Square Enix + RPG + Xbox 360 = ?

When it comes to taking JRPGs from their native territory and popularizing them in the West, there’s only one company that comes to mind - Square Enix - and when that company develops a new title for a console that has supposedly failed in their home territory, you have to sit up and take notice. Many were waiting for Square’s glory days to return and whilst The Last Remnant contains all of the ingredients that you’d find in a tasty JRPG main course, somebody took their eye off the ball when it came to following the recipe.

The story puts you in the shoes of Rush Sykes, a young chap who has just watched his sister be kidnapped by a strange group of creatures. Predictably, you need to head out into the wide, wide world to find her and to work out why they’ve targeted her specifically. It isn’t a million miles away from avenging the death of your father, but it’ll do. The opening gambits are interesting enough to draw you in and to make you want to get a hold of the controller and step into your first fight, which was never going to be too far away. The classic turn-based RPG style that you would find in the likes of the Final Fantasy series and Skies of Arcadia is here in full effect, although some tweaks have been made to allow the player to chain moves together and order waved attacks. This side of things works, with menus organized well enough to allow you access more popular commands, whilst keeping less-used items within reach.

Any illusion of The Last Remnant being anything other than standard video gaming fare is soon shattered as you battle your first enemy. You see, whilst Square Enix have a ton of talent sitting in their development studios, some superb artists and enough money to make sure that they’re all happy, the company decided to license Unreal Engine 3 to power the game. This engine really does have power in spades and has been used to make some pretty awesome titles, but it’s pretty clear that some developers know how to use it more than others. Square Enix clearly don’t, as The Last Remnant is a graphical mess that looks and feels incredibly broken.

The game’s textures are fine, as is the general artwork - so at times, everything looks incredibly nice. The problem is that when things start moving - such as in one of the many battles that form the basis of the game - everything starts to grind and chug, with frequent frame-rate drops, clipping and pop-up. Installing to the HDD makes things a little better, but not much. When I say “frame-rate drops”, I don’t mean the odd skip here or there, either. At times, the game drops from your usual fifty or sixty frames per second down to something that must be more like five or six.  I could probably live with this - given that graphics do not a good game make - but it isn’t the only blatantly obvious problem on show. Not far into events, you’ll be thrown into a chain of boss battles that take an absolute age to complete. I took down the first guy and was falling dangerously short on supplies when - without any option to save or restock - I was confronted with another. Death wasn’t far away, and that meant starting the whole sequence again. Is this just a ramping up of the difficulty curve that I had to overcome, or does the onus fall upon the development team, who have given the game a clumsy and laborious save system that doesn’t involve checkpoints? Trust me, it’s the latter. I don’t mind a difficult game. In fact, I prefer my games to challenge me to the point of being impossible. When they go beyond that point because somebody decided to rest on their laurels, well, that’s a sign of a bad game - especially when you can barely complete a battle with foes numbering up to the triple figures that takes you over an hour and a half, then get beaten down by a lowly single combatant because you haven’t been allowed to recharge your health or save. That isn’t infuriating - it’s mindless.

The tasty cherry atop this RPG flavoured mess? The game AI. A lot of the battles seem to be incredibly easy to win, and the ones I mentioned earlier seem to fluctuate in difficulty at random points. You’ll beat an enemy within five minutes at one attempt (then get killed by the next boss) and when you attempt it again after reloading from your save point, you’ll be there for twenty minutes. A boss will hit you with a flurry of powerful attacks that brings your team to the point of death, and then sit back and perform ridiculous mental-state changing attacks until you defeat him. Oh no…I’m nearly dead and now you’re trying to freaking DEPRESS me with yet another morale-lowering attack. What does the boss think my character’s going to do? Commit suicide?

The Last Remnant has a solid storyline, a decent menu system and some really nice touches - such as the Union system that allows you to control a bunch of characters much more easily than ordering them one at a time. But for each and every decent thing that you notice, there are another three - sometimes embarrassingly huge - problems to counteract it. Some have reviewed this and given it a high score simply because of the company that develops and publishes it but quite frankly, it could have been developed by any two-bit studio and published by a budget label given the breadth and depth of the problems that punctuate it.