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The Last Story (Japan) |OT| The Gooch's Final (?) Fantasy

Cactus

Banned
Effect said:
I could only watch about half before I started getting very, very annoyed that there is a pretty good chance this won't be coming out in North America. Just wasn't enjoyable. I think I'm going to stop (or try to stop) looking at anything regarding this game as to not annoy myself any further. If it comes out I'll get it. However I have no faith that it will. I fear that I won't be interested if the wait is a few years long as well.

You're annoyed because you've already convinced yourself that Nintendo isn't localizing a game that has literally just released in Japan? Swell.

I can't wait for Nintendo to announce the Western versions of this and Xenoblade - partly because I want to play them, and partly because it'll finally put an end to all the complaining and negativity.
 

Shirokun

Member
Mailenstein said:
Just what I needed! Regarding my post from before:


Could you answer me please? Thanks :).


Don't have TLS yet, but based on the audio clips it seems safe to say that the soundtrack is consistently better than Xenoblade's.

So +1 TLS, I guess.
 

Haunted

Member
I don't even know what kind of shitty internal calculations Nintendo has done to determine that this is not worth bringing over. :mad:

And I certainly hope they revise them. Preferably sooner than later.

wsippel said:
Except Reginleiv doesn't suck either. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Shirokun said:
Except that despite some rough edges, Reginleiv is actually pretty damn fun. That's right, Nintendo wants you to writhe in agony.
Well, that certainly makes me feel better. Thanks, guys.
 

Diffense

Member
I'm optimistic that we're getting them...just annoyed at not getting confirmation from Nintendo.
Xenoblade debuted in NA as Monado at E3 2009 and they have to be so tight-lipped about it now?
Crazy and stupid.
 

Glennct

Member
chris-013 said:
Impressive first hour !
Indeed! I truly hope they localize this game; I don't have a Wii but am willing to get one just for this game, just like I got a 360 way back for Lost Odyssey!
 

Kai Dracon

Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
After checking out the first hour footage, I will say the animation in combat seems overly stiff; extremely robotic. I hope it doesn't make the characters feel as if they're sliding around and clunky, unresponsive.
 
Exploring around the city now. It's pretty fun! There's lots to explore. I walked into a shady back-area and actually got robbed by some kids, which activated a search mini-game.

There's also another mini-game where you try to find six coins scattered around the city. Items are scattered all over the city actually. Sometimes while walking there will be a search icon that comes up where you can try and look around the floor for dropped items. It's pretty neat.

Edit: Man it took a long time but I finally found all six coins scattered around the city. The reward is a
hoe
though -- so it's pretty cool I suppose.
 

D-Pad

Member
Kaijima said:
After checking out the first hour footage, I will say the animation in combat seems overly stiff; extremely robotic. I hope it doesn't make the characters feel as if they're sliding around and clunky, unresponsive.

All of the animation feels off, outside of some of the cutscenes. It's hard to look past, unfortunately... Hopefully the game play will distract enough to make it less...
 

-Oath

Member
Not sure what chapter Im on but I just finished the enemy warbase raid.
The game is.... well, great BUT its on the easy side. My only complaint so far.
 

thefro

Member
Kaijima said:
After checking out the first hour footage, I will say the animation in combat seems overly stiff; extremely robotic. I hope it doesn't make the characters feel as if they're sliding around and clunky, unresponsive.

Nope, it feels great to play. It's up to the standards you'd expect from a Nintendo-developed game.
 
thefro said:
Nope, it feels great to play. It's up to the standards you'd expect from a Nintendo-developed game.

The rest of the game is awesome, but the animation is pretty stiff. They mocap'ed the cutscenes but didn't animate the fingers.
 
Notes so far:

・Loving the game.
・Made it to Chapter 15, at level 21.
・Story is extremely well-paced and engaging.
・Combat is very intuitive and flowing. Also QUICK, thank god.
・There is a quest in the 1st city which lets you get an item to turn your character's tops transparent. O_O
・The game requires strategizing at points, but I do find the game to be too easy at the moment. Mostly this is because of the five "lives" each character is given in combat. Really having one or two would have been better balanced.
・Upgrading weapons and armor seems to be the key. New armor is odd in that it has no defense bonus until you start upgrading.

So far this game represents a total facelift on the JRPG genre, and is definitely worth turning your Wii on for.

Oh, and about localization? Area names, attack names and more are already translated (and well!) in-game, so I cannot imagine these were not drawn up without the help of a professional translator. Thus I wouldn't be surprised if the game is already being translated as we speak.
 
cb5d1c46.png


Da Gooch wants to hear from you if you speak dat neezy.
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
My Wii won't be turned on until this or Xenoblade or ToG hits. Ok maybe it will but right now, I have no intent of buying any more Wii games in the near future.
 
I just finished two more quests in the city. One was finding this
lost cat
-- a pain when it's such a big city =/

also, I tried to abuse a summon circle -- hoping to grind my levels -- but on my third summoning a warning came up that said "STRONG ENEMIES." They ended up killing me.
 

-Oath

Member
Ive gotta stop grinding. The game is easy as it is and Im only making the situation worse... its a habit though....
Chapter 29, 14 hours in.
 

thefro

Member
-Oath said:
Ive gotta stop grinding. The game is easy as it is and Im only making the situation worse... its a habit though....
Chapter 29, 14 hours in.

I've just been summoning one battle at all the summon circles to experience the battles there (they're different than the main game).

Really no reason to grind at all in this game unless you want to farm items.

It's basically a cakewalk until chapter 14 if you understand what you're supposed to be doing, and then some stuff gets somewhat more challenging. Rreally seems like they balanced it to be accessible for JRPG players who had never played an action game before.

I suggested to them to put in a hard mode for worldwide release which would only entail changing your different "LIFE" from 5 to 2.
 

Diffense

Member
thefro said:
I've just been summoning one battle at all the summon circles to experience the battles there (they're different than the main game).

Really no reason to grind at all in this game unless you want to farm items.

It's basically a cakewalk until chapter 14 if you understand what you're supposed to be doing, and then some stuff gets somewhat more challenging. Rreally seems like they balanced it to be accessible for JRPG players who had never played an action game before.

I suggested to them to put in a hard mode for worldwide release which would only entail changing your different "LIFE" from 5 to 2.

Well, there is a new game+ but it's only accessible after you've beaten the game.
So I guess it's not a true hard mode.
 

wsippel

Banned
The way the game is paced and structured, with carefully planned encounters and no randomness at all, the designers pretty much knew how strong you'd be at each encounter and balanced them accordingly. Also, with the way the levels and EXP scale, a party member ten or fifteen levels below the main character will be up to snuff after one or two encounters, and always in time for boss battles.

It seems there are points in the game when you have several missions available and are free to choose which one to tackle first, but those are balanced accordingly as well from what I've seen. You're free to grind if you wish to do so, by using summoning points or visiting the arena, but that hardly has any effect on the difficulty of main story missions.

In that regard, Last Story is pretty much perfect. It feels really, really similar to Mass Effect 2 in many ways I think - except it has much more loot, and much cooler weapons and armor. I still very much prefer Xenoblade for the great environments, exploration and overall design, but I think many people, even those who normally wouldn't enjoy JRPGs for more or less valid reasons, would have a lot of fun with Last Story. Those two games are pretty much polar opposites in any way (except for the loot, and the fact that they are two of the most competent Wii titles), yet they both differ from JRPG cliche very much. One is basically a single player MMO, while the other is very streamlined - like I wrote, a Japanese Mass Effect. And both rank at the very top of this gens JRPGs, in my humble opinion.
 

ivysaur12

Banned
wsippel said:
The way the game is paced and structured, with carefully planned encounters and no randomness at all, the designers pretty much knew how strong you'd be at each encounter and balanced them accordingly. Also, with the way the levels and EXP scale, a party member ten or fifteen levels below the main character will be up to snuff after one or two encounters, and always in time for boss battles.

It seems there are points in the game when you have several missions available and are free to choose which one to tackle first, but those are balanced accordingly as well from what I've seen. You're free to grind if you wish to do so, by using summoning points or visiting the arena, but that hardly has any effect on the difficulty of main story missions.

In that regard, Last Story is pretty much perfect. It feels really, really similar to Mass Effect 2 in many ways I think - except it has much more loot, and much cooler weapons and armor. I still very much prefer Xenoblade for the great environments, exploration and overall design, but I think many people, even those who normally wouldn't enjoy JRPGs for more or less valid reasons, would have a lot of fun with Last Story. Those two games are pretty much polar opposites in any way (except for the loot, and the fact that they are two of the most competent Wii titles), yet they both differ from JRPG cliche very much. One is basically a single player MMO, while the other is very streamlined - like I wrote, a Japanese Mass Effect. And both rank at the very top of this gens JRPGs, in my humble opinion.

Holy...
 
wsippel said:
The way the game is paced and structured, with carefully planned encounters and no randomness at all, the designers pretty much knew how strong you'd be at each encounter and balanced them accordingly. Also, with the way the levels and EXP scale, a party member ten or fifteen levels below the main character will be up to snuff after one or two encounters, and always in time for boss battles.

It seems there are points in the game when you have several missions available and are free to choose which one to tackle first, but those are balanced accordingly as well from what I've seen. You're free to grind if you wish to do so, by using summoning points or visiting the arena, but that hardly has any effect on the difficulty of main story missions.

In that regard, Last Story is pretty much perfect. It feels really, really similar to Mass Effect 2 in many ways I think - except it has much more loot, and much cooler weapons and armor. I still very much prefer Xenoblade for the great environments, exploration and overall design, but I think many people, even those who normally wouldn't enjoy JRPGs for more or less valid reasons, would have a lot of fun with Last Story. Those two games are pretty much polar opposites in any way (except for the loot, and the fact that they are two of the most competent Wii titles), yet they both differ from JRPG cliche very much. One is basically a single player MMO, while the other is very streamlined - like I wrote, a Japanese Mass Effect. And both rank at the very top of this gens JRPGs, in my humble opinion.

In an Iwata Asks column, Sakaguchi said something about having seen a YouTube video of a Western game, and this drove him to think that he had to make changes to the JRPG formulas. Any idea what that game might be?
 

Empty

Member
damn. i need to unsubscribe from this thread. all these positive impressions are just making it more painful.
 

wsippel

Banned
ivysaur12 said:
YMMV, of course. ;)

But this is truly how I feel after 15 hours of Last Story and 45 of Xenoblade. Which, in both cases, seems to be roughly half the game. One thing, pretty much the only thing I didn't like about Last Story is that Elza seems a wee bit emo. The whole game seems a bit heavy handed in that regard. Shulk, however, doesn't come across that way, he's more like your typical shonen protagonist. And not because shit doesn't hit the fan in Xenoblade. It does, it does so very early in the game - and it splatters.


AndriaSang said:
In an Iwata Asks column, Sakaguchi said something about having seen a YouTube video of a Western game, and this drove him to think that he had to make changes to the JRPG formulas. Any idea what that game might be?
Like I wrote, the game that came to mind playing Last Story was Mass Effect, so that would be my guess. But it's obviously hard to tell, not knowing which aspect of gamedesign he was talking about.
 

ryan-ts

Member
Daaaaamn wsippel, you are getting me hyped.

Getting Xenoblade in NA is nice (even this is a maybe) but now we definitely need Last Story to go along with it. Finally some home console JRPG's to get excited about and they might not even be coming out over here.
 

Shirokun

Member
AndriaSang said:
In an Iwata Asks column, Sakaguchi said something about having seen a YouTube video of a Western game, and this drove him to think that he had to make changes to the JRPG formulas. Any idea what that game might be?

It was Gears of War. I think somebody already mentioned this earlier in the thread.
 

ivysaur12

Banned
wsippel said:
YMMV, of course. ;)

But this is truly how I feel after 15 hours of Last Story and 45 of Xenoblade. Which, in both cases, seems to be roughly half the game. One thing, pretty much the only thing I didn't like about Last Story is that Elza seems a wee bit emo. The whole game seems a bit heavy handed in that regard. Shulk, however, doesn't come across that way, he's more like your typical shonen protagonist. And not because shit doesn't hit the fan in Xenoblade. It does, it does so very early in the game - and it splatters.



Like I wrote, the game that came to mind playing Last Story was Mass Effect, so that would be my guess. But it's obviously hard to tell, not knowing which aspect of gamedesign he was talking about.

Which do you think has a better plot? And are either even good?
 

wsippel

Banned
ivysaur12 said:
Which do you think has a better plot? And are either even good?
Can't really say. To judge the plot, I'd need to actually finish both games. Especially considering I quit both games at what seems to be main twist. Not to mention my Japanese is lacking at best (as in: I only understand a couple of words and phrases). I played both games with a friend who's pretty much fluent, but he didn't care to translate every detail. He only gave me a basic "status update" after cutscenes and important dialogues.
 

Bebpo

Banned
I've been taking some pics as I've been playing.

ls12.jpg


ls18.jpg


ls15.jpg


ls14.jpg


ls10.jpg


ls11.jpg


ls17.jpg


Also got the staff credits since duckrolls been bugging me to get them for a while. Not the best picture quality but every name should be readable.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v297/bebpo/staff01.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v297/bebpo/staff02.jpg

Decided not to post impressions until I finish it since the game is so short and I'm at the endgame around 13 hours in now. So I'll finish it up the next time I play and write up my final thoughts.
 
Played a few more hours today. The game is pretty great so far. Excellent pacing. Having a good time with this.

Can someone please explain how the burst skill works at level 16? I just acquired it but I don't get the point of it exactly (my JP isn't good enough to read all that Kanji).
 

Big One

Banned
So TLS players, how does the game rank up next to Mistwalker's other games?

How about other JRPGs this gen?

Also I noticed that there's SEVEN pages from only like two pages since the release of The Last Story on Pixiv. It seems the fan community has accepted it into the ranks (you know the ones).
 

wsippel

Banned
Mockingbird said:
Played a few more hours today. The game is pretty great so far. Excellent pacing. Having a good time with this.

Can someone please explain how the burst skill works at level 16? I just acquired it but I don't get the point of it exactly (my JP isn't good enough to read all that Kanji).
From what I understand, if you enable gathering and guard incoming attacks, your burst level rises. Then, when you disable gathering, you'll send out a shockwave that will debuff nearby enemies.
 

thefro

Member
plank said:
does this game use wii remote motion sensing? or M+?

Not a bit. It doesn't even use the pointer for aiming.

Big One said:
So TLS players, how does the game rank up next to Mistwalker's other games?

How about other JRPGs this gen?

I don't feel qualified to say that (since I'm only halfway through and don't understand Japanese), but I from what I've played so far it's the best game on Wii besides Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2.
 

EatChildren

Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
What's the deal with NewGame+ in this?
 

ryan-ts

Member
thefro said:
I don't feel qualified to say that (since I'm only halfway through and don't understand Japanese), but I from what I've played so far it's the best game on Wii besides Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2.

...... I want this so bad.
 
Just finished a few online sessions in the raid mode. Damn that thing's pretty addicting. The rewards you get are some pretty damn powerful weapons for the single player game too. Using these weapons on where I'm at in the game feels like I'll be cheating or something. I was lucky enough to get two rare weapons on my 2nd and 3rd wins -- one of which is the Trident!

also, you really need competent players for these boss raids because without them you'll be dead or the time limit will run out. Make sure to get on those damn heal circles! I admit I was very incompetent =P I threw bananas that would mess up my teammates after I died! This game is really something! I'm now level R3 (you start at R1)!
 
I like the direction Gooch takes with grinding in Lost Odyssey and apparently here.

While LO had some difficulty spikes, they tried to balance all of the enemies with the exp cap.

f* you Nintendo
 

djtiesto

is beloved, despite what anyone might say
AndriaSang said:
In an Iwata Asks column, Sakaguchi said something about having seen a YouTube video of a Western game, and this drove him to think that he had to make changes to the JRPG formulas. Any idea what that game might be?

He didn't need to make any changes to classic formulas, IMO. Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey were fine as is (apart from the technical issues).
 

thefro

Member
Mockingbird said:
Just finished a few online sessions in the raid mode. Damn that thing's pretty addicting. The rewards you get are some pretty damn powerful weapons for the single player game too. Using these weapons on where I'm at in the game feels like I'll be cheating or something. I was lucky enough to get two rare weapons on my 2nd and 3rd wins -- one of which is the Trident!

also, you really need competent players for these boss raids because without them you'll be dead or the time limit will run out. Make sure to get on those damn heal circles! I admit I was very incompetent =P I threw bananas that would mess up my teammates after I died! This game is really something! I'm now level R3 (you start at R1)!

That's a neat feature... you become a ghost when you run out of lives and can shoot banana peels or healing arrows at your teammates. You can still run around the map and do stuff and watch.

I hope they make a sequel because both online modes are really well thought out but could be expanded more. There's only 5 boss battles in raid mode (well,
six really since another dragon shows up
). Could use about 10 more, plus a mode where you go through a randomly generated dungeon in co-op.

The number of maps in versus mode is fine but it'd be really fun to see a mode like capture the flag or something with this battle system.
 
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