The Last Remnant

Developer: Square-Enix

Release Date: November 20, 2008

Time Played: Two Hours and not a bit more

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Amount of this game I felt like actually understood at the end of that time: 1 out of 5

Would I play more: There’s a part of me that absolutely wants to understand this game more, because clearly it has its fans. But also would it actually be worth it? Need I remind you, they’re localizing more Trails games so I’d probably get started with that anime hole at some point.

The Last Remnant is probably the most pointed example of this series’ format not necessarily gelling with some of the denser Japanese RPGs I’ve encountered. The way some of these games parcel out their mechanics and gimmicks isn’t conducive to short-form exhibition streams. While I can point to plenty of CRPGs with generally “slow” beginnings, I think it’s fair to say most of them are pretty good about throwing things out upfront within the first 2-4 hours. Conversely, two hours into Final Fantasy XII and you’re barely past killing rats in a sewer, let alone touching the gambit system. To this I once again remind you, dear reader, that this feature is *probably* not representative of a truly exhaustive critical opinion and should be taken with a grain of salt. Most of the time. I also still maintain that more of you should play Wizards and Warriors, but I understand that's my sickness.

As such, the best I can say is that The Last Remnant has an immediately obnoxious main character in the form of Rush Sykes. Move over Fayt Leingod, this plucky-but-dumb Johnny-Young-Boschly firmly fulfills the “Anime shit boy” quotient this feature has been so desperately lacking up to this point. He’s a dumb-dumb lacking all social tact who also has a weirdly strong attachment to his sister and zero understanding of any of the sociopolitical machinations that probably underlie this game’s plot. I sure as hell didn’t know what was going on any more than he did other than vaguely understanding that fantasy war is happening and ancient mcguffins called “Remnants” are probably important to the fabric of society. Also I didn’t even encounter The Conqueror yet, who I’m to understand is this game’s omnipresent and decidedly scary antagonist.

So what *did* I encounter during the two hours I played? A handful of tutorial dungeons and very little actual tutorial. This seems like the kind of game one would need a FAQ open most of the time to really get. Instead of controlling your units on an individual basis, you arrange your characters into squads, something similar to Ogre Battle, and issue general commands like “use special skills” or “use offensive magic” based on the context of how things are going. This sounds great. If only the game even remotely explained itself to me in any decent capacity. There’s something to be said for games that ask the player to figure things out. There’s another for games that attempt to explain themselves but do it incredibly poorly. This is the latter. And, for better or worse, I dunno if I’m ever quite gonna cross that threshold.

Underworld Ascendant

Developer: Otherside Entertainment

Release Date: November 15, 2018

Time Played: Two hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Special Achievement Award: Most Improved

Would I play more: like the worst part is that my answer is probably “yeah sure why the hell not”

I’m not going to beat around the bush: While Underworld Ascendant is probably still the worst game I’ve ever personally backed on a crowdfunding campaign (well, it’s that or like… The Bard’s Tale IV at this point) I need to give Otherside Entertainment credit where credit is due. They sure did manage to salvage a broken, barely-functional skeleton of an immersive sim into a less-broken, functional one! If you know anything about Underworld Ascendant’s launch and its 37 metascore (quite possibly the lowest one on the wheel) you know that’s a vast improvement.

To be clear, this is probably the closest I’ve gotten to bringing an “indie” RPG onto the wheel. As I’ve said before, I mostly want to focus on published, “boxed” titles for this series. Part of that is because I don’t want to punch down on smaller teams and smaller projects and part of that is because it saves me from the endless flood of RPGmaker trash and similar detritus. Part of why Underworld Ascendant manages to skirt past that border is because of its pedigree; namely having a lot of former Looking Glass and Irrational folks who were more than happy to remind me during the kickstarter campaign that they made some video games people cared about. While I don’t think you can necessarily buy physical copies of UA, at least outside of whatever they gave to backers, it was picked up by mid-tier publisher 505 and ported to console.

I’m not going to get too far into the weeds on the likes of “broken promises” and what they were initially promising during the kickstarter campaign versus the final product. However, it needs be repeated that Underworld Ascendant was clearly and openly trading off the name of Ultima Underworld, which is one of the most important games ever made. It is not that, nor from my investigation into this final version is it any closer to being the spiritual successor it initially pitched itself as. But, it at least ditched the generic, randomly generated mission structure that the original decided was a good idea. So what you’re left with is something I’d describe as “babby’s first immersive sim.” The big tech gimmick in this game are a bunch of systemic interactions, which is to say that if something is made of wood it can probably be set on fire and if there’s a switch you can press it with any sort of physical force (i.e. an arrow.) That’s it. Also the rope arrows from Thief are there and sort of work. It’s cool. Well, it would be more cool if Breath of the Wild hadn’t come out a year prior, but still, even in my short time with the game I did set things on fire, which is a definite plus in my book.

That said, even with the addition of such invaluable mechanics as “mid-mission saves” (no seriously that wasn’t there at launch) and a more structured campaign, there’s still a lotta JANK in Underworld Ascendant. The melee combat is sub-Oblivion flailing about, enemy behaviors are occasionally… questionable, and the hand-crafted nature of the environments becomes a little less novel when one realizes that the devs tried to extract as much use as they could with the way missions and respawns are handled. Still, gotta give a point in their favor: I did not hate what I played, which is more than I can say for how the game was at launch. Kudos. Golf clap. Still maybe not a great video game, but something I wouldn't be opposed to revisiting in the future. Perhaps for charity?

Aaaanyway, as always feel free to follow me on Twitch if you wanna see these games played live for your amusement and my pain. I've also been playing some Jedi Knight 2 and Shadow Hearts Covenant recently, if you'd like to see me play video games that aren't terrible. I'm also playing Grandia II for my occasional off-week podcast, Off the Deep End, so if you'd like to hear my thoughts about that, maybe consider giving that a listen too? We have fun.