As I noted on Monday, the trial version for The Last Remnant came out today so I quickly queued up the download through Firefox. If you’re wondering why I’m not calling it a demo anymore, it’s because Square Enix calls it a trial, so I thought I might as well just follow suit. The download itself is basically 1.0 GB and the installation itself takes about 2.4 GB so I hope you have a lot of free space lying around.
So the first thing I did after I started the trial was to turn everything down. The only thing I didn’t switch to the lowest setting possible was the resolution, I ended up tweaking it down to 800×480 instead of the lowest 640×480. What can I say, I’m a sucker for widescreen resolutions. When you’re scrolling through the settings, you’ll find that you can keep the Japanese voices but use English text, which is of course what I picked. I also noticed that I could use my 360′s controller so I plugged that in and restarted the game (just in case) and it picked it up just fine so it seems like I wouldn’t have to use a keyboard to play.
Now I’d be lying if I said the loading speeds were not abyssmal. When the game started all I heard was music and I worried that the game had hung or something. Thankfully, the graphics eventually rendered onto the screen. I tilted my left analog stick and Rush started moving. What a shocker! My frame rate was less than 15 when I was running the benchmark but the trial version itself was actually quite smooth! Also note that I was using 640×480 when I was running the benchmark, how very odd indeed. After talking to my fellow chums and having toured the city a little bit, I headed southeast as I was instructed to to the Ivory Peaks. I didn’t want to bother going to the other places because of the bad loading times.
Anyway, once I arrived at the Ivory Peaks, the battles began. I didn’t know how to engage the enemy properly so they always started attacking me first. :( Nonetheless, the battle system is quite engaging with them QTEs and it’s also very refreshing as I don’t think I’ve played a game with this kind of battle system before. And in case you were wondering, my frame rate was doing just fine in battles also (score!). After a couple of fights (or none if you manage to dodge everything), you’ll eventually exit out of the Ivory Peaks and be granted access to Elysion on the world map. A small cutscene will ensue as you can see below and then that will be the end of the trial.
I’ll probably give the trial another spin later and explore the other areas that I skipped, I may or may not write more then, no promises.