I inadvertently accomplished nothing over the past five hours. I was worried about my party being underequipped, so I resolved to correct the issue. However, you can't just buy weapons for your characters. Instead, they will upgrade their own weapons by taking a cut of your after-battle spoils. In order to make them more powerful, you have to track down the materials they need, and farm monsters until the necessary items drop. With the help of the wiki, that's exactly what I've been doing.
The last five hours have been - go to a place, fight monsters, cross fingers, get disappointed, try again. I did get to use David's Remnant for the first time, which was cool. But I died, which wasn't. Even more uncool is the fact that I have no control whatsoever on when the Remnant shows up in my command list. From the research I've done online, it appears that the commands available to you in any given round are chosen randomly from a list of dozens of possible commands, and while it is subject to influence by the circumstances of the battle, there are no guarantees. Which means that I can basically never use my super attacks, and on more than one occasion, I've needed to heal my characters, but the option was not there.
It's funny. I'm not especially unhappy playing this game, but all I have to say about it are complaints. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I think the issue is that the good aspects of this game are purely generic. Having a party and fighting a variety of exotic monsters with menu commands while exploring a map and gathering equipment in an ever-escalating reward cycle is a solid formula for a game. Some of my all-time favorite games followed that formula. I suppose the worst thing I can say about The Last Remnant is that it completely fails to improve on the jrpg fundamentals.
If I wanted to say something nice about the game, I'd say that I admire its willingness to take risks and try new ideas. The fact that you can control literally dozens of unique characters is pretty neat. And I suppose, in theory, not having control over your party's inventory is really just the flip side of not having to micromanage your party's inventory. The Remnants themselves are visually arresting, though I feel like I've been waiting too long to see them in action.
I still have five hours to go, and it is my hope that the incidental grinding I've done thus far has not ruined the future level-scaling. The main reason I worried so much about upgrading my people's weapons is that I'm afraid of getting so far ahead in the story that the proper upgrade materials will stop dropping, and thus my equipment will get stuck at a low level, yet I wound up gaining something like eight or nine battle rank in the process of loot-farming. I can't help feeling like my current course is headed for disaster.
If I'm lucky, I'll run out the clock before that happens.
No comments:
Post a Comment