A_Fnord

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.