RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

Sometimes, it’s refreshing to go through a game with no foreknowledge of what’s going on. I rarely get that opportunity, given how close my ear tends to be to any RPG-related news source. Rare is it that I can claim that a game’s flown completely under my radar.

Last Rebellion flew completely under my radar.

I’d expected my March gaming revelry to mostly consist of Pokemon NewHotness and Sakura Wars: We Finally Released One In English. Little did I expect to be issued a copy of Last Rebellion, a game for a platform I don’t actually own. So, three favors and a round of Chinese food later, I’d procured a PS3 on which to test-drive this latest NISA release. (And two smart-aleck copilots, playing Crow and Tom to my Joel.)

… I’ll level with you. I’ve written, deleted, rewritten, revised, and rerewritten the two paragraphs that should go here. I can’t find the right tone. This game has left me torn. So, in an attempt to balance the two sides of my head and the multitudes of opinions contained therein, I will write two reviews. One filled with vitriol, and one filled with happiness and ponies. That’s what this game left me with. Enjoy.

Last Rem… Erm. Rebellion. I forgot which one this was.

Last Rebellion feels like a brazen attempt to woo the western audiences with a turn-based JRPG, which seems as sensible as wooing the cute girl at the laundromat with a discussion about how many followers you have on your Youtube channel in which you crush cans against your head. There’s a disconnect here, and most people can find it in a heartbeat. But no matter, you’re gonna pay $50 for this disc, so you might as well dive into the pity headfirst.

In the kingdom of INTERCHANGEABLE, two gods, INTERCHANGEABLE and INTERCHANGEABLE, representing Death and Life (respectively), are out of balance. It falls upon you, INTERCHANGEABLE, to fix things, because your dad’s the king and there’s also this hot girl, or something. Frankly, my eyes glazed over at the third Generic Fantasy name and never really got better. The plot of this game is just one huge Cliche Katamari, so dense with tired story elements and typical RPG conventions that even the characters themselves redline the ERPM (eye-rolls per minute) gauge. In a better game, a little bit of Genre Savvy is welcome and can help to break the 4th wall. This game, instead, chooses to funnel any poignant sarcasm or intelligent postmodern analysis into yet-more Stereotypical-Protagonist-Angst fuel.

So you have to slay your Necromancer brother, discover the reason for the disappearance of these girls, find the eccentric inventor, there’s discussion about a civil war in a country you never actually get to visit… Honestly, if you’re going to design for a game that non-JRPG fans might be interested in, could you do any more wrong than this? You’re not going to get the hooks in ’em far enough to justify the one or two plot twists that kinda subvert the player’s expectations. (Only to replace them with completely new, tired, overdone expectations that fit the new worldview.) I don’t think I wouldn’t have been able to make it through this yawn-fest without turning it into a Mystery Videogame Theater experience. The dialogue is painful, every emotion can be predicted scenes in advance, the soundtrack listing consists of “Ominous Drumbeat Over Creepy Sounds” repeated for every track (except the final, hidden entry: “I Thought You Said There Wasn’t Any Japanese In This”), and the monster designs can, in some cases, differ by what seems to be two points of light or shade. (Because in an ecosystem where members of a species are completely identical, of course the one that’s 37% grey is wildly different from its 39% grey cousins.)

And the animation? NONE. Outside of the main gameplay engine, absolutely every dialogue is done with still-frame paintings, panned around or spun or whatever to make folks think that there’s a little more effort here. And even the art style begins to grate after a while. Does Mr. Angsty even have lips? What obsession do these people have with hoodies? Humanity is never meant to know.

I’d say this was phoned-in, but that’d be a disservice to Japan’s telecommunications superiority. I can’t think of a more un-memorable plot, but that’s kind of the point. I just want it to go away.

Hopefully not the Last Rebellion

I’ll admit, the plot was trash. Though occasionally funny, the rampant cynicism makes Baby Conan O’Brien cry. But no matter. This game needs only one thing to justify its existence: the mechanics. In most JRPGs, multi-segmented enemies are the domain of final-bosses ONLY. What body parts does a slime have, anyway, to require such dissection?

Last Rebellion‘s response: “Body, left eye, right eye, grin, stalk.” Five points. Because it’s that detailed. Every mob, no matter how trivial, has between six and ten distinct body parts. Every mob, no matter how trivial, has an order to those parts, a prescribed battle-plan that the wary adventurer is wise to discover through trial, error, and deductive logic.

Man. I love games like that. I actually get to think! During battles! Not just mashing a button to attack, there’s a reason behind this! Landing blows in the correct order serves dual purposes: it increases a combo count, which in turn yields bonus EXP, and it increases the duration of the stamps placed upon that body part. Each appendage that can be targeted has its own defense value; any particularly weak spots are marked in red to indicate that they will trigger a powered-up counterattack if struck out-of-order. So do you include these danger zones in your first couple encounters with a new mob? Do you risk it, or do you attack everything else, doing less damage but sparing you the counterattacks? It’s exactly this strategy that makes Last Rebellion unique among most JRPGs. In other titles, you might encounter this scenario once per game, in one particular boss fight. Here, such deduction must be applied to every troll, skink, cyclops, and chicken.

It also helps that every round, you may attack as many body parts as you like for 1 Combo Point per hit. 10 parts on a mob? Pony up 10CP, and you’re hitting it 10 times that round. 10 parts on each of 5 mobs? 50CP, and that’s 50 melee attacks that turn. And that’s 50 stamps you’ve just laid down.

“Wait,” I hear you say. “Stamps? The hell does the Postal Service have to do with this game?” No, no, no. Stamps are what make magic work. Think of them as targeting points for every offensive spell you cast; any given cast of a spell will, for the same flat MP cost, target every “stamp” on a mob. So, if this troll has one stamp on its head, a 60MP cast of Thunderbolt (L5) will hit that stamp. If the same troll has a stamp on every one of its 10 appendages, that same 60MP hits the troll 10 times. 10 stamps on each of five trolls? That’s 50 Thunderbolts, all for 60MP. Stamps wear off after time, though, necessitating melee attacks to keep the magic working. Stamps placed out of order last for two turns, those in correct order last for four, and critical hits land a five-turn stamp. Stamps stack if repeatedly attacked, and the longer a stamp’s duration, the more effective the magic that hits it.

It’s a strange version of synergy, balancing physical beatings with CP use and using magic to fill in the rest. Each turn, you get two actions, one from each of Angst Man and Plot Girl. (They have real names, but one’s a number anyway and this is funnier.) In keeping with standard RPG expectations, he’s the physical power and she’s the magical maven, though either can use any magic so far learned. The only other difference between them is in their special abilities: Nine (I told you he had a real name!) can absorb MP from downed foes, while Aisha’s (She does, too!) ability removes downed foes from the battlefield by converting them into HP.

The two-action-per-round limit may seem stifling, but Last Rebellion‘s strength is in its scaling. The game feels well-balanced from start to finish, with no real pushover battles but nothing that’s by any means “cheap” either. The HP/MP regaining techniques intrinsic to the duo are a great way to keep the game rolling without being knee-deep in curative items or restoration points while at the same time keeping the player on a knife’s edge. Further, HP or MP (depending on which half of said duo is active) is slowly regained while maneuvering through the dungeons, dungeons, and dungeons which form the bulk of the game.

(Further, in one thing I rarely get to comment on… the trophies may be the greatest ever created. A silver trophy entitled “Congrats, You Beat Up a Little Girl?” Who wouldn’t be envious of that?)

These are… really awesome designs and features. I can only hope that these words what I’ve written convey some of the exhilaration I felt as I maneuvered my way through this combat system. It’s amazing. It’s thought-provoking. It synergizes logical experimentation and turn management with tried-and-true RPG elements and mainstays. It’s set the bar high for every other game I’m going to play this year.

The plot was just kinda… yeah.

All Together Now

Nothing’s right; I’m torn. This is a game I want to give a 5/10, if only because the plot merits a -2/10 and the mechanics a 12/10. I suppose I can give it a little boost, though, in that there’s a certain… shared sufffering, I wanna say? Shared suffering between the player and the characters living out this mess. You don’t really connect on a personal level to these creations, but you do feel sorry for them. On the other hand, they get to pull off really shiny things when they’re not delivering painful exposition or overdramatized line readings. On the other other hand… GYAARG. Never before have I dealt with a game that swings from abysmal to glorious so swiftly or so often. Some folks don’t really “get” the Orwellian notion of Doublethink. Let me lay it out for you:

PLOT DOUBLEPLUSUNGOOD. GAMEPLAY DOUBLEPLUSGOOD. WE ARE THE DEAD.

BUT WE’RE STILL ALIVE.

KINDA.

Played to completion using a copy provided by the publisher.