The Last Story – I finally finished this game off after playing it on and off for a few months. Overall it’s a pretty enjoyable game with a compact, nicely wound story with a cool cast and some good plot ideas. The game’s story isn’t epic, nor is it trying to be, but I think it mostly succeeds at what it is trying. Although, I think that the game is a little bit underdeveloped in a way because it feels like a few of the of the most prominent and most interesting characters, namely Calista, Dagran, and the Count, were not given adequate screentime to fully complete their arcs.
With Dagran in particular, I think the game would have been very well-served by spacing out a lot of his endgame plot over the last 25% of the game. Instead of getting the hour of whiplash between Dagran has disappeared mysteriously to Dagran shows up and reveals his evil plans to Dagran having this little redemption scene at the end, you could instead have the reveal about Asthar earlier, allowing the player to mull on that plot point a bit, and have the plot more naturally build up to Dagran as a villain rather than just dropping the big drama bomb on you really quickly after Zangurak dies.
Also, the Gurak suck and should feel bad. Such a boring, predictable race of people which is so insulting to the intelligence of those who play the game.
The game has a great secondary cast, particularly Syrenne, and they bounce of each other quite well. Syrenne even has some pretty sad/serious stuff at the end of the game that I enjoyed quite a lot.
Gameplaywise, the game is a mess, although its gameplay is pretty interesting. I found myself largely floating through randoms without many problems and then generally being annoyed by the boring gimmicks of all of the bosses. The gimmick of “you have to hit the boss with a certain spell or ability” is not really a recipe for a very fun fight. The final boss is the major exception to the rule of the game’s bosses being really stupid and gimmicky though. If only the rest of the game’s boss fights were more like it, then Last Story would be a better game. Also, never have solo combat in a system that rewards having ally contribution, game. Mirania was probably the MVP just because she has the multitarget Revive and regain stock spell. Lowell on the other hand kind of sucks because being a fighter-mage is a bad niche in that game.
The game reminds me a lot of Dungeons and Dragons in the sene that you have these fixed encounters rather than random battles, and there feels like a lot of contrivance to have you fight as many battles as you do in the game. I felt like the game has a lot of filler fights that could have been used fleshing out the game’s story more.
The game is certainly pretty aesthetically appealing, with the music and graphics being very nice, and I love the trend toward letting you design the clothes that your PCs wear that both Xenoblade and TLS have.
I’d probably give the game a high 5 or low 6 depending on my mood. Good game, but has some pretty major flaws that prevent it from being great.
