[X360, PS3] The Last Remnant

[Sharingan]

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.

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.

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.

[Harrison]

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.

[Demon Cleaner]

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