[X360, PS3] The Last Remnant

Ouch. The 360 version was recently released, and it's getting butchered for its technical shortcomings, especially on the graphical side of things. This doesn't bode well at all for the upcoming PS3 version, considering The Last Remnant runs on the Unreal engine, and if the developers can't even get it to work right on a hardware platform that's supposed to work well with that engine, I'm not eager to see what mess they manage to make out of the PS3 version.

Some excerpts from the Gamespot (crappy review site, I know) review:

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When you first begin The Last Remnant, you'll participate in a battle within moments of inserting the game disc, and chances are that you'll be struck by a glaring issue: The frame rate is awful, and the texture pop-in is shockingly bad. It's an issue you'll never quite get used to, considering that it mars the entirety of the experience. What a shame, because this long and fascinating Japanese role-playing game has a way of getting under your skin. It features a rich, original fantasy world, obviously crafted with great care and artistry, and it tells a strong, politically charged tale that will keep you glued to the screen. Although somewhat flawed, the battle system is fun to play around with, particularly in the second half when enormous armies go head to head in some dramatic, bloody showdowns. Had developer Square Enix not rushed an unfinished product to shelves, The Last Remnant could have been an instant classic. But even if the game isn't what it should have been, RPG fans should take this journey in spite of the game's technical defects.

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It's downright depressing that this inner beauty is so heavily diminished by a totally broken technical framework. The Unreal 3 engine powers The Last Remnant's visuals, but it isn't clear whether the technology wasn't a good fit for the game, or whether the development team simply wasn't capable of using it to manifest its vision. Either way you look at it, the visuals are technically broken, a total embarrassment that intrudes on every single aspect of the gameplay. The frame rate is awful, often pausing for a second or two at a time, and slowing to a crawl anytime anything of significance happens on the screen. This isn't just an annoyance, but a huge detractor to the pace of battles and exploration, which are further broken up by inexplicably long loading times. Cities are divided into tiny areas, and moving from one to the next leads to loading screens that jolt you back to reality every few minutes. Furthermore, though many Unreal 3-powered games suffer from some texture pop-in, you've never seen it to this extent. It can take almost 10 seconds for some textures to load, and that includes everything from ground textures, to character faces, to walls. These drawbacks are somewhat alleviated if you install the game to your hard drive, but it isn't a big enough difference to justify using up such a huge amount of drive space. Either way, we shouldn't have to choose either of these evils.

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Squeenix should just have stuck with their own development tools instead of fiddling around with middleware they've no experience with.

That's sad to hear, as I was looking forward to it. Right now it only scores 66% at Metacritic, I guess we have now to wait for White Knight Chronicles.

The IGN review was even more merciless (53%). Darn, I was hoping for this game to be good - certainly, the previews were quite impressive - but it seems Squeenix seriously dropped the ball this time.

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The problems begin with technical issues. Simply put, The Last Remnant is a coding disaster. Square Enix may have licensed the Unreal Engine 3, the same tools used to make Gears of War, but the developers clearly did not know how to use it. There are such serious framerate issues during combat that what you see on your television sometimes resembles a slideshow. It sullies the entire experience and can even get in the way of gameplay since The Last Remnant has a critical system that requires you to perform timed button presses. The trouble continues with loading, which is laborious given the number of times you go in and out of a fight or change rooms. Once it does get loaded, you'll find awkward texture pop-in which can hurt the visual fidelity of cutscenes and kill any power or emotions they might convey.

The technical performance of The Last Remnant is so poor that I can't believe anybody considered the game finished and ready to release. Things get better if you install the game on your hard drive using the New Xbox Experience dashboard, but it is by no means fixed. All of the problems are still there in slightly less disastrous form. If you don't have a hard drive, The Last Remnant isn't worth the time of day.

Even the aspects that the near-broken game engine doesn't hinder still fall short. The animations in The Last Remnant are downright bad (just get a load of the main character running). And since Square Enix opted for in-engine cutscenes, that means you get the same lame animations during every conversation and the lip syncing is oftentimes creepy looking. During battles, the camera is sometimes placed too close to your characters, rendering them partially see-through or totally invisible. You might even find yourself looking at your character standing inside a dragon's tail while attacking said lizard. The Last Remnant is sloppy at best.

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So yeah, I'll probably be skipping TLR entirely (unless they fix all the issues when the PS3 version is released, which I doubt) and wait for White Knight Chronicles. I'm quite confident actually that WKC will be a good game, given Level 5's track record.

The problem is that these days you just can't rely on a game being good because it is from a specific developer or publisher. Different teams work within these companies, and often work gets farmed out too, so you don't really know who is always behind a game, even with a well respected name up front.

And preview trailers can't always been believed either because so many companies invent the trailer's footage using prerendered graphics and not actual in game content. Something I think should be made illegal. They should have to show actual in game footage of the real game in trailers.

Metascore drops continuously, meanwhile to 63%. But I saw a video review from Gametrailes who gave the game a 8/10, IGN was mainly moaning about graphical issues.

The Last Remnant review from Gametrailers