The Last Remant

E3 2008: The Last Remnant Update
Square dishes new details on its upcoming RPG.
by Erik Brudvig

July 16, 2008 – Some titles appear at every press event, showcased to the point of redundancy. That can not be said about The Last Remnant. Due out this November for Xbox 360 and following later on PlayStation 3 and PC, Square-Enix has yet to blow the lid off this RPG and show the world exactly what it can expect out of the Unreal Engine 3 powered adventure. For this E3, the publisher released a trailer and announced the game for the PC but still did not put the game on display in playable form. To grab a few extra details, we sat down with Nobuyuki Ueda, producer for Square, to pick his brain through a translator.

The Last Remnant follows the tale of Rush Sykes, a young chap who has had his sister kidnapped. He sets out after her and the adventure begins. Rush’s world is one of fantasy where remnants of an unknown civilization are scattered about. These remnants provide a sort of power to the various races that inhabit the world. A character named David, for instance, uses a remnant-based weapon that looks like a gun. He comes from a city where there is another massive sword shaped remnant that the city has been built around. In its immediate surroundings, the city thrives.

If you watch the newest trailer, we’re told you can catch a glimpse of one of the foes in The Last Remnant. The team didn’t want to go into too many details about the characters or their allegiances, but it did fill us in that one of the enemies is featured for a blink of the eye in this trailer. Have a look at the 40 second mark and watch out for a guy in white.

The battle system in The Last Remnant makes use of what Square is calling unions. There will be multiple members in your party that can be grouped into these unions. Up to five characters can be put in each union and up to five unions can be commanded at once. The team is in the final stages of crafting and tweaking the system, but it says that the goal of the game is to build unions based on character’s strengths and to then use them strategically. Though it is a command based RPG, each union is given a strategy command and then the AI acts upon it.

We’re told that there’s a single main storyline that The Last Remnant follows, but the team has created a lot of side stories to give the player more freedom. This, along with input from the localization teams in North America and Europe, give The Last Remnant what Square hopes will be a style that the whole world will enjoy. Further catering to the western audience was done with all of the motion capturing and lip synching done in the US and Europe. That means all of the lips will match the voices in this Japanese made game. And you can thank those Europeans for the game coming to PC. There was apparently a strong request from that region to bring the game to the home compute