Welcome back to Save State where we whip, but don’t you dare nae nae. We only move forward in this house, never learning! The Last Remnant is one of those titles that’s a massive bugbear of mine. A long time ago I bought it, and my Xbox 360 red ringed while playing. While my Xbox was getting repaired, I lent the title to fellow columnist Neal Sayatovich, who also fell in love with it. I took it back after my Xbox was returned to me and… it red ringed again. The second time was very funny because right before the console died for a second time, the visuals completely broke, with all of the textures becoming various hues of neon. It didn’t help that I didn’t fully understand the leveling system, so while my Xbox was shipped off yet again, I bought the BradyGames strategy guide for The Last Remnant, read up on what I needed to do, and fully prepared to immerse myself in the adventure upon my Xbox’s subsequent return.
What I discovered about The Last Remnant was that raising your stats and learning new skills was more like a SaGa title, where your battle rank (or level) doesn’t necessarily inform the stats of your characters, so grinding could actually make the experience intensely difficult or outright unbeatable. After restarting The Last Remnant on my battle-worn Xbox 360, I made sure to keep my battle rating low and my stats and skills high, making it about 60% of the way through the story when a mandatory cutscene caused the title to crash every single time. I made it to the last of the bases you need to take out, and the cutscene crashed 10 out of 10 attempts. So, I reloaded a save from five to 10 hours before, rushed back to that point to see if maybe that could fix it, only to discover… nope, it crashed on that exact cutscene. Whatever broke that particular save occurred at some point much earlier, so I was once again forced to restart The Last Remnant.
Attempt number three involved me adhering to the guide, attempting to complete every single side quest available in order to fight the true final boss at the end. Of course, wouldn’t you know it, one of the side quests broke and was incompletable. I finished the side quest and returned to the quest giver, but everything would freeze upon quest completion. Rather than restart for a fourth time (because I wasn’t going to just not fight the true final boss after all these hours of play), I ultimately decided that the Xbox 360 version was too buggy to finish and stuck the disc in its case for good.
Imagine my surprise when I spied The Last Remnant Remastered on the Switch eShop at a pretty substantial discount, and that many of the bugs from the original release were completely squashed. For $8, I figured I could do worse, and maybe I could eliminate one of those titles that I enjoyed but that frustrated me too much to actually engage with on its original platform. So, to begin with, what is The Last Remnant? It’s a Square Enix JRPG where you control Rush Sykes, who initially starts a journey across a war-torn continent in order to save his sister.
The story of The Last Remnant has solid bones, but it is told in a pretty clumsy way and relies heavily on tropes, as Rush quickly gets wrapped up in a larger conspiracy with reverberations that spread all across his world. The executive producer of The Last Remnant is the same guy who directed and designed the Romancing SaGa series (which I absolutely adore), and this adventure mixes the esoteric stat progression system from SaGa with squad-based combat. The original Xbox 360 release had a lot of shortcomings you had to be careful of, such as battling too much actually being able to force the player into a softlock situation because your Battle Rank grew too high, reducing your rewards from battle, and making enemy stats higher. Back in the original release, if you played The Last Remnant as a normal JRPG and just fought every enemy you came across, it was somewhat easy to be in a situation where your character growth would be stuck, but you also couldn’t defeat enemies.
In The Last Remnant, your character’s stats increase based on what they do in combat. This means your attack stats go up as you use combat arts, intelligence increases as you use mystic arts, and your units’ HP stat will increase as they take damage. You can chain encounters together, and an important component of the experience is that the lower your Battle Rank versus the opponents you’re fighting, the higher your stats will grow and the more likely your characters are to learn new skills or advance to more powerful classes. In the original release, having a high BR would reduce the rewards for fighting monsters while increasing enemy stats, which is why you could be in a position circling the drain if you consistently kept your BR high by fighting as many monsters as possible.
The Last Remnant uses a really unique leveling scheme that you really only see in titles like Romancing SaGa, but it can really catch you off guard in the original release. Thankfully, the remaster fixes a lot of this because you still gain normal rewards even if you have too high of a BR for your foes, which means if you feel you’re hitting a roadblock, you can actually grind out some new skills or class advancements if needed. Of course, all of this preamble would be silly if the combat weren’t fun, but thankfully it is.
In The Last Remnant, combat is basically between your army and your enemies, none of this “team of three takes on the world with the power of friendship” nonsense. You will have multiple groups called Unions, with up to five units per Union to fight your enemy’s forces. You can direct your Unions to attack specific enemy groups, but you’re largely giving vague orders to them based on their judgment. You can get a glimpse of what each character will do if you give a specific order, but sometimes the characters will reevaluate and change things up on their own. For example, if you order a group to attack with mystic arts, but that Union takes a bunch of damage and is on death’s door, one of your casters may choose to heal their platoon instead.
Effectively, how much control you have over your Unions is determined almost entirely by how well you build all of your characters, which in turn has an impact on how coherent the orders you give your platoons are. It’s in this respect that The Last Remnant, even the Xbox 360 version, is one of the most impressive titles of all time when it comes to interesting and involved unit progression. Characters will learn new skills by doing things, so in order to learn a more advanced combat art, they will likely need to use the previous level of it a specific number of times. On top of this, characters have different wield styles for their weapons and earn EXP for class advancement based on what you have them do, so you’re rewarded thoroughly for specializing characters rather than trying to make jacks of all trades.
It was actually surprising how much I enjoyed the remaster of The Last Remnant compared to the Xbox 360 version. Battle Rank raises much more slowly to the point where I had completed the third boss but was still at a BR of 2. There were a ton of changes all over the remaster that made it quite a bit easier compared to the original, including how you can now use as many leader characters as you want. Story characters like Rush were limited to one per Union the last time I played, meaning you basically benched almost everyone you met throughout the adventure, sadly. Of course, the experience was reworked to account for the substantially higher damage a player would deal with a platoon that consists entirely of more powerful characters, but having a wider variety of units with more art trees and special arts can really turn the tides of battle.
The Last Remnant Remastered is now a title I can recommend to RPG enthusiasts, especially if you’ve already experienced or enjoy entries like the Romancing SaGa series. The story isn’t bad by any stretch, the combat is uniquely interesting due to how it ties directly into character development in a very unusual way, and it’s overall just an experience you won’t find anywhere else. It’s the most 5 out of 5 of all the 3 out of 5 games you’ll ever play, and if you see it on sale and enjoy JRPGs with unique progression and combat, you should absolutely give it a shot.
That being said, I think it’s time to bring this entry of Save State to a close. Remember, a dance off can be appropriate at many different times, but I assure you that a funeral is not one of them. See you in two weeks!
