Gaming Last Remnant

[Drizzt Do'urden]

Okay I got a copy of last remnant for christmas and haven't even got to play it yet :cussing: .

I installed both discs to my xbox since I've heard it can east what are supposedly some long loading sequences. My question is (since I'll bust it out today before I get back on here) what do you think about the game? Is it what you expected it to be? Is it better or worse?

Again I'll be playing the heck out of it for the next two days and get back to everyone with what I think of it.

[Meggido]

I'm impressed with the story. at least on the surface and from the first few hours it looks like the game has a lot of depth in terms of the story. I haven't played it much but it has me really intrigued. That's the good part, the bad part leads to why I haven't played it much.

Basically Square did a horrible job of using the Unreal 3 engine. The load times are horrendous and frequent, even between event changes in cut scenes and starting a battle. To further top it off the game doesn't even flow well in battle with occasional lag as the game loads itself. This can probably be fixed by loading the game onto the hard drive but I haven't tried that yet. The final thing is rendering issues. While a cut scene is occurring it can take as long as 30secs to a min for the graphics to completely render. This should be instantaneous and seamless at least in theory but this is far from the truth. Reviews I read said this can be fixed partially by installing the game onto your hard drive but not by a significant amount.

[Drizzt Do'urden]

Well due to unforseen circumstances I haven't been able to put as much play time into this as I would have liked. I've only logged about an hour, but what I thought I would do is give this game ratings based on my play time every 10 hours.

My first review of the game will be now after 1 hour of play, next will come at 11, 21and so on and so forth.....

Okay after my first hour of gameplay I'm fairly satisfied. Thanks to all the negatives about this game I'm enjoying it that much more, just the oppisite of the whole "big hype bad game" that we've seen time after time this year.

Though they really are probably not neccesary for the most part, I'm going to use spoiler tags. I'm going to try not to reveal much if anything about the game's story or anything else, but slip ups do happen.

[B]Story:[/B] [spoiler]So far the story seems to jump a bit. I'm not sure exactally if jump is the best turn, but it really doesn't move seamlessly from one aspect to another early in the game. One second you character is running headlong into a battle, and the next your in a cave. Then you're accepted by a laid back Marquis just because you say you're somebody (though you are the person you claim to be). So right now I'm sort've torn from this standpoint. [/spoiler]

[B]Battle System:[/B] [spoiler]This is another area I'm torn on. I like Union system they employeed to this due to the fact that I haven't seen anything quite like it, but it seems that if you were in a large battle it would be hard to keep track of your units positions and create any sort've real strategy.

There's one other point that I'm not so sure about; In order to gain new attacks and to increase the effectiveness of the current ones, you must use those attacks. But several times it seems the order the unit attacks from is more random then based on the speed of the character. So you don't always get to attack due to the ease of early level battles. I'm hoping this changes a little bit, I just created my first union outside of the assigneed ones you get right off so I'll keep my fingers crossed. [/spoiler]

[B]Graphics:[/B] [spoiler]They did a pretty decent job on the graphics for Last Remnant. I sort've like the unreal engine in that aspect, but they did a poor job of editing it it would seem. Just as many of the reviews say sometimes images take a few seconds to adjust into 'focus' and can be blurry.

I'm also dissapointed that I haven't seen any REAL cutscenes yet. When I say real I mean FF X quality cutscenes, but it's relatively early on in the game. [/spoiler]

[B]Weapons:[/B] [spoiler]This is great and not so great at the sametime. Its early in the game so I haven't had the opportunity to play with my unions weapons yet, but it is a great feature that I can customize the lead characters weapons in many ways. Single Sword with or without shield, Axe, Polearm, and duel weilding, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Hopefully they do a lot with that later on, giving a reason to switch thigns up.....[/spoiler]

I'm not going to touch on areas such as character depth, maps, or the camera at present since I hadn't had the opportunity to get envolved and wouldn't have anything nice to say about them early on.

[B]A little early:[/B] Okay so I don't have quite 11 hours of gameplay yet, but I'm going to go ahead and post. In reality have about 8 1/2 or 9 thanks to a lot of leveling up and fine tuning my units. I'm juiced about this rating though.....


As far as the graphics and battle system, I'm really about the same on. There are a few things I'm liking more, like how you gain new abilities by using the old ones. Making it a sort've "practice makes perfect" type of "growing". The graphics really haven't changed much, but I do notice that I'm noticing the flaws less due to how much I'm enjoying the games.



The pesky load scenes that seemed to take an eternity are bothering me less and less. I'm sure that's due to the story line that I'm becoming more and more engrossed in. I am dissapointed that the only character so far with a lot of "depth" to his personality is the main character. Which isn't a bad thing if there weren't so many other characters you deal with on a regular basis.

Another great feature on this game is the customization. You can create, modify, or disassemble any weapon or piece of equipment. Even so early in the game I've modified both my blades I'm dual weilding twice, so I'm sure it's going to be a bit thing later.

I'm going to end this with a question to anyone who has the game. I'm noticing it's blurry on my Television. Like the words are so small and smashed together. I have a 32 inch, its not an HD or even a Plasma. Just your basic 32 inch, is anybody else having this problem?

[Vigilance]

I need help in this game defeating a boss. Does anyone know how to beat the Hell's Gate boss? I can't seem to beat him for some reason. any suggestion?