Blastoise
01-25-2011, 09:58 PM
I have a soft spot for SRPGs, so I was kind of interested in playing this. That said, the $40 price tag on Steam made me hesitant to buy in on a SE RPG with middling reviews, at least until the holiday sale took $20 off and made that concern moot. Hell, I bought Mytran Wars for that price, I probably couldn't do much worse with twenty bucks.
...what were we talking about? Oh yeah. All in all I like TLR, but man is it a mixed bag.
Let's get some of the bad stuff out of the way first. Technically this game is mostly competent but suffers from some noticeable blotches: I got notable texture pop-in when the game would first load up a new area, which usually only lasts for a couple seconds but is still jarring visually. Loading times are also annoying, not so much for their length but their frequency. A common example: you enter (LOADING (http://i53.tinypic.com/23qxvko.jpg)) a section of town, go to the (LOADING (http://i53.tinypic.com/23qxvko.jpg)) warrior's guild to check for new recruits and to see if you've completed any guild tasks (which are mostly "kill 10 things at this place" objectives the game simply can't put under a "guild tasks" tab in the party menu because it offends Jesus or something), exit (LOADING (http://i53.tinypic.com/23qxvko.jpg)) back to the section of town you were in previously and go to the (LOADING (http://i53.tinypic.com/23qxvko.jpg)) pub to see if anyone's offering a sidequest. During that sequence you'll probably spend more time looking at the loading screen then you will moving around, and it makes taking care of your business feel like more of a slog than it should. Loading into battles can be similarly arduous (I've had boss battles spend what feels like over 10-15 seconds just loading, despite the fact that there was a 2+ minute cutscene where it could have been loading in the background), and the bad old days of the game spending longer to load a fight than it takes you to finish it do pop their heads out on occasion.
Story-wise, well...I think someone (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=154207&page=3) pretty much summed it up when the game was announced:
- Isolated island
- Guy and sister
- Kidnap plot
- Evil organization
- Ancient technology
- War over relics
Hmmm.... man, I'm really impressed. This must be the most original JRPG plot S-E ever came up with!
Of course, what he didn't know then was that the main character (Rush Sykes, in this case) would basically be a country bumpkin for the better part of the first half of the game. There's nothing wrong with that archetype per se, but in a story that features a healthy amount of political intrigue Rush will say such incredibly dumb, ignorant shit ("let's storm the heavily guarded palace in broad daylight to rescue my adorable loli sister!") that you will wish the main protagonist was one of the other better, smarter characters. Not that the story is all that great to begin with: there's hints of potential here and there, but for the most part seeing what happens next in the story is often the least important impetus for continuing down the critical path.
That said, once you get past a lot of the nonsense the combat system itself is actually pretty fun. You control up to five parties (or "unions" in the game's parlance) during battle, each of which has one to five individual characters and functions as an independent unit. Mechanically, the game does a pretty good job of encouraging positioning and morale and generally discouraging 5-on-1 unit pigpiles: trying to burn down a boss with a five-union blitz will usually only ensure that his mooks flank you and pick you apart, since flank attacks not only do extra damage but also hurt your units' morale (which reduces your stats, which in turn increases the damage you take, etc. etc.). You quickly learn to make use of your unions to tank bosses and run interference for others (for example, having one union intercept a nearby enemy union so that they in turn don't intercept one of yours going for an enemy farther up the field), and even though you can only give your unions general orders (they choose the specific attacks based on your command) you feel like you have relatively solid control over tactics and the battle for the most part. Unfortunately, that feeling doesn't last forever.
I should probably preface the next part by noting that with a lot of RPGs I hit a "love is over" point where I decide to try and do everything the game offers (optional stupid hard bosses, rare things, etc.), inevitably frustrating myself in the process. With the Disgaea games I will typically get to the low 2000's on some of my characters before realizing that this is a process I have no interest in continuing for the next 60+ hours. With Devil Survivor it was banging my head against Lucifer. With Fallout: New Vegas it was trying to do everything possible before going for an ending before realizing that if I tried to do that I would never, ever finish the game. About the only RPG I can think of where I've followed through is completing my Pokedexes in Pokemon Red and Diamond, and even then I've left some of the challenges in the latter to linger (I decided I didn't want to bother with 100+ wins in the battle tower after my best streak was broken by a Quick Claw Dewgong who landed Sheer Cold three times in a row). So if some of the stuff below sounds bad, know that it's (mostly) optional content and in some respects the natural result of me trying to cash checks my ass is unwilling to catch.
Part of the problem comes in when you want to exercise finer control over your characters' gear. Contrary to most RPGs, in TLR you only have direct control over the equipment Rush uses and equips: other characters will use money they earn for participating in battle (as well as ingredients you let them take from defeated monsters or treasure) to upgrade their gear automatically (though when they ask you can steer them towards an emphasis on combat, mystic arts, or balance). You can also give characters weapons or accessories you find, but only if that character asks you for the specific item and who asks for what can be frustratingly arbitrary. As an example of how frustrating this can be, during the course of the game you acquire a relatively powerful 1H sword which two story characters will ask for: one is a swordsman, the other is your basic healbot mana princess. However, the game gives the mana princess higher priority on the weapon, so inevitably you'll spend a lot of time telling her "no, you can't have it" when she asks (over and over and over and over...). The swordsman didn't bother to ask for it until a story even took said mana princess out of the party for a while, and even then it took some time before the prompt even came up. Some of the components your party members ask for to upgrade their weapon can also be utterly infuriating to find if you have any idea where to look in the first place (as is the case when a party member asks for one of the three hojillion types of metal ore that only come from one mining point in the middle of Hell's half-acre), so after a while you really start to question if all this heartache is better than just buying your characters equipment from a damn merchant. It's a system that streamlines the entire process at the most superficial level, but makes enacting your own will upon the process so utterly arduous that you feel like you would have been better off without it in the first place.
Oh, and your characters have classes too, but don't expect the game to tell you how to get them or what they actually do. Congratulations, your character is now a Lordly Cavalier! What does that mean, you say?
...what, you actually wanted an answer? Sorry!
I admit for some people, the above probably doesn't matter much. However, I'm one of those people who approaches SRPGs like this as, essentially, a box of Legos: given the pieces before me, what is the most badass group of roiling monster death I can come up with? Things that needlessly obfuscate or make that process more difficult for no real reason frustrate me more than anything else.
I was willing to give this all a pass while the combat system was still engaging and fun. However, after trying some of the optional hard monsters/battles I began to fall out of love with the system as I began to see its warts. Granted, a combat system that significantly relies on your friendly AI to make not-retarded choices has a flaw that's pretty obvious, but the main game generally does a good enough job that this doesn't really become apparent or prevalent for the most part.
But then I tried to throw down with The Fiery Gates. (http://lastremnant.wikia.com/wiki/The_Fiery_Gates)
http://images.wikia.com/lastremnant/images/1/12/The_Fiery_Gates.jpg
Above: not a vagina
I should probably admit that maybe I should have grinded more (the wiki strategy suggests two unions with 7k+ HP, my highest union at my last attempt was 4.5k HP). However, I don't feel like stats were really my primary issue with the fight.
Let me explain. The big thing The Fiery Gates does is resurrect your fallen unions at the end of every round and enthralls them (in other words, they act as an enemy unit until you KO and rez them again). Other than that, beyond some random spike damage the boss is not particularly threatening on its own: your main challenge is to ensure that there are never two or more unions that wind up under its control, because once you hit that point you tend to get stuck in a destructive cycle where your enthralled unions will usually one-shot another one of yours and you eventually get overwhelmed trying to break out of the loop. As long as you keep your unions topped off though, the risk of this happening is rather low, even at my unions' less-than-optimal stats.
Most of my more successful attempts ended pretty much the same way: I would clear the first couple of enemy waves before the boss (who, by the way, put out far more damage than the boss does), get to the boss topped up on health and go to town. At some point during the fight a couple of my unions would end up at around the 50-75% point on health, but none of my unions (despite each one having not-insignificant healing ability) would have the "heal yourselves/heal the others" command come up.
Guess which turn the boss decides to let loose with the aforementioned spike damage. Unions die, get rezzed and enthralled, run riot. Game over.
The first time this happened, my thought was "well, sometimes shit happens." The third time it happened my thought was "this is some serious goddamn bullshit."
Part of the problem is that the designers really love the idea of giant monster battles, even though the battle system really isn't designed for it: once all your unions have engaged there's no real way to command them to make some distance between them and the boss so as to avoid the inevitable barrage of AoE damage, so you're basically left to watch your unions take huge gobs of damage like a bitch even though you can usually see it coming a mile away. This sort of stupidity emerges at other points in the game (no, I don't want you to rez the Cyclops (http://lastremnant.wikia.com/wiki/Cyclops_%28Summon%29), I want you to rez that union that can actually heal and rez), but once the game starts to ask more of the system it feels like it starts to fall apart and you have minimal control over stopping it. It's telling that Cachexia (http://lastremnant.wikia.com/wiki/Cachexia) is considered a requirement for some of the high-level bosses, since apparently making sure they can't spam massive AoE damage is the only viable way to compensate for your AI's failings.
Don't let all this bagging on the game make you think I absolutely hated it, though: I put nearly 57 hours in and finished the game, so clearly I enjoyed it. I'm just disappointed that a lot of the systems didn't feel like they held up under close scrutiny. Alternatively, it might just be that I'm bad at RPGs because I avoid grinding as much as possible and my interest begins to drop dramatically once it appears that grinding is an almost unavoidable prerequisite to continuing.
Either works, I suppose.
...what were we talking about? Oh yeah. All in all I like TLR, but man is it a mixed bag.
Let's get some of the bad stuff out of the way first. Technically this game is mostly competent but suffers from some noticeable blotches: I got notable texture pop-in when the game would first load up a new area, which usually only lasts for a couple seconds but is still jarring visually. Loading times are also annoying, not so much for their length but their frequency. A common example: you enter (LOADING (http://i53.tinypic.com/23qxvko.jpg)) a section of town, go to the (LOADING (http://i53.tinypic.com/23qxvko.jpg)) warrior's guild to check for new recruits and to see if you've completed any guild tasks (which are mostly "kill 10 things at this place" objectives the game simply can't put under a "guild tasks" tab in the party menu because it offends Jesus or something), exit (LOADING (http://i53.tinypic.com/23qxvko.jpg)) back to the section of town you were in previously and go to the (LOADING (http://i53.tinypic.com/23qxvko.jpg)) pub to see if anyone's offering a sidequest. During that sequence you'll probably spend more time looking at the loading screen then you will moving around, and it makes taking care of your business feel like more of a slog than it should. Loading into battles can be similarly arduous (I've had boss battles spend what feels like over 10-15 seconds just loading, despite the fact that there was a 2+ minute cutscene where it could have been loading in the background), and the bad old days of the game spending longer to load a fight than it takes you to finish it do pop their heads out on occasion.
Story-wise, well...I think someone (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=154207&page=3) pretty much summed it up when the game was announced:
- Isolated island
- Guy and sister
- Kidnap plot
- Evil organization
- Ancient technology
- War over relics
Hmmm.... man, I'm really impressed. This must be the most original JRPG plot S-E ever came up with!
Of course, what he didn't know then was that the main character (Rush Sykes, in this case) would basically be a country bumpkin for the better part of the first half of the game. There's nothing wrong with that archetype per se, but in a story that features a healthy amount of political intrigue Rush will say such incredibly dumb, ignorant shit ("let's storm the heavily guarded palace in broad daylight to rescue my adorable loli sister!") that you will wish the main protagonist was one of the other better, smarter characters. Not that the story is all that great to begin with: there's hints of potential here and there, but for the most part seeing what happens next in the story is often the least important impetus for continuing down the critical path.
That said, once you get past a lot of the nonsense the combat system itself is actually pretty fun. You control up to five parties (or "unions" in the game's parlance) during battle, each of which has one to five individual characters and functions as an independent unit. Mechanically, the game does a pretty good job of encouraging positioning and morale and generally discouraging 5-on-1 unit pigpiles: trying to burn down a boss with a five-union blitz will usually only ensure that his mooks flank you and pick you apart, since flank attacks not only do extra damage but also hurt your units' morale (which reduces your stats, which in turn increases the damage you take, etc. etc.). You quickly learn to make use of your unions to tank bosses and run interference for others (for example, having one union intercept a nearby enemy union so that they in turn don't intercept one of yours going for an enemy farther up the field), and even though you can only give your unions general orders (they choose the specific attacks based on your command) you feel like you have relatively solid control over tactics and the battle for the most part. Unfortunately, that feeling doesn't last forever.
I should probably preface the next part by noting that with a lot of RPGs I hit a "love is over" point where I decide to try and do everything the game offers (optional stupid hard bosses, rare things, etc.), inevitably frustrating myself in the process. With the Disgaea games I will typically get to the low 2000's on some of my characters before realizing that this is a process I have no interest in continuing for the next 60+ hours. With Devil Survivor it was banging my head against Lucifer. With Fallout: New Vegas it was trying to do everything possible before going for an ending before realizing that if I tried to do that I would never, ever finish the game. About the only RPG I can think of where I've followed through is completing my Pokedexes in Pokemon Red and Diamond, and even then I've left some of the challenges in the latter to linger (I decided I didn't want to bother with 100+ wins in the battle tower after my best streak was broken by a Quick Claw Dewgong who landed Sheer Cold three times in a row). So if some of the stuff below sounds bad, know that it's (mostly) optional content and in some respects the natural result of me trying to cash checks my ass is unwilling to catch.
Part of the problem comes in when you want to exercise finer control over your characters' gear. Contrary to most RPGs, in TLR you only have direct control over the equipment Rush uses and equips: other characters will use money they earn for participating in battle (as well as ingredients you let them take from defeated monsters or treasure) to upgrade their gear automatically (though when they ask you can steer them towards an emphasis on combat, mystic arts, or balance). You can also give characters weapons or accessories you find, but only if that character asks you for the specific item and who asks for what can be frustratingly arbitrary. As an example of how frustrating this can be, during the course of the game you acquire a relatively powerful 1H sword which two story characters will ask for: one is a swordsman, the other is your basic healbot mana princess. However, the game gives the mana princess higher priority on the weapon, so inevitably you'll spend a lot of time telling her "no, you can't have it" when she asks (over and over and over and over...). The swordsman didn't bother to ask for it until a story even took said mana princess out of the party for a while, and even then it took some time before the prompt even came up. Some of the components your party members ask for to upgrade their weapon can also be utterly infuriating to find if you have any idea where to look in the first place (as is the case when a party member asks for one of the three hojillion types of metal ore that only come from one mining point in the middle of Hell's half-acre), so after a while you really start to question if all this heartache is better than just buying your characters equipment from a damn merchant. It's a system that streamlines the entire process at the most superficial level, but makes enacting your own will upon the process so utterly arduous that you feel like you would have been better off without it in the first place.
Oh, and your characters have classes too, but don't expect the game to tell you how to get them or what they actually do. Congratulations, your character is now a Lordly Cavalier! What does that mean, you say?
...what, you actually wanted an answer? Sorry!
I admit for some people, the above probably doesn't matter much. However, I'm one of those people who approaches SRPGs like this as, essentially, a box of Legos: given the pieces before me, what is the most badass group of roiling monster death I can come up with? Things that needlessly obfuscate or make that process more difficult for no real reason frustrate me more than anything else.
I was willing to give this all a pass while the combat system was still engaging and fun. However, after trying some of the optional hard monsters/battles I began to fall out of love with the system as I began to see its warts. Granted, a combat system that significantly relies on your friendly AI to make not-retarded choices has a flaw that's pretty obvious, but the main game generally does a good enough job that this doesn't really become apparent or prevalent for the most part.
But then I tried to throw down with The Fiery Gates. (http://lastremnant.wikia.com/wiki/The_Fiery_Gates)
http://images.wikia.com/lastremnant/images/1/12/The_Fiery_Gates.jpg
Above: not a vagina
I should probably admit that maybe I should have grinded more (the wiki strategy suggests two unions with 7k+ HP, my highest union at my last attempt was 4.5k HP). However, I don't feel like stats were really my primary issue with the fight.
Let me explain. The big thing The Fiery Gates does is resurrect your fallen unions at the end of every round and enthralls them (in other words, they act as an enemy unit until you KO and rez them again). Other than that, beyond some random spike damage the boss is not particularly threatening on its own: your main challenge is to ensure that there are never two or more unions that wind up under its control, because once you hit that point you tend to get stuck in a destructive cycle where your enthralled unions will usually one-shot another one of yours and you eventually get overwhelmed trying to break out of the loop. As long as you keep your unions topped off though, the risk of this happening is rather low, even at my unions' less-than-optimal stats.
Most of my more successful attempts ended pretty much the same way: I would clear the first couple of enemy waves before the boss (who, by the way, put out far more damage than the boss does), get to the boss topped up on health and go to town. At some point during the fight a couple of my unions would end up at around the 50-75% point on health, but none of my unions (despite each one having not-insignificant healing ability) would have the "heal yourselves/heal the others" command come up.
Guess which turn the boss decides to let loose with the aforementioned spike damage. Unions die, get rezzed and enthralled, run riot. Game over.
The first time this happened, my thought was "well, sometimes shit happens." The third time it happened my thought was "this is some serious goddamn bullshit."
Part of the problem is that the designers really love the idea of giant monster battles, even though the battle system really isn't designed for it: once all your unions have engaged there's no real way to command them to make some distance between them and the boss so as to avoid the inevitable barrage of AoE damage, so you're basically left to watch your unions take huge gobs of damage like a bitch even though you can usually see it coming a mile away. This sort of stupidity emerges at other points in the game (no, I don't want you to rez the Cyclops (http://lastremnant.wikia.com/wiki/Cyclops_%28Summon%29), I want you to rez that union that can actually heal and rez), but once the game starts to ask more of the system it feels like it starts to fall apart and you have minimal control over stopping it. It's telling that Cachexia (http://lastremnant.wikia.com/wiki/Cachexia) is considered a requirement for some of the high-level bosses, since apparently making sure they can't spam massive AoE damage is the only viable way to compensate for your AI's failings.
Don't let all this bagging on the game make you think I absolutely hated it, though: I put nearly 57 hours in and finished the game, so clearly I enjoyed it. I'm just disappointed that a lot of the systems didn't feel like they held up under close scrutiny. Alternatively, it might just be that I'm bad at RPGs because I avoid grinding as much as possible and my interest begins to drop dramatically once it appears that grinding is an almost unavoidable prerequisite to continuing.
Either works, I suppose.