Comments on: The Last Remnant, Demo, Steam Stuff

By: cool1990

cool1990 — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 17:37:11 +0000

i played the demo,and supports mouse,you have just to press the RMB and hold,so you’ll move the camera,
and and you can change the button show in the game,from x360 to keyboard, but The UI stinks that’s for sure.

By: malkav11

malkav11 — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:41:36 +0000

A couple of things – like most JRPGs these days, Last Remnant has full voice acting for cutscenes. Incidental, optional dialogue is unvoiced. Personally I wish it were all unvoiced because a) I can read faster than people can speak by an order of magnitude and b) they still haven’t mastered this thing called “hiring voice actors that don’t suck”.

Secondly, I haven’t looked at the demo, but in the full game they very definitely flesh out what’s going on, what your motivation is, etc. I think the plot’s pretty bad so far, but it’s definitely there and gives context. Apparently the demo doesn’t show that off. Shame.

Thirdly, I guess the counterintuitive levelling is only likely an issue if you want to go after the optional (superhard) bosses. That’s good. I had heard accounts from people that they didn’t have enough HP to tackle disc 2 (on the 360 version it’s two discs) the way they’d originally been levelling. This makes it more akin to the hoops you have to jump through to defeat Emerald and Ruby Weapons in FFVII, or the Dark Aeons in FFX (International) or the arena bosses in the same game, etc. Except that unlike those games, you have to start planning right away and there looks to be less grinding involved. It’s why I’m making a go of it. It’s honestly kind of fun dodging through areas and speedrunning content to get to the grinding bits. Which I haven’t done yet, so we’ll see on that.

By: Nero

Nero — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:52:57 +0000

You can actually do it so it shows keyboard keys instead of xbox 360 buttons while playing. First option in the gamepad menu (yeah weird). I’m not a big JRPG player (last one I played was FF8) but I quite liked this. I didn’t really get the combat at first, but really much of it is automatic. You select the general orders and then the characters do their thing with that. So it’s not like you select a certain spell/item to use with every characters but you have groups of people (unions) that do what you ask. I got almost 4 hours until I finished the demo (can still go back and kill monsters). So yeah, I enjoyed my time with it.

By: Suraj

Suraj — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:06:20 +0000

Bobsy, even with these issues I managed to get into an inn & start on a quest. I started combat by selecting an enemy & pressing spacebar (after trying out all other keys). Lo & behold it raged for 5 minutes accepting no inputs from me & finishing off the enemies. Can anybody explain what should I do to actually take part in the combat?

By: Markoff Chaney

Markoff Chaney — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:00:07 +0000

malkav11 – Thanks for the heads up. That almost moves the game to no-buy for me. What an odd leveling/special ability creation system…

I was just getting into the QTEs as well. They were starting to remind me of the Shadow Hearts series, what may be my favorite JRPG series. Hrmm…

By: Bobsy

Bobsy — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:34:39 +0000

Books =/= games.

I’m looking to be immersed in an exciting fantasy world. This is made difficult if said world operates in silence.

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:09:34 +0000

Bobsy,

There is a reason books are still a popular medium despite tv and film exisiting.

Sometimes written text can carry more momentum than spoken words.

By: Bobsy

Bobsy — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:59:08 +0000

Oh dear lord. I’ve never been turned off a game so quickly. Let’s go through the first couple of minutes. I load the game. No mouse support? I know, we’ve only been using the damn things for 20-odd years, we can’t expect Square-Enix to have caught up yet. Oh I see! It thinks I’m using a 360 pad. Appently I can press X? [presses X on the keyboard] Nothing happens. Oh, it really means the enter key! THEN WHY CAN’T IT TELL ME TO PRESS THE ENTER KEY? ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS CHANGE A TINY SPRITE.

God. Okay, skipping over the blatent and lazy lack of support for the platform, let’s get onto the game. I arrive in some sort of throne room with a bunch of people standing around. Apparently I’m some androgynous person with black emotastic hair. Me all over. I guess that everyone wants to talk to me because they have little speech bubbles above their heads with ellipses in them. Dotdotdot!

Except they don’t speak in words, they speak in text. This is a 1 gig download and they still can’t talk? It’s 2009. The only reason to not have voice acting in a game these days is to save money. Acceptable in an indie game, not in a massive JRPG epic. No-one really tells me what to do or why I should care, and suggest that I should “make preperations” for wherever we’re going. Preperations, huh? Like what? No help? Okay, I’m off to some place in town I don’t know anything about.

On arrival I spot a little frog-thing that texts me a hearty welcome to Blahblah district and… I can’t go on. I don’t have a reason to. Why should I? I want to play Baldur’s Gate or something. It’s not a good port, and it makes no attempt to sell itself to me. Bad demo, bad game. No sale.

By: MeestaNob

MeestaNob — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 10:41:05 +0000

Steamworks saves – does that mean your save games are saved in the Steamcloud?

If so, cool, no faffing about with ‘InsertnameApps/Documents/GameName/Saves’, thank Gordon.

By: Anthony Damiani

Anthony Damiani — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 09:30:15 +0000

“It’s most ‘efficient’ to play Bioshock using only the wrench and lighting plasmid, but it’s about as much fun as punching yourself repeatedly in the balls.”

…. there are other ways to play Bioshock?

By: Simon Jones

Simon Jones — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 08:12:22 +0000

Hm, the demo managed to annoy me about 10 seconds in. It begins in a rather ugly throne room, with loads of characters standing around doing absolutely nothing (other than having giant exclamation marks above their heads).

I try using the mouse to have a look around and get my bearings a bit. It doesn’t seem to work (can this be changed, or is the viewpoint always locked?). So I try the ‘A’ key, and I jerk to the left with a complete disregard for physics.

OK, let’s try ‘S’. I take what can only have been two steps (it’s hard to tell due to the bizarre animation)….and hit a loading screen. No warning, no indication that I was about to leave the zone, before I’d even spoken to any of the characters.

Hehm. Not impressed. Although I freely admit I haven’t really given it a chance. But, then, few games have seemed so woeful so quickly…

By: JKjoker

JKjoker — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 01:58:26 +0000

actually, after watching more trailers and combat videos on youtube i think this game might be pretty fun, the combat system looks a bit like soul nomad.
i hope it does well enough, it might open the doors for FF13 for pc, after all, they had to port it to xbox in order to increase their target market (the costs were so huge that they would need for a really high % of the installed base to buy a copy just to break even), they might as well port it to pc