The Last Remnant

The Last Remnant is pure, crystalline perfection. Every facet of the game, every element, every design decision, they all work in unison to create the most excruciating experience possible. If you are looking for a thing that can annoy and infuriate you in equal measure, there’s no other option around that is so flawlessly, impeccably constructed to fulfill and even surpass any masochist desire. The Last Remnant’s systems are tailor-made to produce a dreadful sense of utter frustration and make players feel virtually impotent against everything that is happening on the screen. Meanwhile, the story is so nonsensically bad, with an idiotic protagonist, loose plot, and shallow characters, that it’s nothing short of a feat that it still manages to be thematically controversial. Truly, the whole game is a quite remarkable achievement.

The game’s protagonist is called Rush and, sure enough, the first time we see him, Rush is rushing into the middle of a warzone in search of his sister Irina. Rush’s main trait is being impulsive: he will rush out of meetings or right into powerful enemies without giving it a second thought. “Rush, wait,” will be one of the most repeated sentences in the narrative. This, of course, makes him look like a fool: Rush never thinks before acting, which often gets him into a lot of unnecessary difficulties. But more than a fool, Rush is especially dense, for there’s no other possible explanation for his first actions in the game, when he rushes into a warzone because he mistook a female general for Irina – a general with completely different garments and physical appearance. Rush is looking at a bunch of flowers with his ladylike sister and when he looks around and sees that she has disappeared, his first thought is: “Well, there’s a huge battlefield over there that I haven’t noticed until now. Irina is surely there for some reason, and she’s also definitely that woman wielding dual swords and shouting commands at her army. Because when I looked away for just a minute, she certainly managed to enlist in that army, rise in its ranks until she became a general, and now she’s that fierce commandant over there. That must be it.” And so Rush rushes into the battlefield and tackles that general because, well, why not?

The thing is: The Last Remnant is so perfectly constructed that this first scene actually serves as a microcosm of the whole experience. Rush doesn’t make sense there because he will not make any sense whatsoever ever. After that battle, for example, he meets an important duke, David of Athlum, and starts to call him Dave, give the guy advice and shout at him like they’re best pals or old childhood friends – although they have never met before. Rush is a protagonist so base and stupid that when the duke tells him he has to respect his sister and stop treating her like a child, the protagonist’s magnificent answer is – and I kid you not – “Respect, huh? Sounds… deep.” David, nonetheless, decides to help the protagonist find his sister since he has a good heart and because Rush and Irina are the offspring of some important people.

The game reveals who kidnapped Irina right away, though – an evil “wizard” called Wagram – and the first half of the game is just the group chasing the guy around. This seems like a simple, uninteresting plot and indeed that’s exactly what it is. The bad guys, for example, are written so in tune with the rest of the narrative that they say stuff like, “Women are meant to be servile,” “The only divine power that shall be connected to them is me,” and – my favorite – “I want to rule the world,” just to make sure the player understands they’re the bad guys. Make no mistake: these are not sentences that reflect any theme inside the narrative; their only function is to show how evil the villains are. Nobody can accuse The Last Remnant of pretending to be something that is not: this is an honest game that warns about how dull it really is right from the very start.

Its second half is even more fascinating: now that Rush and David are not looking for Irina anymore, and are kind of lost, lacking a clear goal, they decide to investigate a strange figure subtly called “The Conqueror” to find if he’s up to no good – spoilers: he is.

The game is called The Last Remnant because in its fantastical universe filled with lizard and frog people – one of David’s main generals, Torval, is a four-armed humanoid panther with bat-like ears – there are these things called – you guessed it – Remnants. They’re mystical artifacts/creatures/whatever-the-plot-needs-them-to-be that hold incredible power: since they can be used as weapons of mass destruction each kingdom has one to ensure that “peace” is maintained in the world.

Warning: this paragraph will go into mild spoilers – that is, if you think there’s something to spoil in The Last Remnant. The Conqueror thinks holding and wielding Remnants is a really bad idea since weapons of mass destruction are usually built to cause – you guessed it – mass destruction. He believes that humanity will eventually break this fragile peace and bring destruction upon the planet: “At this rate, they will push the Remnants’ power beyond their limits. They will destroy all existence,” he says. The main characters, however, all disagree with him. “Do you really think so little of us,” David asks The Conqueror, although the answer should be fairly obvious, especially considering Rush’s next response, in which he places the fate of the whole world beneath his loved ones: “My friends and family is something that I wouldn’t  trade for the world.” Put a Remnant in Rush’s hands and he’ll use it – actually the game puts several and the player really uses them to vanquish not only monsters but also people. But the rub is that – being an obnoxious villain – The Conqueror doesn’t intend to solve the problem by doing the logical thing – destroying the Remnants – but by annihilating humanity. And so the main characters all try to thwart his plans and stop everyone’s death. However, as the narrative in The Last Remnant is so expertly crafted, the player only discovers these things in the very final cutscene, when the themes obviously have no room to breathe or be developed: the brilliance here lies in the fact that, since the game apparently treats David and Rush’s line of reasoning – using Remnants is great and we should just trust that mankind will do the right thing – as a heroic one, giving players too much time to think about what’s being really said would make them question if the game is actually condoning the development and use of WMDs for the protection of one’s country and people, and, well, nobody wants to go that way and so let’s drop the subject and move on.

The Last Remnant is so self-aware of its own nature that, knowing how problematic – no, let’s change it to unique – its main story is, it actually makes it a very small part of the experience. The main meat of the game is doing sidequests, in which Rush will meet someone in need of help in the local pub and – you guessed it – help them. These sidequests usually take an hour to complete since they often involve whole dungeons and each battle in the game tends to lasts a while. Narratively, they are very basic with characters saying stuff like, “oh, there is this girl lost in this cave, can you go and rescue her for me?” One of the quest givers even goes a step beyond and blatantly exposes the sexism of the mission while explaining the reason she had to abandon her friend in a dungeon, “A girl can only take so much… I’m sure a man like you would understand.”

There are dozens of sidequests in the game, making it easily last more the 60 hours. Most of them, of course, have boring set-ups and payoffs. There’s one that is absolutely great if you want to waste a huge chunk of your time doing absolutely nothing: it requires Rush to walk across a vast expanse of desert filled with nothing but sand and a couple of monsters, going back and forth, to read the inscriptions on some pillars in the right order to summon a random ghost. And you can always mess up the order so that you have a legitimate reason to begin from the quest from the start and waste even more time. But the moment you do everything right, and the ghost of a woman finally appears, what happens?  She just leads you to a random spot in the desert to collect a treasure for the character that sent you there. And the reward for the whole quest? You won’t know even after completing it. After all, several sidequests in the game offer as a reward a special item but offer no clue about its purpose. You can receive an item called “Ves Salia”, for instance, with a description that says, “A red stone known as the roc’s fang.” But what does it do? You just have to visit an internet FAQ to find out! And the answer is: most of these items are really useless and only serve as pre-requisites for more sidequests, giving the whole thing a spectacularly frustrating feedback loop.

Some of these quests are important, though, since they will unlock special characters for your party, which at the end can have up to eighteen units divided into five squads called unions. Eighteen units in your party, but do you know how many of them can you actually customize, like changing the basic equipment, besides Rush? None. Eighteen units in your party and do you know how many of them are you allowed to directly command in battle, choosing actions? None. These units have specials attacks, but can you choose when to use them? Nope. You have summons at your disposal, but can you choose when to activate them? Nope. You have spells that are more effective when enemy unions are grouped together, and some that work better when there are a lot of monsters in the same union, but can you choose when to use them? Nope.

“Obtuse” is a great word to describe The Last Remnant. The game has a lot of very complex systems but decides to allow the player control over only a tiny fraction of them. Take the combat, for example: the game decides which union’s actions are going to be available and they all have very generic and vague names like “attack using combat arts” or “attack using mystic arts.” In a normal RPG, if a character has a number of skills and spells at their disposal, the player usually can select the specific one they want to use: the strategy lies there. But The Last Remnant is different; The Last Remnant is special. Here, you can only select “attack using combat arts” and the characters in that union will use one of their skills seemingly at random or ignore you – because why not – and just use a regular attack. Eventually, the player will be able to make an educated guess, based on the action points used by the command, which arts are going to be selected, but the player will remain with no control over which actions will appear available at any given time. This renders a rather complex combat system into a very simple and boring one: while you watch more than thirty combat animations, the thing that you’ll have the most control over in combat will actually be the frequent Quick Time Event that will pop up and that can drastically alter the result of the battle. When I state that The Last Remnant is a thing to behold is because of stuff like this: it’s a JRPG with a very complex combat system but that decides to give the player direct control only over Quick Time Events. It’s simply amazing.

The thing about The Last Remnant is that there are a lot of factors at play deciding which actions will be available, which characters will actually attack using the command chosen, which attacks will hit or miss or be blocked, when the option to use summons will appear, and so forth, but all these factors are kept hidden from the player. This makes most things that happen in battle seem very random, especially when the player is not using an external FAQ to get a basic grasp of the mechanics. You can set up formations for your unions, for instance, but if that does anything besides slightly increasing the stats of a union, the game doesn’t tell. Units will eventually change class and learn new arts, but what these classes mean, the game doesn’t tell, and what will determine what arts will be learned the game doesn’t tell either. The whole game seems designed to keep the player in the dark: “Look at all those amazing systems,” The Last Remnant seems to say, “and despair, because you can’t control any them. Instead, here, have some more Quick Time Events to keep you occupied.”

Some of the game’s systems are also very counterintuitive. As you battle enemies, for example, your “Battle Rank” grows. Since units don’t have a level attached to them – it’s The Last Remnant, of course it would ditch even levels – the Battle Rank seems to assume that function at a first glance: the player wins battles, gain “experience” – which is never shown as well – and, eventually, the Battle Rank goes up one level. However, the Battle Rank isn’t an indicator of how strong the party is, which everyone would naturally assume it is, but has the precisely opposite function: it determines how strong the enemies are going to be because the difficulty scales up with the Battle Rank. The player, without external guidance, will find out about that the hard way.

As its director, Hiroshi Takai, worked in two SaGa games, in The Last Remnant characters’ stats also grow with each battle instead of when the character levels up – after all, here they never level up. But what some of these stats do exactly remains a mystery even to internet FAQs. There’s a character, for instance, with a stat called “Misfortune”. Therefore, after some battles, you will see the sentence “Misfortune grew,” which is simply perfect in its counterintuitivity.

The game’s also very overwhelming during its first hours thanks to its terminology. In the first battle alone you will be faced with terms like “Deadlock”, “Raidlock”, “Rear Attack”, “Intercepted” and so forth. These terms are related to the positioning of your unions in battle: when one of your unions attacks an enemy both of them enter into a “deadlock”. Then, if another one of your unions attacks the same enemy, they’ll go behind them and initiate a “flank attack”, which will increase the damage given. But if another enemy unit chooses to attack this second union – and is faster than it – this union will actually be “intercepted” before having a chance to initiate its flank attack. However, you can only guess the targets of enemy unions and who will act first. There are also some enemies that can be “deadlocked” by multiple unions before being able to be flanked, but there’s no way to see that information before “multi-locking” most of your unions. In the same vein, there are enemy attacks that deal huge damage if your unions are near one another, but you can’t move them around the battlefield if they’re fighting the same enemy. It’s as if The Last Remnant had two directors: one tasked with having great ideas, while the other’s goal is to butcher them – and the latter does an admirable job indeed.

But one idea that was already born problematic is the bar showing the “morale” of your army. If you are going well in battle, it will tip into your favor and facilitate critical hits and more powerful attacks, but if the enemy is winning the fight, it will make the battle even more difficult, basically unbalancing the game by favoring the side that is already at an advantage.

Since you can’t control a thing during combat – and you can even set the Quick Time Events to be resolved automatically – the frustration during some difficult battles is inevitable. Scenarios like having only melee actions available to your magic-focused unions, or having only healing options when everyone is in full health, are very common and can be incredibly infuriating or very, very funny depending on your mood at the time. And each battle will take a while since you are going to have to watch the attack animations of your eighteen units plus the enemies’ – in the Remaster version, however, you can activate a “turbo mode” which will speed up the action by a whole lot: you probably won’t be able to follow what’s happening on the screen anymore, but again, you’re bound to reach a point when you are going to think “yeah, I won’t, but who cares.”

Finally, since you can’t directly equip anyone but Rush, when you go out of towns – which are formed by just one or two streets with a Pub, a Guild, some vendors, and a lot of background buildings, perfectly symbolizing how the best things in the game are kept in the background, leaving the player with just the basics and nothing to explore and learn – the characters will randomly ask if they can “borrow” some of the equipment you have acquired. To make matters worse, they will also ask for specific items to improve something – the game, of course, doesn’t tell what –, which means that when you leave a town you will be sometimes met with more than six messages from your units. “Rush, you ever heard of Sharp Homunculus Horn? I was hoping you’d come with me to look for some,” one of them will ask, and, after you press A to go on, another character will pop up and ask, “Hey! You know what would be super-special awesome? Imperium! Let’s find some,” and then a third character will show up and ask, “What’s good? I’m thinking we should get some Vulture Underbelly Fur? It’ll be the jump-off,” and then another one will appear, and you get the idea. About the fortieth time this happens any sensible player will question their use of free time and want to murder every single one of these characters.

How can one summarize The Last Remnant and do justice to how brilliant it is? Well, do you know the movie Cats? The abomination directed by Tom Hooper that is a feast for the eyes and ears? That defies logic and explanation? That is utterly magnificent? Well, just imagine that one of its characters, Mr. Mistoffelees, the great conjuring cat, went and transformed the whole experience of watching the movie into a bunch of JRPG systems. The incomprehensible result would be something akin to The Last Remnant. And if you haven’t watched Cats yet, what are you waiting for? It had, at the very least, the decency of lasting less than sixty hours.

May 06, 2020.