Take yourself back to 2008. It was my first year of university. The PS3 had been out for over a year and incredible games like Batman: Arkham Asylum, Halo and Portal were commonplace, testing the limits of the technology and the modern gamer, laying the groundwork for inimitable video game canon that we all know and love.
Square Enix, powerhouse producers of Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy, released a game titled The Last Remnant on the XBox 360 that same year. If you’ve played any Final Fantasy game, you get the gist: protagonist and his group of weirdo friends rush off into the wilderness to prevent a giant evil from destroying the world as they know it, using a turn-based system that works around the five Chinese elements. Enter The Last Remnant. On the surface, it’s just another JRPG, right?
WRONG. This is perhaps the most perplexing, convoluted, batshit game that I have ever played with the most questionable character decisions and breathtakingly beautiful worldbuilding mashed together in one unplayable 80 hour slog, that I only managed to beat a literal hour ago thanks to a saint on Steam who explained all of the games mechanics without missing a beat.
You start as Rush Sykes (yes, his real name), who dresses like a fantasy 2000s skater boi and has the most jarringly casual way of speaking in the world.
He has a sister, Irina, who I think is supposed to be at least 16 but who behaves like an 8 year old, and she immediately gets kidnapped, so of course he runs off to save her and ends up in the middle of a huge monster fight with this kid named David (pronounced Dav-EEEd for some reason), the Marquis of Athlum, who has an equally annoying British accent and is the owner of a giant magic gun called the Gae Bolg. The Gae Bolg is a Remnant, an item of unspeakable magic power that bonds itself to hosts and ultimately destroys those hosts. There are a limited amount of them in the world. Got it? Good.
Rush for some reason acts like he has been isakaied into this world, rather than being born in it. His parents are Remnant scientists of insane renown and he has no idea what a Remnant is or does. He calls David ‘Dave’ right off the bat. He is insufferable. And yet he becomes integral to a continent based effort to stop The Conqueror from taking over all of the Remnants in the world and destroying mankind. Within all of a day, David trusts him to come in jaunts to the capital to attend Congress.
I found this game by chance, five years ago, on a Steam sale for $7, and I poured it into my veins. What is going on here? Why is this world so good and the characters so insanely varied and weird? And I jumped into the city of Athlum and met all of its generals like if I found a person I loved in this game outside of Rush, I could understand why The Last Remnant had its claws so deep in my arms.
The combat is unique. Instead of controlling each individual character, you create Unions, little troops of characters who act in a military unit. You can attack, defend, use magic, heal or just wait a moment to see if one of your super cool powers comes up to destroy the whole battlefield. On the face of it, it’s simple. But there are so many hidden mechanics that are NOT EXPLAINED AT ALL that if you fight every little monster that runs at you, you will find yourself underpowered and high levelled and being totally crushed by every boss you run into.
It is equal parts frustrating and mesmerizing, watching your little guys run into fights and slam weapons onto foes, getting critical hits and juking opponents’ hits. There comes a point, though, where the hypnotic quality of the combat is not enough and you don’t know how anyone ever finished this game. This was the age of GameFAQs, where you didn’t have to call a hotline to get cheats but you did need to find the right forum to explain exactly what on earth you were supposed to do.
I died to the Nest of Eagles fight 30 times before I restarted the whole game and found a guide. It explained how to get the spells I needed to win, what the difference between skilling up and high BR is (high BR bad, high skills good), how to get the weapons I needed, how to specialize my characters… And yeah, none of this is explained in the game at all.
But the world, guys. Watercolour backdrops of walled cities with huge Remnants looming over them. Four-armed cat people walking with little hoppy frog men. Armour and costumes that fit everyone’s ears and extra limbs. Side quests that establish inter-city quarrels and forbidden romance.
It got me to thinking, man, what is it about bad JRPGs that sends me feral? Because I have plenty others where that came from. The White Knight Chronicles I and II, which languished on the PS3 and never got a remaster (a crime); Skies of Arcadia on the GameCube (crossing my fingers for news about a remaster for that one). It isn’t the combat, although once you get good at it you sort of enter a flow state where you don’t ever have to think about it. It isn’t even the characters 90% of the time, although Vyse the Sky Pirate in SoA is an absolute LAD.
I just love to explore. I like to see how the magic systems work, how the social hierarchy affects the NPCs. I like to talk to the strangers on the street and find out what their gripes are, however small. I like to wander into a dungeon and see what the lore pieces say. I like to come out of the wilderness stronger than God because I did all the silly side quests and now I’m ready to end the main antagonist in three hits, thank you very much.
The Last Remnant is tedious in many ways, but you can’t look away. It tried to do something no other JRPG was doing at the time and it almost pulled it off, albeit with the weirdest protagonist in video games and his emotionally stunted sister. It doesn’t hold your hand. There is no dreaded yellow paint. There are no tutorial hints or waymarkers. You walk around until you figure it out and if you don’t figure it out, oh well, too bad so sad, get pummelled idiot. You are free to walk the world any way you choose and there are so many choices.
I didn’t originally finish it when I bought it on PC. I got about halfway through and something in the port broke the game, making it impossible for me to load my save and progress, and I thought that was it for me and The Last Remnant. I thought about it occasionally the way a trauma patient thinks of their quiet days convalescing after an accident. What was that weird game? I wonder how it ends? Guess I’ll never know.
And then look what showed up on the PS5 store. $7. A steal.
Play the bad games, friends. Enjoy the suffering. Shout ‘this is bullshit!’ at the screen for an hour. You might get an experience in a world that you were not expecting.
