The Last Story

It is absolutely fitting that the director of The Last Story, Hironobu Sakaguchi, is the creator of the Final Fantasy series. After all, The Last Story is a JRPG that, unlike the latest releases of the famous but ironically endless Square Enix franchise, develops its ideas and characters in a mature, but modest way.

The plot is pretty basic: Zael, the young protagonist, encounters a beautiful but strange girl in the market of a great city one day. And, after helping her escape from the local guards, falls in love with her before discovering that she is, in fact, the princess of that kingdom, Calista.

What makes The Last Story special is how this simple story is told. The romance between Zael and Calista, for example, would certainly be one of the most irritating and unnecessary elements of the plot if it were treated in a juvenile and exaggerated way, but that doesn’t happen here. Their relationship grows little by little. At the beginning, they just feel a natural attraction to each other, but after the powerful experiences they end up sharing and the adventures they go through together, and mainly because of the great deal of understanding that one always offers the other, their relationship becomes something special.

Zael himself is a much more complex character than he appears to be at a first glance. His dream is to become a knight, so he can become able to protect the people from the evil that was inflicted upon his family when he was a child. However, his journey with Calista modifies him in a subtle way, making him see the universe around him in a different light. So, when the opportunity arises to make his dream come true, his hesitation sounds not only natural but also right to the player.

Another positive aspect of the story is the brilliant way in which Sakaguchi manages to interconnect all the plots in the game. The transitions between the political machinations intending to poison the relationship between Zael and Calista, the war against the inhabitants of a distant continent, called the Gurak, and the subplot about the deterioration of nature and the imminent end of the world are seamless, which preventing the game from losing its focus even when dealing with too many themes.

And the same serious and realistic approach to the main love story is also given to all these plots, which start slowly but evolve over time. The war between continents, for example, doesn’t bring one side more righteous than the other; both races (humans and guraks) have extremely similar motivations and commit similar atrocities. Political intrigue sounds logical and necessary to move the most important pieces to war, and the destruction of nature comes as the natural consequence of so much battle, hatred, and death.

The villains in The Last Story also stand out because they occasionally show traces of being complex: they are not evil for evil’s sake, but have excellent reasons for acting the way they do. The motivations of Count Arganan, for example, are absolutely understandable: he is the leader of the human race and has the duty to watch over their future. His relentless pursuit of a power capable of annihilating the rival and hostile race is, in his eyes, perfectly justified. And even his most absurd moment – the solo attack on a dormant alien entity – is understandable because of the apparent lack of alternatives. The vile and cowardly Jirall also has his hostility towards the protagonist well explained, after all, Zael is stealing not only his wife but also his entire future at court. Now, the villain Zangurak (the lost twin brother of Ganondorf from The Legend of Zelda) appears more one-dimensional, although this is due much more to his little presence throughout the adventure than by lack of conflicts or a weak personality.

Structured in the form of chapters and moving at a steady pace, the only problem of the game’s story is precisely the fact that some subplots remain underdeveloped. In the end, it becomes apparent that more time should have been reserved for several characters to grow and have their stories told: in other words, The Last Story should have been longer. The secondary missions of Mirania and Yurick, Zael’s mercenary companions, serve as good examples. These missions – which are, in fact, entire chapters – develop not only their personality but also some of the game’s main themes. However, the rest of the mercenary group – Lowell, Syrenne, and Dagran – have no chapters of their own. With the exception of the latter, since his story has a strong connection with the main one, this lack of development is felt and represents a great loss of opportunity to further expand the narrative.

The Last Story is also full of great scenes loaded with symbolism and meaning – such as Zael and Calista’s escape from her room, when they bump into a servant who throws flower petals into the air, creating a typical wedding scene.

Sakaguchi, it’s worth noting, doesn’t confuse “classic” with stagnation, and with The Last Story he creates an innovative real-time combat system, which is based on magic circles. These circles may be used by a special attack to cause negative effects on enemy combatants. That is, if Zael uses a circle of fire, he will inflict on his enemies a Guard Break (breaks their special defenses); if he uses a forest circle, it will cause Silence (prevents enemies from casting spells); and using one of ice, will cause Slip (makes them… slip). In addition, the protagonist will also have the “Mark of the Outsider” ability at his disposal to attract all enemy attention and may, after a while, give orders to his companions, deciding what kind of magic or combat technique they shall use.

Against the game’s bosses, this system works brilliantly, since they force the player to think about the use of spells and magic circles, the risk/benefit of the Outsider’s power, and even the environment itself, which can often be destroyed or scaled depending on the situation. During duels – with special mention to the fight against General Asthar – it is also an effective system, stimulating an intelligent use of blocking and cover techniques. The problem is during normal battles, which usually have about eight enemies. These confrontations will, with rare exceptions, go like this: the player, upon entering a battlefield, will first observe the formation of the enemy and, after not formulating any strategy whatsoever, will initiate the combat. In five seconds there will be mages casting spells of fire and ice against their enemies; archers poisoning their foes at a safe distance or interrupting the ritual of enemy mages with explosive darts; kamikaze warriors running and cutting everything they see in their path; bridges and towers crumbling over the characters, and enemy soldiers slipping and falling on frozen grounds, at the same time that they are consumed by fire. And so, before Zael and the player can find the nearest wall to use for a special attack, the battle is already over and the hero has leveled up.

This widespread confusion ends so fast because the game’s difficulty is virtually nonexistent. Players will not bother to strategize because it is simply not necessary: ​​enemies, although reasonably clever, are very weak and die with very few blows. Therefore, this ends up sabotaging the combat system most of the time, eliminating most of the challenge. In addition, this combat system would have benefited from the possibility of choosing which character to play with: players will almost always be stuck with Zael. With all the characters available in the online multiplayer mode, this limitation is illogical.

The art direction, in turn, fits the overall direction of the game, building and decorating somber environments. In this respect, Xenoblade Chronicles works as a good point for contrast. Xenoblade contains an eccentric premise – the characters live on a continent in the form of a moving colossus – and thus creates a beautiful alien universe: full of green fields, luminous marshes, tropical forests, and gigantic structures, suiting the scope of its story. Now, The Last Story follows the opposite direction, since it tells a more grounded story. No environment has strong colors: there are plenty of brown and beige, and almost all landscapes are urban and dry. Nevertheless, even following a more sensible and simplistic guideline, the art direction still allows itself some occasional eccentricities, if charged with some meaning, such as painting the floor of Count Arganan’s room as a chessboard.

Graphically, The Last Story pushes the Nintendo Wii’s hardware to its limit. By reproducing a large medieval town, full of inhabitants and animals, and still possessing character models light years ahead of the ones in Xenoblade, it was almost inevitable that the game would choke a few times. If players observe the people of Lazulis City, for example, they will perceive that the more distant ones move in a strange way, as if with low animation frames, and even the movement of the main characters in the cutscenes is hard and unnatural, sometimes reminding Max Steel dolls.

The developers also invited another veteran of the Final Fantasy series to take care of the soundtrack, the composer Nobuo Uematsu. Uematsu, however, presents here one of his most irregular works. While some songs, such as the theme of the castle and the tavern, are nothing but boring, and the one used during war preparations is even similar to a theme of the Transformers movies, other tracks are part of his best work. The battle music, for example, manages to perfectly combine energy with a classic personality; the melody called “New Days” that plays in one of the final scenes is sad, emotional and at the same time optimistic; and the theme for the last battle is rasping and guttural, with screams and an evil chorus, giving the fight an excruciating atmosphere. And the main song “Tubero Mono” makes the scene in which Zael and Calista watch the stars together instantly memorable.

It’s appropriate that the creative director and writer of The Last Story is the same of the first Final Fantasy games because his new game represents just the opposite of what his old series has become. The Last Story is a game that impresses exactly by the execution of its simpler elements. And with so much experience under his belt, it is only natural for Hironobu Sakaguchi to play with the title of his games, as if to say that his works are the last word on the subject.

December 06, 2018.

Review originally published in Portuguese on March 11, 2015.