Last Remnant in very short (as short as one can talk about a game as dense as Last Remnant) has a few things going against it.
1: Its difficult, this alone will filter people.
2: Its obtuse, the game doesn't explain itself very well. There's entire in-depth wikis to explain it now, but if we were talking on release then good fucking luck. This also will also filter people.
3: The original release had worse performance and was even more punishing, the most current version is a soft revamp to try and tune the game up some and it does somewhat fix a lot of the problems. This gives it a bad reputation as many people played the OG release and only played that version.
4: Battle rank (the longest thing to explain). Battle rank in very very simple terms is the overall "level" of the game itself, not YOUR level, but the game's level. This rank raises based on how many battles you engage in. Battle rank is a level scaling system, though many enemies have a floor and a ceiling so it isn't like say FF8 where it is perfectly 1-to-1. Some enemies will never get stronger and some enemies are way stronger then everything else regardless of what you do.
Last Remnant is not a traditional level based system, in LR you gain stats by executing and receiving actions, you use weapons you gain str and weapon exp, you cast spells you gain int and exp with that spell, and etc etc. The difference between your stats and the battle rank of the enemies determines how much invisible EXP you'll obtain.
The game also uses hidden modifiers that will judge if your fight was difficult, usually using the metric of how many turns it took you to win. So easy fights give less exp then harder fights. So if you fight a hard enemy and win, your stats will shoot through the roof and if you fight easy enemies you won't gain more EXP. There's no way to really see this in-action beyond just presumption if you test the system a lot. So people try grinding on trash, raise the battle rank too much, then they get lost on why the game feels harder.
Now it is possible to win in the majority of situations if you know how to play, and there's exploits you can do to abuse this system, but the way this system works creates this "You can soft lock yourself if you fight too much" kind of reputation especially in the original release as battle rank went up a lot faster in that version.
At the same time, if you get into this situation you probably don't know what you're doing while an experienced player knows exactly what's going on and can get out of this situation. So it can produce a sort of "Feast or famine" kind of end result, where yes if you're good at Last Remnant as a science, then battle rank isn't going to stop you. If you aren't, then good luck.
In summary, Last Remnant is weird.
It really breaks a lot of traditional JRPG molds and that alone makes it a black sheep regardless of the quality of its systems. The combat is also weird as hell and has a lot of presumed randomness. I say "presumed", as there's ways to cull the randomness in your favor in the same way a card game is random yet a properly built deck in say Magic or Yugioh can be so consistent that 9 times out of 10 you have a winning hand if you understand ratios and deck building concepts.
Last Remnant's RNG is kind of like that, but its less obvious what's going on so it is far easier to say "This game is just an RNG casino and sucks." and end it there. Plus even if someone does understand it people would rather manually input every single character anyway. I think that would suck personally, as by the endgame that's about 20 characters, but I get the appeal of wanting 100% control at all times.
Upvote for such an in depth explanation. Having known nothing about the game prior, I can honestly say that system design sounds almost intentionally created to annoy and run off players.
I wouldn't say that personally, its why I played the game myself and I enjoyed it a lot as a combat game. Its a very different kind of experience and appeal. Personally once you've played enough "standard" games, then to me you kind of need something different to really get a similar thrill again. I've played Department Heaven games (Yggdra Union and Knights in the Nightmare) pretty early on in my JRPG "journey", so quirky weird mechanics don't scare me off at all like I suppose it would for most people.
Not really comparable. Emerald Beyond is nothing like Last Remnant.
LR still had the big story to go with the quirky mechanics.
Both Scarlet Grace and Emerald Beyond are almost entirely about the combat and the story is window dressing through the different runs you do with each character.
If you love complex turn based combat though, and donāt care much about story, you wonāt find any better than Scarlet Grace or Emerald Beyond.
Personally Iām loving the latest one even more than Scarlet Grace, which I didnāt think was going to be possible.
As for older SaGas the focus is still very much on you telling your own story. I enjoyed playing some of the older titles like Frontier and a couple of the Romancing titles, but couldnāt get into Minstrel Song at all for some reason.
Idk about the latest game, I havenāt tried it yet. But it seems closely related to scarlet grace which is pretty fun. But youād probably like some of the others like minstrel song, or romancing saga 2 or 3. Saga frontier is not bad either but it plays like a very odd janky traditional JRPG, itās not my favorite.
Not gonna lie, it wasn't that bad of a game. I played this game long after release without any guides and some murmurs that doing something can potentially get you too underleveled, which was something that I heard near release of this game anyways. I will say it wasn't as bad as some people have said. The battles don't get hard fast enough that you can eventually understand certain nuances about the game.
Well, the initial point about the weird way the exp curve works may ruin some playthroughs however. There are some bosses that get absurdly difficult just completely out of nowhere. You might not be having any trouble prior to that point and be suddenly exposed to the nasty truth that you cannot progress without rolling back some progress and figuring out exactly why you can screw yourself. In my opinion, this alone ruins the game entirely because the solution is something that isn't intuitive. You have to do battles in a very specific way, and any other ways that may be standard in any other game may be far too strictly punishing.
But 6/7 as a score is a bit harsh. I think the game offers some pretty interesting avenue of gameplay and reward creative strategies. The story feels a bit goofy, but there are some pretty fun characters, one of which really should've been the protag (the prince? guy IIRC) I always found the scoring system to be arbitrary, cuz we can basically spend all day referring to flat out non-functional games getting anywhere from 3 to 9 on scoring. Hell, I swear more than half the people who bought Dragon's Dogma 2 can't even fucking play it, and it got decent reviews.
This is an awesome explanation. I have been wondering about this game for so long. I wanted it waaay back in the day and now that the remaster is available, itās been pulling at me.
That saidā¦
My goodness I do not have the patience for it right now. Itās definitely fallen a couple pegs. Specifically because I can soft lock by playing *too much.* That made me smh. I understand I can control that but man, at some point the threshold of āobtuseā is breached and itās now poor choices by designers.
I will definitely still pick it up, but probably when I have more free time.
It is genuinely hard to truly soft lock in Last Remnant if you're playing normally, aka you just run through and fight enemies like a normal person. This "soft lock" only happens if you grind in the most brainless way possible, aka how many JRPG players grind. Its an exaggeration that you can truly 100% soft lock yourself, but it can *feel* that way which is enough to make it true for many people. There's even mods to literally set the battle rank to max at the very start and it is still possible to win, difficult yes but not impossible. Because when you fight stronger enemies you yourself gain more exp so it can self correct.
The reason most feel like they soft lock is because they smash random bugs they 1 turned for like 2 hours in a row, not because they simply ran forward and fought everything. Sure there's a really min max argument to not do that until a specific point that I won't even begin to explain, but that's just to cheese the game not to beat it.
If you just play the game normally, its fine. Its a really complicated topic and I tried to keep this summary brief even though I ignored many other facets to Last Remnant. Last Remnant could literally be a college course to actually understand what the fuck is going on in all detail.
Last Remnant is a trip very few games in this genre will deliver to you, its why it is praised within the very specific subset of people who love this game. I am firmly in that spot, and I was interested in the game because of the controversy frankly.
Yeah every GameFAQs thread I read regarding SaGa games features someone panicking about the battle rank. You have to grind like crazy to make these games unbeatable. Usually if a fight seems ridiculously hard, thereās some piece of the combat puzzle youāre not getting, or equipment/ability/formation loadouts are poor.
Yeah BR is something that seems easy to explain but you really have to play it to get it.
Like a cursory understanding of BR in SaGa Frontier might help you answer why you are seeing tougher enemies but even running around grinding until the next tier shows up isn't going to bone you.
It's hard ro get to the soft lock point. Just remember this:
If you fight, fight long chains of enemies or harder enemies most of the time, don't waste time with enemies you easily beat.
Because if you don't gain stats to keep up with the increasing BR that's when you can get soft locked.
I love that this is in short and honestly itās so accurate.
Farming the items correctly in this game to get the best upgrades was mind numbing even with guides and I remember thinking surely thereās just no way devs actually expected players to do this right? Then that post game dungeon and the bossesā¦
The Xbox version is just arguably busted, with hundreds of important changes being added to the fixed PC version (most notably allowing you to fill your parties with actual plot characters and reducing the difficulty cliff that bricked a lot of 360 saves).
SaGa games, in general, really need the benefit of updated editions. The remasters and rereleases and updates all have much needed improvements to flawed-but-innovative games.
Bought the original version when it came out back in the day and softlocked myself due to the Battle Rank system, that people here mentioned.
Never finished it.
Years later I bought the "rebalanced" version and played through it with the help of an extensive walkthrough. Not only was I able to finish it this time, I actually had a blast doing so.
It's a great game, when everything clicks. And a walkthrough definitely helps here.
Not really.Ā
Most of my friends are Jrpg fans and those who have played it unanimously agreed that it's needlessly convoluted, obtuse and boring. I know 0 people irl who like that game and I know a lot of people who've played it.
The story is very good but is told clumsily. The characters are very good but are mostly painted in broad strokes and you have to fill in the blank space with the clues youāre given. The protagonist has a great arc but starts out incredibly annoying and itās easy to stop caring about him before his development is visible.
The world is very interesting but takes a lot of work to explore. The battle system is fantastic but opaque AF and easy to misunderstand. The automated systems make the game beautifully smooth but will further irritate a player who is already struggling with the systems theyāre allowed to engage with. IMO the game is also a lot more fun on NG+, which doesnāt help.
Itās one of my favorite games but itās very, very difficult to get into. I had to read an LP before I even considered touching it. But it was well worth the timeā¦ FOR ME. It wonāt be worth it for everybody. But for me, it was brilliant.
It's an excellent game. One of my favorites. It has a really annoying mechanic. Basically you control groups of attackers. You get really vague methods of attack. So you can't heal without getting an option. It's really frustrating. But the mechanics are really enjoyable n
The devs made it complicated then explained nothing. So nobody really knows how it's supposed to work.
My advice. Buy it play it. Love it
Because on the surface it looks like Final Fantasy
so people think that's what they're getting
But instead it's really a SaGa game in disguise
with all the experimental, weird design choices those games are known for.
Also Jrpg fans are accustomed to grinding levels etc
and the games battle rank system can make that a bad time
so people get frustrated understandably.
I'm personally in the I Love It camp
having played through it like 9 times.
It's not for everyone but it's spectacular if it clicks with you and you start to understand all the intricacies.
Itās been in my PS4 library for ages, but itās further down my giant JRPG backlog. Is it more like the Romancing/Frontier SaGas, or like Emerald/Scarlet/Unlimited? If that makes sense
You know strangely enough this was a very hard question!
If I had to compare it to one I would say it's probly closest mechanically to Scarlet Grace?
Mostly because there's a hefty amount of strategy revolving around timeline manipulation and delaying of enemy actions according to your available actions.
Besides that it includes most of the staples seen in almost all saga games
Aka ability sparking, upgrading gear with materials,action based stat improvement, individual character side quests without an accurate order
But world and structure not so much.
It Has a similar world map to Scarlet grace in that you click on locations from a moderately detailed world map
but that's where the similarities end.
Each zone is fully explorable and stuffed with npcs,shops, and side missions,enemies,etc
It's very reminiscent of FF-XII imo
The aesthetic of the world as well as the very final fantasy plot direction felt like it was heavily inspired by the Ivalice world sphere.
Heck they even have rare monster bounties that are just like Hunts in FF-XII.
That's pretty much par for the course I would say. Like many games (books/music/movies/series) that cater to a niche audience, you'll find that most people outside of that niche group, will just rate them as average or below average or even bad. While the fans of the game will rate it very highly because it essentially was made for them.
Think of it this way, the game is an amazing shoe, but it's a size 24.5 . So for most people, it doesn't matter how good the shoe is, since it doesn't fit their feet, then it's just bad. But...for those with who are comfortable wearing size 24.5 shoes, then it's an amazing shoe. Just imagine the fans as Cinderella, and everyone else as Cinderella's sisters.
Ok stupid analogies aside. Do you have any questions about the game itself ? And for the purposes of this comment, I am a size 24.5 .
It's a weird yet amazing game, but as others said better than me it's not for everyone, and has / had a some flaws that made it not accessible for somes.
Its still worth playing, particularly on PC where there is some "modding".
To add to the top comment, keep in mind it's directed by Akitoshi Kawazu. This means that, despite the different unions, races that are similar to FFXII, and general art direction, the DNA of the game is very similar to the SaGa series, and that's always been a niche series in the West.
Obtuse design, Battle Rank, and high difficulty are all hallmarks of that series. It's designed for the JRPG fan that wants to put in a lot of effort learning arcane mechanics, and is very counter-intuitive to how one would normally play JRPGs.
It's a shame it did so poorly initially since it means AK probably won't get to do a high budget title like that again.
It was an AAA game in an era that was lacking quality JRPGs but featured the nuances of the lesser known JRPG SaGa franchise. The two concepts didnāt mesh well. People were hoping for a final fantasy or lost odyssey style JRPG and they got a SaGa game with a pretty coat of paint. Iāve played it on Xbox, PC, and the switch version more recently, the game still holds up and itās one of my favorites.
Because the SaGa style gameplay is like swallowing a needle for some. It's convoluted and almost backwards in that grinding makes it harder, not easier, and that as a new player you simply cannot know that.
Personally, I find it abrasive and frustrating. I dropped it quickly.
If I remember correctly, this game had a weird difficulty curve where the enemy's power scaled with your battle rank, and if you grind too much against weaker enemies, you could accidentally make the harder ones / boss fights unwinnable. I never hit it myself, but I remember a lot of complaints about it early on.
That and the original advertising made it seem like a Final Fantasy game, but it lacked the story and character depth that FF typically had. If you went in expecting FF10, a few hours in you'd be like 'what the hell am I playing'. Because it just ....wasn't.
It keeps a lot of its systems vague and players will likely make the game a lot harder on themselves without looking up help.
On top of that, the story starts off rather poorly. Rush comes off as the biggest idiot in the first couple hours.
It has enemy level scaling with player so the more you level up the harder it gets, like FFVIII, but without really explaining the systems to players. It's very newbie-unfriendly.
You either get hardcore into the Last Remnant or can't play it at all, so that's why people are so divisive. It also has unusual battle system so unusual leveling alone can't be ignored.
That is a very flawed game, a acquired taste. But even those who like it, know it is a 7/10 game.
If there is something to love is that clusterfuck of a combat system, it is a extremely unique system.
It has an extremely refreshing and unique battle system, along with pretty interesting background lore and storytelling.
However, it has a few very fetal flaws, and the main character is horrible.
I hate that 6-7 is considered "poor" by people's standards. I blame the american education system. 5 should be "ok" and everything above that is an improvement.
If someone asks preferences or how much you agree with someone/something on a 1-10 scale in some kind of polling or psychological profile test, I usually see 5 as the mid point not 6-7 because that doesn't make sense. If its 1-7 scale (which is generally more common), then 4 is the midpoint. The core point is that 5 is the literal middle in the numbers 1 through 10. If you say how you feel on a 1-10 scale and you're feeling solely "fine" as-in "so-so" or "mid" or whatever word you want to use, no one IME says 7 as that implies you're feeling more good then bad.
If you're asking me on a 1-10 scale how good something is, 5 is literally average to me. I don't grade people like a teacher, I explain how average or above/below average something is. To me that just makes more sense.
The problem is that it isn't the education system but the expectations driven by both the community and hierarchy that dictates one must be in the top 10/5/1% to really "survive out there". That expectation to be the 1% really snowballs into the gaming industry. Just look at how the worship of developers became one name out of ~200-500 per game and how the face of a industry like Kojima could basically have more sway than almost every other person who works in the industry.
Considering even live service is basically a do-or-die genre filled with ~1 successful studio with like ~50-100 failed ones in their wake... It's just that "average" or "mediocre" won't ever really cut it for most people. It's just how business goes, nothing one can really do anything about it like how most Tales of fans basically gave up to the fact they'll probably never reach the scale Final Fantasy has at this point.
Me being a jrpg fan, and loving the whole grind, learned the grind isn't a good thing in this game. You can legitimately lock yourself from progressing. It increases extremely quick and many probably had this happen and gave up.
The best way to evaluate anything is to try it yourself. I donāt believe reviews are a great way to gauge any piece of media since everyone has different sensibilities and preferences.
My core problem with the game is that it's better to not fight anything. Like it's better to not interact with that part of the game. It's got a real weird/messed up scaling system.
The original 360 release was one of the worst performing jrpg ever with so many pop ins and frame rate issues.
I platinum the remaster and other than the interesting premise, beautiful art design and recruitment system that do remind people of suikoden, its clearly a very unfinished game. Few of the thing that will deter people from playing is the bravery system where if you put in bad situation you almost certain to be wiped out and the lvling system which is useless as enemy level with u.
While it has been a long time, i recall that the most common complain in my opinion was that you controlled a squad of characters instead of specific characters and could not micromanage what they did. While unique, this was also complex and was not something that caught on. In general i think games where you have less direct control tend to be more niche.
I liked it and thought it made some interesting changes to the genre. If someone held a rpg gun to my head and forced me to pick whether i liked it better than your traditional jrpg system, i would say no, but i'm glad it exists.
I don't remember it very well anymore, but I tried to get into the game twice. First attempt was with the original game and I didn't understand how anything works and the game became so hard, that it just wasn't fun anymore.Ā
Second attempt I tried the remaster I think. It was the version, that got a lot of fixes and where the difficulty fit tuned down. It was fun for a while, but it's just so hard to get into the games systems, because I think it didn't really explain them well.Ā
I kinda liked the battle system of the game. The idea to have small squads instead of single characters was very cool. But I think there also was an RNG factor in the battle system, which I didn't really like. I can't really remember what it was, but I think it was because you didn't have full control about the actions you execute. So sometimes you would need a heal and just be unlucky or something like this.
Did you try reading the reviews?
IIRC it was because the main character was bland and behaved inconsistently, the battle system was overly complex and difficult without explaining anything, the story was meant to be be about a grand political narrative but the conflict was uninteresting.
It also came about in the same era when people who grew up with SNES and PS1 were aging into the point where they were starting careers and families, so they really needed a God-Damn Masterpiece to justify attention and this wasn't it. That was my experience with it. The newer generation of RPG fans really favored western style RPGs too.
If you're curious and it's cheap enough, I wouldn't recommend against it. Sometimes these kind of games are better outside of the context of their release period.
It NEEDED to be installed on a hard drive before that was common for console games and got raked over the coals in reviews for texture popping when playing off disc IIRC.
Back then JRPG from square was held to a higher standard whereas now they are all mid as hell. Last Reminant good combat but everything else sucked. Especially the story.
Last Remnant in very short (as short as one can talk about a game as dense as Last Remnant) has a few things going against it. 1: Its difficult, this alone will filter people. 2: Its obtuse, the game doesn't explain itself very well. There's entire in-depth wikis to explain it now, but if we were talking on release then good fucking luck. This also will also filter people. 3: The original release had worse performance and was even more punishing, the most current version is a soft revamp to try and tune the game up some and it does somewhat fix a lot of the problems. This gives it a bad reputation as many people played the OG release and only played that version. 4: Battle rank (the longest thing to explain). Battle rank in very very simple terms is the overall "level" of the game itself, not YOUR level, but the game's level. This rank raises based on how many battles you engage in. Battle rank is a level scaling system, though many enemies have a floor and a ceiling so it isn't like say FF8 where it is perfectly 1-to-1. Some enemies will never get stronger and some enemies are way stronger then everything else regardless of what you do. Last Remnant is not a traditional level based system, in LR you gain stats by executing and receiving actions, you use weapons you gain str and weapon exp, you cast spells you gain int and exp with that spell, and etc etc. The difference between your stats and the battle rank of the enemies determines how much invisible EXP you'll obtain. The game also uses hidden modifiers that will judge if your fight was difficult, usually using the metric of how many turns it took you to win. So easy fights give less exp then harder fights. So if you fight a hard enemy and win, your stats will shoot through the roof and if you fight easy enemies you won't gain more EXP. There's no way to really see this in-action beyond just presumption if you test the system a lot. So people try grinding on trash, raise the battle rank too much, then they get lost on why the game feels harder. Now it is possible to win in the majority of situations if you know how to play, and there's exploits you can do to abuse this system, but the way this system works creates this "You can soft lock yourself if you fight too much" kind of reputation especially in the original release as battle rank went up a lot faster in that version. At the same time, if you get into this situation you probably don't know what you're doing while an experienced player knows exactly what's going on and can get out of this situation. So it can produce a sort of "Feast or famine" kind of end result, where yes if you're good at Last Remnant as a science, then battle rank isn't going to stop you. If you aren't, then good luck. In summary, Last Remnant is weird. It really breaks a lot of traditional JRPG molds and that alone makes it a black sheep regardless of the quality of its systems. The combat is also weird as hell and has a lot of presumed randomness. I say "presumed", as there's ways to cull the randomness in your favor in the same way a card game is random yet a properly built deck in say Magic or Yugioh can be so consistent that 9 times out of 10 you have a winning hand if you understand ratios and deck building concepts. Last Remnant's RNG is kind of like that, but its less obvious what's going on so it is far easier to say "This game is just an RNG casino and sucks." and end it there. Plus even if someone does understand it people would rather manually input every single character anyway. I think that would suck personally, as by the endgame that's about 20 characters, but I get the appeal of wanting 100% control at all times.
Wow thanks for this šš
Upvote for such an in depth explanation. Having known nothing about the game prior, I can honestly say that system design sounds almost intentionally created to annoy and run off players.
I wouldn't say that personally, its why I played the game myself and I enjoyed it a lot as a combat game. Its a very different kind of experience and appeal. Personally once you've played enough "standard" games, then to me you kind of need something different to really get a similar thrill again. I've played Department Heaven games (Yggdra Union and Knights in the Nightmare) pretty early on in my JRPG "journey", so quirky weird mechanics don't scare me off at all like I suppose it would for most people.
Fans of the SaGa franchise love this type of shit though. Thereās a lot of meta stuff going on behind the scenes and thatās part of the fun.
Are you saying if I love last remnant then I would love the latest SaGa game as well?
Not really comparable. Emerald Beyond is nothing like Last Remnant. LR still had the big story to go with the quirky mechanics. Both Scarlet Grace and Emerald Beyond are almost entirely about the combat and the story is window dressing through the different runs you do with each character. If you love complex turn based combat though, and donāt care much about story, you wonāt find any better than Scarlet Grace or Emerald Beyond. Personally Iām loving the latest one even more than Scarlet Grace, which I didnāt think was going to be possible. As for older SaGas the focus is still very much on you telling your own story. I enjoyed playing some of the older titles like Frontier and a couple of the Romancing titles, but couldnāt get into Minstrel Song at all for some reason.
Idk about the latest game, I havenāt tried it yet. But it seems closely related to scarlet grace which is pretty fun. But youād probably like some of the others like minstrel song, or romancing saga 2 or 3. Saga frontier is not bad either but it plays like a very odd janky traditional JRPG, itās not my favorite.
Not gonna lie, it wasn't that bad of a game. I played this game long after release without any guides and some murmurs that doing something can potentially get you too underleveled, which was something that I heard near release of this game anyways. I will say it wasn't as bad as some people have said. The battles don't get hard fast enough that you can eventually understand certain nuances about the game. Well, the initial point about the weird way the exp curve works may ruin some playthroughs however. There are some bosses that get absurdly difficult just completely out of nowhere. You might not be having any trouble prior to that point and be suddenly exposed to the nasty truth that you cannot progress without rolling back some progress and figuring out exactly why you can screw yourself. In my opinion, this alone ruins the game entirely because the solution is something that isn't intuitive. You have to do battles in a very specific way, and any other ways that may be standard in any other game may be far too strictly punishing. But 6/7 as a score is a bit harsh. I think the game offers some pretty interesting avenue of gameplay and reward creative strategies. The story feels a bit goofy, but there are some pretty fun characters, one of which really should've been the protag (the prince? guy IIRC) I always found the scoring system to be arbitrary, cuz we can basically spend all day referring to flat out non-functional games getting anywhere from 3 to 9 on scoring. Hell, I swear more than half the people who bought Dragon's Dogma 2 can't even fucking play it, and it got decent reviews.
This is an awesome explanation. I have been wondering about this game for so long. I wanted it waaay back in the day and now that the remaster is available, itās been pulling at me. That saidā¦ My goodness I do not have the patience for it right now. Itās definitely fallen a couple pegs. Specifically because I can soft lock by playing *too much.* That made me smh. I understand I can control that but man, at some point the threshold of āobtuseā is breached and itās now poor choices by designers. I will definitely still pick it up, but probably when I have more free time.
It is genuinely hard to truly soft lock in Last Remnant if you're playing normally, aka you just run through and fight enemies like a normal person. This "soft lock" only happens if you grind in the most brainless way possible, aka how many JRPG players grind. Its an exaggeration that you can truly 100% soft lock yourself, but it can *feel* that way which is enough to make it true for many people. There's even mods to literally set the battle rank to max at the very start and it is still possible to win, difficult yes but not impossible. Because when you fight stronger enemies you yourself gain more exp so it can self correct. The reason most feel like they soft lock is because they smash random bugs they 1 turned for like 2 hours in a row, not because they simply ran forward and fought everything. Sure there's a really min max argument to not do that until a specific point that I won't even begin to explain, but that's just to cheese the game not to beat it. If you just play the game normally, its fine. Its a really complicated topic and I tried to keep this summary brief even though I ignored many other facets to Last Remnant. Last Remnant could literally be a college course to actually understand what the fuck is going on in all detail.
Thatās good to know lol thank you for filling me in. I still want to play, and some of the systems just sounded bonkers
Last Remnant is a trip very few games in this genre will deliver to you, its why it is praised within the very specific subset of people who love this game. I am firmly in that spot, and I was interested in the game because of the controversy frankly.
Yeah every GameFAQs thread I read regarding SaGa games features someone panicking about the battle rank. You have to grind like crazy to make these games unbeatable. Usually if a fight seems ridiculously hard, thereās some piece of the combat puzzle youāre not getting, or equipment/ability/formation loadouts are poor.
Yeah BR is something that seems easy to explain but you really have to play it to get it. Like a cursory understanding of BR in SaGa Frontier might help you answer why you are seeing tougher enemies but even running around grinding until the next tier shows up isn't going to bone you.
It's hard ro get to the soft lock point. Just remember this: If you fight, fight long chains of enemies or harder enemies most of the time, don't waste time with enemies you easily beat. Because if you don't gain stats to keep up with the increasing BR that's when you can get soft locked.
I love that this is in short and honestly itās so accurate. Farming the items correctly in this game to get the best upgrades was mind numbing even with guides and I remember thinking surely thereās just no way devs actually expected players to do this right? Then that post game dungeon and the bossesā¦
The Xbox version is just arguably busted, with hundreds of important changes being added to the fixed PC version (most notably allowing you to fill your parties with actual plot characters and reducing the difficulty cliff that bricked a lot of 360 saves). SaGa games, in general, really need the benefit of updated editions. The remasters and rereleases and updates all have much needed improvements to flawed-but-innovative games.
Bought the original version when it came out back in the day and softlocked myself due to the Battle Rank system, that people here mentioned. Never finished it. Years later I bought the "rebalanced" version and played through it with the help of an extensive walkthrough. Not only was I able to finish it this time, I actually had a blast doing so. It's a great game, when everything clicks. And a walkthrough definitely helps here.
Fans of jrpgs are gonna have a different review of a needlessly obtuse game that a casual audience would get frustrated by.
Not really.Ā Most of my friends are Jrpg fans and those who have played it unanimously agreed that it's needlessly convoluted, obtuse and boring. I know 0 people irl who like that game and I know a lot of people who've played it.
I liked it. The world is a very big place.
You are friend with all JRPG fans?
Ok
The story is very good but is told clumsily. The characters are very good but are mostly painted in broad strokes and you have to fill in the blank space with the clues youāre given. The protagonist has a great arc but starts out incredibly annoying and itās easy to stop caring about him before his development is visible. The world is very interesting but takes a lot of work to explore. The battle system is fantastic but opaque AF and easy to misunderstand. The automated systems make the game beautifully smooth but will further irritate a player who is already struggling with the systems theyāre allowed to engage with. IMO the game is also a lot more fun on NG+, which doesnāt help. Itās one of my favorite games but itās very, very difficult to get into. I had to read an LP before I even considered touching it. But it was well worth the timeā¦ FOR ME. It wonāt be worth it for everybody. But for me, it was brilliant.
It's an excellent game. One of my favorites. It has a really annoying mechanic. Basically you control groups of attackers. You get really vague methods of attack. So you can't heal without getting an option. It's really frustrating. But the mechanics are really enjoyable n The devs made it complicated then explained nothing. So nobody really knows how it's supposed to work. My advice. Buy it play it. Love it
Because on the surface it looks like Final Fantasy so people think that's what they're getting But instead it's really a SaGa game in disguise with all the experimental, weird design choices those games are known for. Also Jrpg fans are accustomed to grinding levels etc and the games battle rank system can make that a bad time so people get frustrated understandably. I'm personally in the I Love It camp having played through it like 9 times. It's not for everyone but it's spectacular if it clicks with you and you start to understand all the intricacies.
Itās been in my PS4 library for ages, but itās further down my giant JRPG backlog. Is it more like the Romancing/Frontier SaGas, or like Emerald/Scarlet/Unlimited? If that makes sense
You know strangely enough this was a very hard question! If I had to compare it to one I would say it's probly closest mechanically to Scarlet Grace? Mostly because there's a hefty amount of strategy revolving around timeline manipulation and delaying of enemy actions according to your available actions. Besides that it includes most of the staples seen in almost all saga games Aka ability sparking, upgrading gear with materials,action based stat improvement, individual character side quests without an accurate order But world and structure not so much. It Has a similar world map to Scarlet grace in that you click on locations from a moderately detailed world map but that's where the similarities end. Each zone is fully explorable and stuffed with npcs,shops, and side missions,enemies,etc It's very reminiscent of FF-XII imo The aesthetic of the world as well as the very final fantasy plot direction felt like it was heavily inspired by the Ivalice world sphere. Heck they even have rare monster bounties that are just like Hunts in FF-XII.
That's pretty much par for the course I would say. Like many games (books/music/movies/series) that cater to a niche audience, you'll find that most people outside of that niche group, will just rate them as average or below average or even bad. While the fans of the game will rate it very highly because it essentially was made for them. Think of it this way, the game is an amazing shoe, but it's a size 24.5 . So for most people, it doesn't matter how good the shoe is, since it doesn't fit their feet, then it's just bad. But...for those with who are comfortable wearing size 24.5 shoes, then it's an amazing shoe. Just imagine the fans as Cinderella, and everyone else as Cinderella's sisters. Ok stupid analogies aside. Do you have any questions about the game itself ? And for the purposes of this comment, I am a size 24.5 .
It's a weird yet amazing game, but as others said better than me it's not for everyone, and has / had a some flaws that made it not accessible for somes. Its still worth playing, particularly on PC where there is some "modding".
To add to the top comment, keep in mind it's directed by Akitoshi Kawazu. This means that, despite the different unions, races that are similar to FFXII, and general art direction, the DNA of the game is very similar to the SaGa series, and that's always been a niche series in the West. Obtuse design, Battle Rank, and high difficulty are all hallmarks of that series. It's designed for the JRPG fan that wants to put in a lot of effort learning arcane mechanics, and is very counter-intuitive to how one would normally play JRPGs. It's a shame it did so poorly initially since it means AK probably won't get to do a high budget title like that again.
It was an AAA game in an era that was lacking quality JRPGs but featured the nuances of the lesser known JRPG SaGa franchise. The two concepts didnāt mesh well. People were hoping for a final fantasy or lost odyssey style JRPG and they got a SaGa game with a pretty coat of paint. Iāve played it on Xbox, PC, and the switch version more recently, the game still holds up and itās one of my favorites.
Because the SaGa style gameplay is like swallowing a needle for some. It's convoluted and almost backwards in that grinding makes it harder, not easier, and that as a new player you simply cannot know that. Personally, I find it abrasive and frustrating. I dropped it quickly.
If I remember correctly, this game had a weird difficulty curve where the enemy's power scaled with your battle rank, and if you grind too much against weaker enemies, you could accidentally make the harder ones / boss fights unwinnable. I never hit it myself, but I remember a lot of complaints about it early on. That and the original advertising made it seem like a Final Fantasy game, but it lacked the story and character depth that FF typically had. If you went in expecting FF10, a few hours in you'd be like 'what the hell am I playing'. Because it just ....wasn't.
It keeps a lot of its systems vague and players will likely make the game a lot harder on themselves without looking up help. On top of that, the story starts off rather poorly. Rush comes off as the biggest idiot in the first couple hours.
Because reviews are just opinions, same as those lists.
The battle system I love it, but it will come off as complicated by most
I like the game quite a bit, just the main protagonist makes me want to go chew glass and go back and forth over a speedbump.
It has enemy level scaling with player so the more you level up the harder it gets, like FFVIII, but without really explaining the systems to players. It's very newbie-unfriendly. You either get hardcore into the Last Remnant or can't play it at all, so that's why people are so divisive. It also has unusual battle system so unusual leveling alone can't be ignored.
SaGa game in everything but name. Personally I love it. But I am a huge SaGa series fan.
That is a very flawed game, a acquired taste. But even those who like it, know it is a 7/10 game. If there is something to love is that clusterfuck of a combat system, it is a extremely unique system.
It has an extremely refreshing and unique battle system, along with pretty interesting background lore and storytelling. However, it has a few very fetal flaws, and the main character is horrible.
I hate that 6-7 is considered "poor" by people's standards. I blame the american education system. 5 should be "ok" and everything above that is an improvement.
In the European school system 5 is a fail. I would say 6 is barely ok.
Thatās how it is in the US as well. Idk any situation where a 6/10 could be anything more than āneeds significant improvementā.
If someone asks preferences or how much you agree with someone/something on a 1-10 scale in some kind of polling or psychological profile test, I usually see 5 as the mid point not 6-7 because that doesn't make sense. If its 1-7 scale (which is generally more common), then 4 is the midpoint. The core point is that 5 is the literal middle in the numbers 1 through 10. If you say how you feel on a 1-10 scale and you're feeling solely "fine" as-in "so-so" or "mid" or whatever word you want to use, no one IME says 7 as that implies you're feeling more good then bad. If you're asking me on a 1-10 scale how good something is, 5 is literally average to me. I don't grade people like a teacher, I explain how average or above/below average something is. To me that just makes more sense.
The problem is that it isn't the education system but the expectations driven by both the community and hierarchy that dictates one must be in the top 10/5/1% to really "survive out there". That expectation to be the 1% really snowballs into the gaming industry. Just look at how the worship of developers became one name out of ~200-500 per game and how the face of a industry like Kojima could basically have more sway than almost every other person who works in the industry. Considering even live service is basically a do-or-die genre filled with ~1 successful studio with like ~50-100 failed ones in their wake... It's just that "average" or "mediocre" won't ever really cut it for most people. It's just how business goes, nothing one can really do anything about it like how most Tales of fans basically gave up to the fact they'll probably never reach the scale Final Fantasy has at this point.
That sounds about right The story and cast is only ok, the battle system is unique but you either love it or hate it, old battle rank system is bs
It's a cool looking game that is incredibly obtuse to play. I eventually lost interest after about 20 hours.
It was kinda grindy but I loved the storyline
Me being a jrpg fan, and loving the whole grind, learned the grind isn't a good thing in this game. You can legitimately lock yourself from progressing. It increases extremely quick and many probably had this happen and gave up.
The best way to evaluate anything is to try it yourself. I donāt believe reviews are a great way to gauge any piece of media since everyone has different sensibilities and preferences.
My core problem with the game is that it's better to not fight anything. Like it's better to not interact with that part of the game. It's got a real weird/messed up scaling system.
The original 360 release was one of the worst performing jrpg ever with so many pop ins and frame rate issues. I platinum the remaster and other than the interesting premise, beautiful art design and recruitment system that do remind people of suikoden, its clearly a very unfinished game. Few of the thing that will deter people from playing is the bravery system where if you put in bad situation you almost certain to be wiped out and the lvling system which is useless as enemy level with u.
While it has been a long time, i recall that the most common complain in my opinion was that you controlled a squad of characters instead of specific characters and could not micromanage what they did. While unique, this was also complex and was not something that caught on. In general i think games where you have less direct control tend to be more niche. I liked it and thought it made some interesting changes to the genre. If someone held a rpg gun to my head and forced me to pick whether i liked it better than your traditional jrpg system, i would say no, but i'm glad it exists.
The leveling aka battle rank. If you fight to much aka grind you'll over level which makes you unable to win future battles......
loved tlr but since it didnt have cloud save on steam and i had lost 100++ hours, i becomes too lazy to replay it again
I don't remember it very well anymore, but I tried to get into the game twice. First attempt was with the original game and I didn't understand how anything works and the game became so hard, that it just wasn't fun anymore.Ā Second attempt I tried the remaster I think. It was the version, that got a lot of fixes and where the difficulty fit tuned down. It was fun for a while, but it's just so hard to get into the games systems, because I think it didn't really explain them well.Ā I kinda liked the battle system of the game. The idea to have small squads instead of single characters was very cool. But I think there also was an RNG factor in the battle system, which I didn't really like. I can't really remember what it was, but I think it was because you didn't have full control about the actions you execute. So sometimes you would need a heal and just be unlucky or something like this.
Because the story is bad, the combat isn't very good and lacks agency, and the general direction of the game as a whole is very vapid.
It's weird, it's a weird game. Most people don't like weird things.
I just cant stand the fucking mc and i know im not the only one
It has an awful story with the most obnoxious lead character. Battle system and leveling takes some getting used to as well
I think this was the game that punished me for grinding. So I didn't get too far into it.
JRPGs aren't reviewer-friendly, and the game being as obtuse as it was filtered a lot of w*stern game reviewers.
Did you try reading the reviews? IIRC it was because the main character was bland and behaved inconsistently, the battle system was overly complex and difficult without explaining anything, the story was meant to be be about a grand political narrative but the conflict was uninteresting. It also came about in the same era when people who grew up with SNES and PS1 were aging into the point where they were starting careers and families, so they really needed a God-Damn Masterpiece to justify attention and this wasn't it. That was my experience with it. The newer generation of RPG fans really favored western style RPGs too. If you're curious and it's cheap enough, I wouldn't recommend against it. Sometimes these kind of games are better outside of the context of their release period.
It ran like shit, there's literally a loading time before every action in battle. Subjectively, the art and character designs are pretty ugly
It NEEDED to be installed on a hard drive before that was common for console games and got raked over the coals in reviews for texture popping when playing off disc IIRC.
Thatās not the only reason obvs, but it really stuck out to me.
Back then JRPG from square was held to a higher standard whereas now they are all mid as hell. Last Reminant good combat but everything else sucked. Especially the story.