The Last Story

Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobuo Uematsu team up again to make a Japanese RPG which can be easily considered one of the best in years. It succeeds in innovating in a lot of features, with a charming gameplay that works and is very fun. It also has an epic and well-told story. A must-have for fans of the genre.

The Last Story is a brilliant role-playing game that's as rich and emotionally affecting as the best in the genre.

Fun ideas clash with mundane storytelling, but the nimble action wins out in the end. [Apr 2012, p.74]

An engaging and refreshingly svelte JRPG, but one that offers mere hints at where the genre may go from here rather than the new blueprint it could have been. [Issue#121, p.110]

The Last Story is not the last classic japanese RPG, as it diverges deeply from the tradition of the genre, lacking some of its core elements and borrowing something from others. It tells a marvellous story, through solid gameplay which shines in the versatility of the combat system. We're well aware it may not be what fans have been asking, but if you'll give it some attention, you will be carried away.

The Last Story is by no means a perfect game. However, the good here far outweighs the game's shortcomings, and, unlike RPGs that are bloated with fetch quests and tiring level-grinding, everything here is absolutely in service of the game's story.

If The Last Story is the Wii's swan song, it is a miserable dirge, full of regret and remorse.

This game is incredible, great graphics, soundtrack, and gameplay. Should get a modern port or a remaster of some sort.

Good game with great combat system, but very boring and easy at the beginning. Первая половина игры очень простая и скучная, а вот вторая становится довольно сложной в плане боёвки и интересной в плане сюжета. В плане музыки одна из самых невзрачных работ Уемацу, запомнил от силы три трека. 7/10 за хорошую вторую половину игры, которая скрасила очень блеклое начало + за интересную боевую систему и внимание к деталям. Пройдена за 23 часа.

The Last Story is a pretty good but flawed game. Graphically speaking it's by far the best looking game I've seen so far on the WII, because so it does tend to get choppy and gets frequent frame rate drops at times but usually doesn't last more then thirty seconds. Controls are actually somewhat straightforward and somewhat difficult to figure out. I found myself being confused trying to use certain skills at times but other then that it was easy all you pretty much had to do to attack was run into enemies and the player you control would automatically attack. The story isn't bad and there are a few side quests to help you enjoy the game more, at the time of the games end I had clocked in around 28 hours. There were some boring parts in the game but still it was enjoyable. Music and sounds were awesome and characters were unique and interesting. This game is actually good and I had more fun with it then I did with Xenoblade, but there were some aspects that left me wishing there was more ways to customize my characters or maybe more ways to change the outcome. Still this is one of the best looking games on the WII and one worth playing for RPG fans.

The Last story is an utterly medicore game turned bad due to hardware limitations. The Last Story is a JRPG made by some of the veterans of the genre, with music composed by the almost legendary Nobuo Uematsu. This is a game that "should" have been good, considering the people behind it. The story in The Last Story is actually somewhat interesting. There's a backdrop of some grand sweeping events, with a big war between two people brewing, but instead of focusing on this war, the game focuses on the more personal relationship between a few characters, and their goals & aspirations in life. In terms of structure, the game actually spends a large portion of its time on the buildup (act 1 in most movies) than more or less any other RPG, J or otherwise, that I've ever played, and it's not an unwelcome change of pace. Sadly, while I kinda liked the main characters, I found the villains to be bland and boring, and the conflict to be uninteresting. For a game with music by Mobuo Uematsu, the music is surprisingly forgettable. It's never terrible, but most of the tracks feel generic, with only one or two actually being good. The voice acting, while never great, at least has a lot of personality to it, for the good guys at least. The voice actors all have distinct voices that makes the characters easy to tell apart, even when you can't see them. Sadly, the villains fare a lot worse here, with unimpressive voice acting that make them hard to take seriously. In terms of sound effects, the game is utterly alright. Nothing more to say about it, the sound effects do what they need to do, and little else. In terms of graphics, the Wii hardware do show its limitations. Some areas look really nice, due to good art design, but a lot of the details look muddy and dark. What's far worse is that the game is pushing the Wii's humble hardware far beyond what it can take. Early on in the game, it's not too bad, but towards the second half, there's just too much going on at any given time that the framerate not only dips down into the single digits, but stays there. It's like a slideshow, and it seriously hurts the game. Gameplay is a bit different from what you would expect from a JRPG. Combat is in real time, and you're expected to use the environment to your advantage, by taking cover, shooting at weak points and so on. Sadly, while the combat shows potential, the game feels incredibly simplistic to play, with the vast majority of the battles requiring no skill what so ever. It might be a good thing that combat is simple & simplistic though, considering the frame rate. It would have been a pain to play a game with a more involved system with such poor performance. Overall, had The Last Story been released on a system with more powerful hardware, any system with more powerful hardware, it would have been a lot better. It still would have been an utterly mediocre game, but it would have been a lot better than what we got.

If I wanted to recommend an RPG to someone this would be at the bottom of my list. The story line is short, there is virtually no character, or weapon customization besides linear upgrades. You spend a majority of the game doing random town gathering quests, the in town arena is the same couple of battles over and over again. There is very little exploring, there is only one town in the game and then story-line quests outside of town. The only reason I continued playing was the hope that it would expand the more I played, but it didn't.