Previews
Square vets look west for their next big RPG.
By
Jeremy Parish 11/17/2008
I wasn't sure what to expect when Square Enix invited me and
Game Developer magazine's Christian Nutt to have dinner with the creators of
The Last Remnant. Mainly awkwardness, I suppose. It's difficult to have a casual, relaxed conversation with Japanese developers, which is more a matter of cultural barriers than language; Japanese devs tend to be guarded around the press, and Square Enix's creators doubly so. Much to my surprise, though, the men behind Remnant were open and relaxed. Surprisingly, they didn't come to hype their game but rather to engage in a frank, informal discussion about the differences in tastes between the American and Japanese markets. Ironically, though we barely talked about Remnant, by the end of the night I found myself more and more intrigued by -- and excited for -- Square's next major title. And make no mistake, this is a
Square title. Even after the better part of a decade, Square Enix is very much two companies, and Remnant has all of the hallmarks of its Square half. It's internally developed, for one; while all Enix properties are created by outside collaborators like tri-Ace and Level 5, this is a strictly in-house project. In fact, at launch it will be Square Enix's first internally made title for the current console generation. It's also Square's first new in-house IP since 2001's
The Bouncer. And it's the work of an impressive number of company veterans led by Hiroshi Takai, whose résumé includes a number of
SaGa, Mana, and
Final Fantasy titles stretching back to his work on
Final Fantasy V's exceptional combat system.
SCREENS: Click the image above to check out all The Last Remnant screens.
Much of Remnant's staff previously worked on
Romancing SaGa and
Final Fantasy XII, and it shows through in their work. "We've avoided comparisons to SaGa and FFXII, because this is something completely different," Takai demurs. "We'd like to avoid preconceptions." Later, however, he did admit that he feels Remnant brings together the best aspects of SaGa and FFXII while adding new concepts and refinements. A paternity test would definitely prove the game's Final Fantasy heritage: Remnant's large-scale battle system runs on what art director Yusuke Naora calls "Gambit 1.5," an evolution of FFXII's Gambit system, which allowed for intelligent, automated A.I. control of nonplayer party members. "Players can't actually edit their party A.I.," says Naora, "but during the development process, the team worked with Gambits" -- the tool to define the rules by which the player's party would behave in the finished game.
While many RPG fans may initially find the lack of direct control over their party off-putting, the transparency of Remnant's use of Gambits makes sense. In FFXII, the player controlled a party of three characters drawn from a pool of six; here, the active "party" consists of as many as five Unions, which are groups of five warriors working in unison. Battles can involve as many as 50 combatants. Rather than force players to issue commands at the individual level and transform the game into a toilsome exercise in tactical micromanagement, Remnant zooms back from the macro view and becomes more about overall battlefield dynamics. Each Union's treated as a character might be in another RPG, with individual units within each Union acting according to their predetermined Gambits.
In practice, combat isn't so cut-and-dried as that, though. A character's action in any given round will depend on their skill level, learned abilities, the status of their comrades, the positioning of the character's Union relative to enemy Unions, and the team's overall morale in the current battle. In other words, A.I.-determined actions are highly context-driven. A character with wounded allies is likely to use healing skills -- unless, perhaps, his Union has the drop on an enemy formation and can safely finish off their opponents in that round. In that case, they might go all-out to mop up the rabble instead. Victory in combat seems to be less about the specifics (which are handled intelligently by preset Gambits) and more about general combat strategies, understanding the capabilities of each Union, positioning your team advantageously against the enemy, and knowing your foes' potential abilities. Because the combat system is entirely turn-based and features an extremely detailed interface, players can cycle through possible tactics to choose the most advantageous set of commands available to their Unions; they'll never be forced to guess what their party will do.
SCREENS: Click the image above to check out all The Last Remnant screens.
This is where the SaGa connection comes into play, although abstractly; it's a link that's difficult to express or define in concrete terms. Still, something about Remnant is powerfully reminiscent of the SaGa games, even though the game mechanics are radically different. The character-building system is a part of that. As in the SaGa titles (and
Final Fantasy II before them), character stats improve according to skill use, so that characters whose Unions act defensively will be rewarded with added endurance while characters whose Unions focus on special attacks will become more adept with the corresponding abilities. But there's a more nebulous connection as well in the general
feel of the game.
Early reviews from Japan paint a picture of an RPG with a heavy emphasis on combat, and by all appearances Remnant's battle mechanics are unique and idiosyncratic -- unapologetically so. Maybe that's the SaGa spirit bleeding through: both feature large, seemingly chaotic battles where your characters initially seem to behave with their own minds until, suddenly, everything clicks for you and falls into place.
Still, it's clear that Takai and his team have worked to make Remnant much less of a niche-oriented RPG than the SaGa games. "The problem with SaGa is that it has very passionate fans, but it can't break out beyond them," he laments. "If people see the SaGa connection as a good thing, that's great, but we want to make it clear that this game is much more refined and accessible."
Accessibility seems to be much on the team's mind; most of our conversation over dinner centered on the subject -- and more specifically, how to make a game like Remnant accessible and appealing to Americans. Japanese developers are mindful of the fact that their side of the industry has "lost its edge," to put it in the terms that Square Enix president Yoichi Wada himself
used recently, and Remnant has been designed from the ground up as an RPG targeted just as much toward Western gamers as our Japanese peers. "We did a lot of research into Western tastes, things that Americans want from their games," Naora says. Our meeting was ultimately another step in that process, a chance for the team to field more input about what works here and what doesn't.
SCREENS: Click the image above to check out all The Last Remnant screens.
The tremendous success of
Fallout 3 seems to have made a particularly profound impact on Naora. "When we make a game that sells two million copies, that's always seemed like a tremendous success for us," he says. "But now we hear about Fallout 3 selling four million in just a few weeks, and it really surprises us. This is a game that doesn't even look like what we in Japan consider an 'RPG,' yet it's incredibly popular."
"Until about a year ago, we'd never even heard the term 'J-RPG' to distinguish our RPGs from Western games," he admits. Now he seems determined to sort out the defining differences between the two schools of RPG design. Does it mean stronger female characters? A first-person perspective? More realism?
And that's why Remnant is so intriguing. It's one thing for Japanese developers to pay lip service to appealing to Western audiences, but it's something else entirely to make a sincere effort. Naora and Takai appear genuinely interested in pushing their games beyond the limitations of language and culture, and their team is largely comprised of veterans from some of Square's most unconventional and Western-oriented titles. The SaGa titles have always hewed more closely to the structure of 8-bit PC RPGs than any other Japanese franchise; the much-reviled
Unlimited Saga attempted to delve even further into the genre's roots by adopting the style and conventions of a pen-and-paper RPG. Meanwhile, FFXII boldly combined the narrative and character conventions of its series with the trappings and openness of Western MMOs. Hopefully, Remnant's creators will continue to explore the works of developers like BioWare and Bethesda to discover what makes those games tick and incorporate their findings into their own projects -- ideally without compromising the fundamental flavor that their Japanese perspective provides.
Balancing the need to appeal to both American and Japanese audiences is a demanding, difficult task that eludes most developers. Fortunately, Remnant seems like a vital step in the right direction.
