The last express

You know the drill. I wasn't planning on posting this, but it was significant enough to force me to. The game itself may not be that great, but what's riding on it is. This is probably the last game I'll buy. Unless the entire industry turns, and rights itself overnight, I'll be taking an extended break from all the nonsense. Incidentally, the director of this game feels the same. Unfortunately, he should be the one to steer the entire industry in a new course. If he bails, we're all doomed.

What we have here is Hiranobu Sakaguchi's The Last Story. Similarly to his last big project, Lost Odyssey, he is the chief game designer, his old friend Nobuo Uematsu is handling the music, and Kimihiko Fujisaka (Drakengard, Sands Of Destruction) is the contracted character artist. It's the same formula that brought us the original Final Fantasy (that one featuring Yoshitaka Amano), and I'm glad to see it still being used. On paper this game looks quite capable of delivering on the lofty expectations placed on it, the biggest unknown, unfortunately, is the actual game itself. We'll get to that in bit, first let's ogle the pretty packaging.

I never wanted to do this "unboxing" thing, since I'd never be the first to do it, nor have the facilities to do it properly (a well lit room, and a video camera). Over time I've felt that a lot of important information was lost by never showing off the innards of these game boxes. Not the least of which is the disc art, which is often times the best piece of art in the entire package. So let's do this thing. The thumbnail up top is the game box as it appears on store shelves. It's actually a standard Wii DVD case encased in a cardboard sleeve, which only shows off a girl's profile. The actual box art is quite a bit more colorful, but Sakaguchi likes him his minimalistic box covers, so a compromise was made. The first thing one does when picking up a game box off the shelf, is flip it over and check out the screens and info on the back. With The Last Story we get a neat surprise here, as it seems the cover image extends to the other side. Opposite the heroine, Kanan, on the reverse side we have a profile of main character, Elza, sporting not one, not two, but three individual ear piercings. Dude is hard core. The position of Elza's head mirrors Kanan's so exactly, that it's actually possible to reverse the box sleeve, slide it over the back cover, and create an "Elza Edition" of the main box art, if one so desires. Unfortunately a game can't be released without all that customary copyright information and technical details like supported controllers, and CERO rating stamps. This usually sullies the pretty artwork the artist worked so hard to create. Nintendo decided to reward fans by printing the full cover image without any of those trappings on the reverse of the insert. I didn't get the limited edition art booklet and mini CD which was some sort of half assed pre-order item, so this is as close as I'll get to an art book. Still, better than most run-of-the-mill releases. The disc and instruction manual are in full color, befitting a significant release from Nintendo. There was a little bit of confusion initially surrounding this release, as one of the first promotional pieces of art showed the main characters, and a bad ass white tiger. The tiger has since been downplayed in the official art, and nothing was ever mentioned about it on the official promotional materials detailing the world and characters. While the art on the disc omits the all-important tiger, I can say with authority the tiger is all up in this game, and is even more bad ass than a huge white tiger can possibly be.

I'm still fairly early in the game, still before the main mission that gets the story rolling gets handed down. The action, however, starts almost immediately when the player hits the (proverbial) start button and a lengthy tutorial dungeon ensues. Here the player is almost immediately given control of Elza, and thrown into a battle with an almost full battle party. The point is to proceed from battle scene to battle scene picking up and mastering new techniques along the way. After finishing it, and coming face to face with the awesomeness that is the tiger, the party heads back to the main city where the game is based. the next few hours are spent touring it while meeting the remaining principal characters and learning more techniques to progress through the game. The rushing slash attack, for example, is unlocked during a forced trip to the local coliseum.

The city is very large, and full of people, but none of them seem to be very convincing as townsfolk. They simply meander about bumping into each other while going through their random animations and spouting gibberish. The game tries to shoot for a Shumnue-like feeling of immersion and being surrounded by other people's lives, but falls a little short and lands somewhere closer to The Last Remnant. The imprecise and stiff character animations and movements are very reminiscent of that game. The graphics are also a technical mixed bag. Some textures looks excellent, like building walls and floors, while some, like characters clothing and hair look low res and artificially stretched. This is especially noticeable, and jarring during the cinematic presentation of cut scenes. If you're going to put a camera "there," at least make sure "there" looks as good as possible. The action camera does a decent job showing off the action during battles and exploration, but it too can trip over the age old "getting stuck in a corner and clipping through everything" hurdle. The frame rate is fairly solid, while not 60, not always 30 either. "Playable" is the adjective I'd use. Character controls are reasonably responsive, but animations feel very stiff. While using the automated control method the developers thought up as the default, almost all actions feel as if there is a second of lag between the press of the button, and the animation on screen. I remember mentioning somewhere that Japanese developers who try to innovate on standard RPG mechanics usually wind up with terrible action games instead of innovative RPG's and The Last Story feels like the exact boundary between the two. Not unplayably clunky, but not intuitive enough. If this was a Devil May Cry-like game it would (and should) get raked across the coals for these technical shortcomings, but since this game is an RPG first, and everything else second, I'll look past these issues and reserve judgement once I get further into it. The usual jumping off point in this situation would be the part where the game punishes the player for trying to fumble with the imprecise interface under stress, such as unbalanced boss encounter. (There was something worryingly close to this during the tutorial dungeon, but I was simply doing it wrong, and the battle was incredibly easy once the gimmick was uncovered.) I hope that at the very least if Sakaguchi hasn't learned how to make a workable action game over the decades, he at least learned enough as a director to avoid that scenario.

So far, the music too has not knocked any of my socks off. If anything, I've noticed that it isn't very "Uematsu-like." In most of his works it was still possible to draw connections to his previous efforts, going from Blue Dragon back to Final Fantasy X or even VI for example. So far, I haven't heard anything that reminds me of an older game. I can't say if this is a positive or negative, as I don't remember hearing anything that stuck in my head the same way certain themes from past games tend to do. Maybe this is a sign of Uematsu evolving his craft, or maybe it's a sign he phoned this one in. As with the game proper, I'm reserving final judgement until I experience more.

Interlude:
This didn't seem that important, but I didn't want to leave the issue hanging. The very next night after posting the above article, I went back to the game and almost immediately I was reminded of Final Fantasy VII music. So there you have it, Last Story harkens back to FFVII. I personally hate the FFVII music (and everything else about that game), but the similarities are only in arrangement, not actual composition. One can think of this as FFVII music done right then.