Typo hahaha I meant XIII, I played XII recently and loved it. I’ll fix it now
@Xelha freaking curse. Then your union leader goes down and you have to wait for the rest of them to get slaughtered for a resurrection. Luck of the draw!
I do like this game and I enjoyed it. But later I found out that monsters do scale with you. So when you need to defeat a dragon in a certain place you can still be wiped out after spending time to level up more. Still you could be swiped out. When you play a RPG you should enjoy the level up because you're getting stronger and passing the stronger ones... they took that out just like they did with Oblivion. Why do we even bother the level up system in a RPG if a gamestudio is lazy not to put monsters with certain levels at map without autoscale with player. It's just BS. I was angry and never touched the game again. All the grind and level up just was for nothing. If you do like the story just play it and don't waste too much time on leveling up cos it's kinda useless. It's all tactics and that can be done if you're further in game with more teams
If the level up wasn't like this I would give it personal a score of 8. But with the level up screwed up it deserves a 6. A 5 is a bit too harsh
It seems like there are some good qualities with this one, but I'll have to give it a pass for now. I'm so behind on more acclaimed RPGs already that I can safely wait.
Love the design, but I don't have the time for a 60+ hour RPG that's not outstanding.
@nessisonett Ah. Now THAT I'm much more amenable to. That stupid, obtuse hallway running simulator single-handedly put me off the series for almost a decade. Never have I been so disappointed in a game as I was when I purchased FFXIII at launch.
@Mycroft How is Warframe now compared to launch? Has it evolved much? I used to play it quite a lot when it first came out.
@retro_player_22 Resonance of Fate is really cool though, once you wrap your head around it.
@Bunkerneath Hey, if this can get a rerelease, then FF1-6 and all the old Dragon Quests can'tr be far off, right?
@Angelic_Lapras_King good point!! Come on SquareEnix!
So there's something foundationally wrong the rare times that a "Fire Emblem" game only gives you a single chance to recruit an enemy without any warning? I can agree with that. I certainly don't like having to skim level guides in advance, but I learned that I have to do that to make sure I don't miss anybody like how I missed Tharja on my first playthrough of "Awakening."
@OorWullie Thanks, I'm happy to do them!
@BulbasaurusRex Generally speaking, I'd say yeah. I don't really see the advantage to having content that can be made unreachable. Anytime I encounter that in a game, I just feel bad; I'm not going to replay the game to this point to undo whatever the mistake was, and now I don't have the opportunity to see whatever content I'm missing. Just no winning there, y'know?
Very good review of the game, and show cases how to properly review a title. Bring up good and bad, even if it's a game you don't like. Save your opinion for the final mark.
Square just really did a bad job with the UI and explanation of the game's mechanics. I think Last Remnant is a good but not great game because of this.
I was hoping this would score higher then a 5 was hoping a 7 considering how fun it is when done right. then again its 1 of the most complex rpg's I had ever played back then with the original.
Be more weight if they had a Physical option but they don't so popo to them.
5/10 is pretty harsh. The original release's main issue was the horrible texture pop-in and optimization, and this game that you say "Square Enix decided to remaster few asked for" deserved this second chance. Then you complain about the voice acting, and yet it's fine and it even syncs properly with their lips unlike Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (god that was awful). This was a douche review. This game is better than that, even if it didn't suit your tastes.
And gamers don't mind looking up mechanics and info on games like this. This is why GameFAQs exists.
@PocketQ3 agreed
@PocketQ3 Just didn't suit them s guy, I guess. I liked the original when I picked it up on steam though never got around to finishing it. Got too hard at one point. May try playing it again eventually now that I understand the game more.
@Bunkerneath Well they have a loyal group of suckers who will buy any RPG they make.
It's probably a fitting score - but then why are good-for-nothing, awful-looking indie games get a constant 8?
The review system is seriously broken.
This one might be an 5 for a real game and indies 8s might be for indies games. That would be a more fair comparison imho.
But I still say, you should indicate the price in reviews so people would know what to expect.
I mean, a 2 dollar 8 is not nearly the same thing as a 50 dollar 8.
It would be time to admit that.
@construx So, according to you, the review system is "seriously broken" because reviewers don't share your share your low opinion of indie games, right?
Maybe you should consider that the reviewers in this site don't make that distinction between indie games and "real games". Maybe when an indie game gets an 8, it's because the reviewer doesn't consider it neither "good-for-nothing" nor "awful-looking".
If that bothers you so much, maybe you should look for a different site for you game reviews. There must be some site out there that shares that ignorant prejudice against indie games.
This is an excellent review. I hope people don’t just scroll down to the score, as Mitch Vogel has really pulled apart the good and bad of The Last Remnant here. I’m kind of intrigued, against my better judgment, but I appreciate all the warnings in advance.
@Kochambra : is it an ignorant prejudice if I bought some of those games based on the good reviews on this site? And tried them? And found that they are ugly, not fun and ultimately good-for-nothing? And then left and never touched them again?
One of them was a game where you have to push different colored balls. And that's it. That's the whole game! And it got an 8 here!
Would you honestly say that that game is better than this one (with real production value)?
On a completely unrelated topic, if I gather my friends and film them with my phone, would you call that a real movie?
@construx
So you tried some indie games and you didn't like them? That's a shame, but I don't think that makes your distinction between indie games and "real games" any less ignorant and prejudiced.
"Would you honestly say that that game is better than this one (with real production value)?"
If that game that you mention does a better attempt at what it's trying to do than 'The Last Remnant' does, then yes, I would definitely call it the better game.
If higher production cost made a game better, we probably wouldn't even need scores, websites would just have to list the game's budget and that would tell you how good a game is. But that's not how it works, at all.
"On a completely unrelated topic, if I gather my friends and film them with my phone, would you call that a real movie?"
Sure, if it were made with that intention I would totally call it a movie. It could turn out to be anything from a really poor attempt to a really great movie (like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangerine_(film) ). Whether you film it with high-end digital cameras or with a mobile phone, whether you use professional actors on a studio with lots of CGI or amateurs on a street corner, the resulting movie can be amazing.
Is this based on the original Xbox 360 release? Or the later PC revamp?
The PC port was worlds apart from the 360 version with far less reliance on generic rank and file troops and a ton more side content.
With Dragon Quest XI on the switch there is no need to grab this to scratch your JRPG itch.
@BlackenedHalo Yeah, you can also screw yourself completely at Fire Emblem games too. I accidentally killed Sonya in Fire Emblem Echoes, and had to restart about 4 hours of playtime.
@XBontendo You're either a kid, or you just like to leave online comments when you're dumb wasted. Either way, you're OK by me buddy.
@construx You're forgetting that the fundamental reason we play games is for fun (or immersion, etc call it what you will). Production values are nice and we all appreciate that, but it's never been the point. If you filmed your friends on your phone and they tell a good story, or put on a good show - whatever, I'd watch the out of it. Production value is the salad dressing bro. Not the entree.
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