Thomas Kobelsky's Blog

January 4, 2009

Happy New Year to all. It has been a while since my last update on here, for many a various reason which ultimately boils down to either A) Not enough time in the day, or B) I was just too lazy to do it. I apologize for that, and to make up for it, I've finally decided to post something on here before I head off to work. I suppose I'll write about the lastest and greatest game I've been playing, The Last Remnant.

This game can either be REALLY challenging or extremely simple, totally depending on what the AI wants to do each round. This kind of annoys me a little bit because you could be spending four hours trying to beat a battle and get Game Over like 5 times. Then, miraculously, the 6th time you go into the fight, all of your Unions survive with like minimal damage taken. It's totally hit and miss like that, so rather than having an RPG based purely on stats and modifiers, it's got a large chunk of luck involved as well.
I like this, for some reason. The last few RPGs I've played have been too much of a cake-walk for me (Eternal Sonata, Mass Effect, Star Ocean: Till the End of Time), it's nice to have a very different RPG that challenges not only your tactic skills and knowledge of the game, but also tests the player's patience.
You're probably thinking about all the review sites and their 6/10s and such, but I believe that's mainly because of the technical issues it has. The game does bog down a LOT during the battles... sometimes going from 60fps when you're choosing your commands, down to like 15fps when the units are actually attacking. It's not quite so bad if you install it to your 360's hard-drive, but it's still noticeable. That, and the cinematics are a little odd. Everything about them has been done amazingly, but the backgrounds look horrible. Like a movie that has been ripped and was very poorly encoded with DivX or something. If I knew how to take a screenshot from my 360 and transfer it to my computer, I would. Those are my only beefs with the game, so far.
I'm pretty much just starting the second disc, and am sitting at the 2nd Base battle right now. Storming the base wasn't hard at all, but the boss battle inside was just ruined me. Then again, my Rush only has Double Strike for a pole-arm art, so I will probably spend a few hours learning more arts for him before progressing.
And with that, I'm going to finish updating this and make some lunch. Thanks for reading, and don't forget to check out my portfolio.

-tk

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