by: Jason Solorzano

January 15, 2009

The gameplay mechanics is something that is really solid and balance. The Last Remnant tries something new with Unions aka parties. You can have up to 1-5 parties and fill it up to a limited extent. Your either allowed to have three parties with five people in it or spread the number of people in a party with a 4th or 5th party. Both has their advantages and disadvantages but i find having a three parties works best. Having a 4th or 5th party will spread out the damage but will make each party significantly weaker.

In every party there is a leader who is in charge of commands. Each person has there own set of skills and focus on different abilities. It is split among combat arts and mystic (magic) arts. Afterwards they branch out from short to long range melee attacks or mystic attacks to healing arts. Once you have your party set you can have them form different type of formations during battle. These formations will effect your overall party attack, or defense.

Also everyone in battle has their own separate HP who can die but the party continues until the whole party is dead. But the whole party can die if the party HP takes enough damage without actually killing each member off one by one. Its kind of weird but i guess it's a way to quicken up the fights.

Once entering the battlefield you have to choose whom to concentrate your attacks on. You can try to focus your Unions on one enemy but leave yourself open to a flank attacks from another monster or spread it evenly. It is a turn based strategy game that makes you think about the next possible move. Every move is dependent on the Union's Attribute Points (AP aka mp) which controls the special moves you can perform. There is also a time button attack system which allows you to deal critical damage and skip a monster turn. Some people have complained of it being annoying but I find it fun to do during battle then watching them hack & slash. You can turn it off within the option menu so its a moot point. Also your HP and AP refills after each battle so you do not need to worry about healing yourself after the battle is over.

What diminishes the gameplay is the horrible slowdowns in frames per second during battle, really slow texture pop up, and long load times. The game is nearly unplayable without installing it into your hard drive. I also encounter continual disk read errors that will force you to start off from your last save point which can be extremely annoying. Installing the game to the hard drive will improve everything. You will still notice the low FPS and slow texture loads but it is not that bad. Running this game on disc is not recommended at all so clear up your hard drive for 6GBs of space.

The soundtrack of The Last Remnant is not remarkable but is not bad either. The battle music gets redundant and the main theme can get played out after a while. There are several versions of the main theme so it tends to wear thin after a couple of times. The voice actors are bearable but it would have been a nice option to include the Japanese voice overs with subtitles.

The controls and camera angles are fine. The only problem I have is the way Rush walks which is kind of eradicate.

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Its hard to recommend The Last Remnant. From the terrible bugs that make it nearly unplayable unless you install it, lackluster storytelling, and mediocre soundtrack. The only thing The Last Remnant got right was the battle system. If you need a jrpg fix then give it a try but otherwise its not a buy.

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