Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Amazing"

I just completed this game not too long ago and I thought that The Last Story was a good game. This game has a lot of positives, as well as negatives. The positives are the: story, characters, gameplay, graphics and soundtrack. The negatives are the: difficulty level, camera controls and the Auto Attack function. Let's start with the story. The story is strong, immersive and emotional. This is something that some of the previous Final Fantasy games should have had. The story is about Zael, a mercenary who lost his family when his village was attacked by soldiers. When Zael is exploring an underground catacomb, he earns a mysterious power, known as "The Outsider." When Zael befriends Callista, a noblewoman to the Arganan family, he meets the Count, who has a desire to wipe out the Gurak Continent. The Count takes advantage of Zael and his power to destroy the Gurak once and for all. When Zael befriends Gurak citizens, he realizes tha the Gurak are nice people. Zael and his friends now have to stop the Count and end a great war between the two races of people. I like this kind of storyline. In Japanese RPG's, I always want a great storyline that I can remember down the road for years to come. The story also includes a love story between Castilla and Zael. While this love story is nice, it's nothing new, since I've seen so many love stories in Japanese RPG's. Nothing will ever beat the love story between Mishka and King! Animal love stories are definetely better than love stories. Hahahahaha. The story had some emotional moments in it. Personally, I enjoyed the story in this game. The characters in this game have good personalities. My favorite of the personalities was Lowell's "womanizer" personality. There were some funny moments with Lowell. The gameplay in this game is fun. This game blends in strategy with an action RPG. There are certain situations where you have to perform a certain attack to damage an enemy or a boss. Sometimes, you have to preemptively attack an enemy to go to the next area of a dungeon. Zael's Scout ability for example. There were some frustrations to the gameplay though like the Auto Attack function, which I'll get into later. The core of the gameplay is to command your allies to perform a certain attack that you want them to perform. This involves a lot of strategy and can mean the difference between winning a fight and losing a fight. The graphics in The Last Story were definetely top notch. The graphics are clear, well detailed and polished. People usually complain about Japanese RPG's having last gen graphics, but the graphics in The Last Story are 7th Gen worthy. And finally the soundtrack in The Last Story is fantastic. Nobuo Uematsu did a fantastic job with the soundtrack and have a bunch of great songs that you can listen to over and over again. While this game does have its positives, there are negatives in this game. The difficulty level in The Last Story is very unbalanced. Some of the enemies and bosses were easy one level, then the next, they are very hard. Even if you power level your characters, a lot of the time, you have trouble defeating enemies and bosses. It's like the developers wanted to ensure that you would not be able to dominate dungeons so easily, even with level grinding. This frustrated me, especially in boss fights. The camera controls are terrible. When you try to rotate the camera to face an enemy, the camera will only rotate a certain amount of degress and would not allow you to see the enemies you were fighting. I got killed a couple of times, because of the poor camera controls. Finally, the Auto Attack function didn't need to be added. When you run up to an enemy, your character automatically attacks the enemy. The Suto Attack function gets very annoying, especially if you desperately need to evade attacks from enemies to heal or revive a downed character etc. Thankfully, there an option to disable the Auto Attack function. Once I disables the Auto Attack function, the battles were a little easier. So if you're a Japanese RPG fan and you have a Wii, you should definetely buy this game. You will not be disappointed.