The tricky thing about computer rpgs is that you never know when you're going to stumble ass-backwards into a cutscene filibuster. I'll admit, cutscenes are probably the most straightforward way to tell a video game story - you simply animate a movie and then show it to the audience one scene at a time in between gameplay segments. However, I'm finding that this structure makes the game's pacing really clunky.
I can't help wondering if this is a problem unique to The Last Remnant, or whether it is something endemic to video games as a whole, and I'm just now noticing. I'm dredging my memory for cutscene-heavy games I've previously enjoyed to see if I can discern whether I love those games because of their cutscenes or despite them.
-- snip several minutes of me navel-gazing--
The conclusion I'm coming up with is that it's too broad a question to have a simple answer. I can recall several cutscenes that are among my favorite moments in all of gaming - the Reaper Sovereign attacking the Citadel in Mass Effect or the way Queen Brahne used the Atmos Eidolon to savage Lindblum in Final Fantasy IX. On the other hand, the number of times a cutscene has frustrated, annoyed, or bored me is literally too high to count. I guess I could give a wishy-washy answer about how they must therefore be like any other form of art, and have good and bad examples, but I won't because I have a theory.
The thing about video games that makes them different from just about every other form of storytelling media is that they give you the sensation of being in control of the story. Even when the game itself is just a straight line through successive levels, it's still the case that the story does not advance unless you have the skill to survive. Cutscenes, then, work best when they disguise or downplay your lack of narrative control. And there are several ways you can do this. You could make your cutscenes really short. If you're using a level structure, then interstitial cutscenes work fairly well because they come at exactly the time the player is expecting to lose control. Alternately, you could take the sort of information that would normally go into a cutscene and put it into the world, like with Bioshock's collectible audio files or Velvet Assassin's overheard Nazi conversations. It's still spoon-feeding the player story, but they get to decide if they want to access it. Or you could make the cutscenes dynamic, allowing the player to influence them by presenting choices mid-scene. Bioware and Bethesda both do this a lot with their dialogue trees. Finally, you could present the story without actually interrupting play, like with Bastion's dynamic narration or Borderlands 2's ECHO communications.
The Last Remnant doesn't do any of those things. It's not always clear what will start up a cutscene. Encountering and defeating a boss will usually do it, but I've triggered some by talking to certain characters, entering new areas, and once by reentering a previously visited area. And they are usually fairly long. Five minutes seems to be about the average, though I'm certain that I got at least one ten-minute cutscene. This strikes me as fundamentally bad structure, but it could in fact be redeemed if these mini-movies were especially interesting or entertaining.
Unfortunately, they're not. Don't get me wrong, I find myself moderately intrigued by the world and the backstory of The Last Remnant, but when the game bothers to advance its narration, it usually does so in the form of blandly attractive characters discussing their relationships. It's like A Game of Thrones but without all the sex and violence. Occasionally, you will get a bit of pyrotechnics when one of the characters uses magic, but that is usually preceded then followed by a whole bunch of talking. For example, there's this character called The Conqueror who boldly marched into the capitol of the federation of Remnant-wielders and bound a Remnant called the Ark, which is apparently a huge deal because it can allow the living to visit the land of the dead. So naturally, this is the sort of gesture that would cause various world leaders to freak out - which they do by sending the chairman of their council to speak to the Conqueror and promise him a Remnant of his very own (and in this world, if you can bind a major remnant, that also carries with it political authority over the territory surrounding the Remnant) if he will unbind the Ark. He agrees, and that's pretty much it. In a later cutscene, we learn that the council has been subsequently divided over whether they support inducting this newcomer or whether they prefer the status quo - from a speech David makes to Rush about why his city-state can not move openly to help him.
There is plenty of intrigue and potential action in the game. Rush's parents are working on some kind of super meta-magic that can shut down the Remnants. David implied that if the major Remnants were ever used in a war, it would be like a clash of WMDs. There's this character called the God-Emperor that everyone is afraid of/respects who has not yet been seen onscreen, but who apparently employs women in bikinis and their giant minotaur bodyguards to go from place to place heralding the apocalypse. These are potentially interesting events, so why do I always have to learn about them through speeches?
I am, of course, the last person in the world to fault another for being overly prolix, but I am holding out hope that they are merely laying the groundwork for a more epic final act. I think I would be more tolerant of the talking if I were enjoying the actual game more.
The problem I have with it is that the mechanics are extremely opaque. You've got this thing called a Battle Rank, but I'm not sure what it does. According to the research I've done online, this isn't actually a measure of my party's power, but affects the level scaling of enemies. So I'm not sure whether I'm actually powerful enough to get through my current missions. I had some real trouble getting through the catacombs, with my troops' morale starting with a huge deficit for reasons I could not comprehend.
What I would ordinarily do in this situation is grind up my stats, but I don't really know how. Add on top of that the system for upgrading your party's equipment is incredibly complex, involving the hunting down of a huge number of resources (with no indication of where you need to go to search for them) and distributing them indirectly, with no particular system of controlling who gets what.
With all that said, I think this post might have come across as overly harsh. The Last Remnant is an aggressively average game. I may not know what I'm doing, but moving through the maps and taking on random enemies is moderately absorbing. I'm not sure whether I will go past 20 hours (not unless the plot starts to heat up - I really I want to see those huge Remnants in action), but I don't think the last ten will be too terribly onerous.
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