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[Oichi]

I'm about 15 hours into the game, my rank is down to around 2900 or so now... the battles are still a little bit easy but now I have to rock a long distance style along with break style in case I run into a Ranker that loves to counter all melee attacks. I still haven't been defeated in a ranker battle though.

As for the story, I have no idea where it's going but... it's going somewhere.

 

[rush777]

This looks really cool, first I've seen it nice thread.

 

[-Oath]

As for the story, I have no idea where it's going but... it's going somewhere.

Hope its somewhere good, the story seems to moving slow so far.
Just got to another section of the empire, the middle class area Im assuming. First battle there was around +10,000 ranks :lol
And where's FAZ? I want to see him already

 

[Oichi]

You'll run into him soon.

 

[mattiewheels]

The walkthroughs on nicovideo look great....someone mentioned english voices in a post before, was that a joke? I guess english speakers need not apply because of all the quests?

 

[Urban Scholar]

The walkthroughs on nicovideo look great....someone mentioned english voices in a post before, was that a joke? I guess english speakers need not apply because of all the quests?

I don't know Japanese myself and I'm doing rather fine in my game, then again this isn't the first JRPG I've imported. At this point I would imagine the English is taking awhile due to the tons of dialogue and text that has to be translated. Not sure when I'll find the time to post impressions but hopefully this evening after work.

 

[Bebpo]

When does the game pick up?

I'm really not feeling this game at all. The battles are boring outside of the ranker fights and thanks to random battles you can't just avoid them. The sound quality is shit, the areas are all tiny, and there's hardly any plot so far. Not enjoying it much outside of the music so far, it just seems boring.

 

[RevenantKioku]

It got me after the first Ranker battle so, you could keep playing and hoping it gets better for you but who knows, really.

 

[Oichi]

I'll tell ya right now that the story doesn't really go anywhere. Well, it does go somewhere but it seems very meh to me and because of all the damn missions you have to do, it doesn't feel like you're a part of it either. I'm near the end of the game (I think I'm actually at the end boss now... because the one tactic i've been using no longer works lol) and I feel that what I've done in the entire game has no connection at all to what the story is about.:lol

 

[RevenantKioku]

There's a story?
And how the hell are you near the end of the game? How short is it?

 

[Oichi]

It's not that short, I just defeated

Spoiler

Yuri, the #2 ranker

and I'm at 23 hours right now. The story didn't seem to end though... it's still going. :X

 

[RevenantKioku]

Well, it doesn't seem surprising that the

Spoiler

ranking isn't all that there is to this world

.
23 hours since Thursday, that's impressive, though! Although I'm just studying right now. (And DQ9 Liquid Metal Slime hunting at the same time.)

 

[Bebpo]

Hmm, shame to hear that about the story. I'm around 5 hours in after getting my first ougi. Game is good, but it just seems...good. Not much is standing out so far to separate it from the average jrpg besides the battle system and I'm not entirely sold on the system yet. For the ranker fights and boss fights so far I've just used the same R skill attacks in the same order and for normal enemies I just mash OOOOOOOOOOO while reading gaf or something like your average jrpg. I see the potential for the battle system to get really strategic and deep, but because you can't use items and your R skills all have use limits, it seems like you basically do the bulk of your damage in a 1-2 min period and then that's that. Like I said, it's an interesting battle system, but it hasn't sold me on it yet.

Also I feel like it's way too linear for its premise. Instead of being an open non-linear world with rankers living everywhere that you can challenge to rank up and quests as an alternative way to rank up; a game where you can choose your own growth and fight anyone you see...instead of that so far it's basically been a super linear path of "hey, fight this guy now. Next fight this guy. Next do this quest. Next fight this guy" and whenever I try to just pick a fight with someone outside that chain 95% of the time they'll just refuse even though their rank is close enough that I should have been able to fight and beat them and advance up.

I think my main problem is that I'm coming from just having played Xenoblade and after all the progress XB makes for jrpgs in general, playing Last Ranker just feels like a giant step back. I mean for one thing, why did Last Ranker even bother at all with random battles when they were going to put visible enemies in anyhow. They could have just made them a different color.

 

[Urban Scholar]

Well the plot being light does come with the game's concept. This game does feel very Mega Man like in progression but given the shonen manga like design and Capcom it makes sense to me in that regard. Its a ride of what you make of it. Also Marqus/Makis(?) feels like a weird talent agent.

 

[RevenantKioku]

Yoa was the first Ranker fight where I actually had trouble. Then again, you may have already passed her within your 5 hours. I'm notoriously slow at games

 

[Shouta]

My rank is at 965 right now. Definitely like it though definitely need more Ranker battles for sure. Random battles are boring, obviously. I've died a few times mostly because of miscalculations like getting knocked into Break status and then eating a Double Edge. :lol

 

[Oichi]

Oohh...

About Rankings

Spoiler

I love how after you're the #2 Ranker in the god damn universe, people are still sending you on fetch quests. No really, I love it. Sigh.

 

[Bebpo]

Just hit 59k around 7 hours in. I like that the game, like other PSP games, is very portable. Lots of bite-sized quests, events instead of real long ones.

One thing I don't like is how sometimes you're left running around the entire city, checking every floor of every building for that ONE guy who will get your rank up just slightly enough to let you do the next quest. Would have been nice if the stupid ranker file that lists all the npcs you meet and their rankings actually listed...where these people are located ^^;

Thankfully, 90% of the time the game is pretty clear as to "do quest A then you can do quest B then you can fight guy A then you can fight guy B". But yeah, the order of everything feels extremely restricted, like there is no freedom at all in this game to do what you want. Probably my biggest disappointment with the game. Any chance that later on it opens up and you have lots of things to do in any order you please?

 

[Bebpo]

Oh and not being able to skip ougis is a huge smh design decision. It's not like you see them that often, but once you've seen one a few times, sitting through the 60 second long unskippable animation is really annoying. I never use mine because I don't want to sit through that. It's knights of the round all over again.

 

[Oichi]

Oh my god, I'm

Spoiler

fighting Harth for the rank of #1

and this guy is a god damn challenge. I don't really know what I'm doing wrong here but I'm getting him to around 20% health and then I just cannot take him down. He does this move that constantly drains your HP and your Break meter, and he does so much damage to both HP and Break that I'm getting broken every three turns. I tried both bulldogging him despite the deficiencies and turtling until the effect wore off but neither strategy worked. :/

 

[Shouta]

I'm not reading the spoiler but what styles are you using?

 

[Oichi]

Guard and Break. I tried Attack/Guard initially but that didn't work out too well, I didn't do enough damage to him without Break.

Edit: Just beat him and the

Spoiler

final boss

afterwards. Protip: High Guard is a necessity in this battle.

 

[Tailzo]

Thanks for the impressions. I still want the game, even if the story isn't great. I liked the kind of 1-1 battles of Suikoden, like these battles reminds me of.

 

[Shouta]

I like the story actually, though it certainly is a little low key for the most part.

Finished the section where Oichi thought it ended. Definitely can see why he thought so. :lol

 

[RevenantKioku]

Got stuck for a little bit at rank 78628 but I think I'm on track again.

 

[Oichi]

I'll be selling the game back this week, i think. As far as post-game content is concerned there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of it. There's one quest unlocked after you beat the game, and you can also fight special ranker opponents in the coliseum if you input special passwords or complete certain quests...

spoiler for one of the end-game quest

Spoiler

There's a quest where you have to go back to the snowy plains and repeat the map 5 times. Once you have done that, the clients you were working for appear in the coliseum. It's actually a 2 on 1 ranker match too, pretty cool! If you input "ByeByeSenpai", you can also fight a super powered up Baygar (dude with the classes who always yells Senpuaaai). Haven't beaten him yet... he's too powerful. If you input MurakumoKen3 you can fight a super powered Sengoku too.

 

[Bebpo]

Oichi did you finish the game? I'm curious as to the length.

I don't want to be a hater, but I'm not exactly a fan of the game and want to get this over with so I can play Narikiri Dungeon X on the 6th.

I'm around 7 hours in at rank 54,000 atm.

 

[Oichi]

Yes, I finished the game, and I believe I finished all of the quests... although those seem to be almost mandatory anyway to progress. Took me about 24 hours to finish it, although there were some times that I left the game paused while I was doing something else, so I don't know if the game counts that time.

 

[Bebpo]

Thanks. Sounds like a solid length without being too long.

 

[duckroll]

The game finally showed up today. I'm really surprised that even though I ordered the Asia version (no CERO on the box cover! yay!) P-A still sent me the CD. My picture label is Faz, who did you guys get?

Will post some impressions later tonight when I've sunk enough time into the game.

 

[duckroll]

Played about 2 hours so far. I'm really enjoying the game. It's not the sort of RPG which is totally story-driven, so I find that it's best to play in 1 hour sessions or so. The graphics are really, really good, and definitely the best in any Image Epoch game yet. The production values in general feel good, and the game is pretty polished.

The pace of the game feels really unique as far as JRPGs go. It's more relaxed, and it definitely feels like Niinou and Nojima nailed the entire shounen fighting manga feel of the world. The script is pretty funny too, which I've come to expect from Nojima these days. One thing I was surprised about was that the game has.... FOEs. I thought that the rankers would basically be the visible enemy representation like FOEs in EO and dragons in 7D, but that's not the case. Dungeons actually have visible strong mobs represented by some weird purple ball thing moving around on fixed paths. Very, very strange.

I would say that so far the game is pretty much exactly what I expected in terms of gameplay and story, but way better than I expected in terms of polish. Pretty happy with it so far!

 

[RevenantKioku]

Shit. I've had the game since launch. I can't let Ducky pass me!

 

[duckroll]

I would also like to confirm that my Underboob Detective Skills (TM) have not failed me. Ren's realtime model has serious underboobage, even though they're small boobs. In certain cutscenes you can see it really clearly, and it's very faithful to the original artwork by Yoshikawa. Great stuff.

 

[RevenantKioku]

I still can't see boobs, never mind underboobs.

 

[Urban Scholar]

So...

Spoiler

I fought Faz as things hit the provebial fan after the Tylong & Sengoku fight. People are disenfranchised, Zig is sort of lost. I find Faz being mental not surprising really as the whole game has followed the shonen manga format thus far. Still rather entertaining though.

 

[duckroll]

Almost 9 hours into the game, my rank is around 34000 now. I'm surprised at the comments that the game has no story, but I guess I'm kinda used to the sort of narrative that Niinou likes to tell? It's less about major events happening all the time as you go to areas, and more about following the journey of the player throughout the game as the world opens up and the player encounters various people, places and learns more about what's going on, etc. EO and 7D were both like that, and LR feels a lot like that too. The only difference is LR has fully voiced cutscenes, and actual cinematic 3D cutscenes and FMVs.

I guess I'm one of the very few people here who have actually played each of the RPGs Niinou directed in sequence, so this definitely feels like an evolution of his ideas in every way. Really digging it. The combat system is really good, and I find the world and characters interesting. The pacing is about just right for a shounen fighting style story. They should actually adapt Last Ranker into a manga, if they get a good artist I'll certainly read it!


Edit: Oath mentioned earlier that the Shoot Style sucks, and I totally disagree. It's weak if you're using it like Attack Style, but if you pair it with Break instead it's a GREAT way to fight Rankers who like to use counters or range attacks themselves. Shoot Style is also great for easier random encounters where you just want to finish off the enemies as fast as possible without going through the melee attack animations. :lol

 

[Urban Scholar]

I've being using attack/break style primarily while switching to others when certain rank fights called for it.

 

[Bebpo]

ok, got to my first ranker fight I can't figure out. It's vs. this arrow girl at the monorail station that is ~21k. I don't even need to fight her because I'm 19k, but I want to beat every ranker in the game.

Problem is that she counters every physical attack with a kick for 130 damage and so I can't break her. My gun style does almost no damage or break damage. And the only thing useful is guard style but then I'm just guarding and can't hurt her. Oh and her arrows break me really quickly, so she does good damage.

Is there a trick that I'm missing, a skill or something to stop being countered every attack? I didn't have any trouble with earlier arrow people, but then again they only countered sometimes and had moments where they would power up for an attack and leave them open. This girl doesn't have any power up attacks that last more than a second giving me time to pull off a good attack.

 

[Bebpo]

nm, just powered it through using break like always. Didn't realize when she counters you don't lose SP for the attack since it didn't go through. So I just kept mashing O and taking all the counter damage and 1 out of 4 times she wouldn't counter. Took a lot of damage, but kept breaking her and finished her off.

 

[duckroll]

About 15 hours now. In terms of progress my rank is ~4000 now. I think at this point I can summarize pretty well what I like and dislike about the game, since it is unlikely to change much for the rest of the game.

Pro:

- Really good graphics, almost zero loading, feels pretty polished.

- There are unique musical themes for each area, and a ton of battle themes. Good variety in music.

- Battle engine is solid, and it's balanced in a well rounded way. Players who want to keep the same strategy throughout the game can mostly stick with Attack/Break styles and just power through the game. Those who want to experiment with other styles and try out different skills will find it possible to win battles in other ways as well. It might be harder, but it feels more fun if you're into trying different things.

- The worldview and concept of the game as a RPG is pretty unique, and it definitely feels refreshing to play in comparison to just another standard JRPG.


Con:

- The game itself feels rather limited in scope and low on overall content. In general areas get a lot of reuse in quests, even mandatory ones, and the world in the game feels pretty small. Weapons and equipment are also a bit lacking, making equipment customization feel really limited.

- While the combat mechanics are good, and the graphics are above average, the areas in the game feel very simple in design, and the monster encounters are generally time wasters instead of something that requires strategy like the ranking battles. It makes the game content feel like it's padded.

- A bit of inconsistency between cutscene production values and the non-cinematic conversations. The main problem is with the lip sync mouth flap. While they're almost perfectly synced in the cinematic cutscenes, the normal conversations have this annoying mouth flap animation that just keeps looping when a voice clip is played. This makes it look retarded when a character says a word and pauses for dramatic effect before continuing, but the animation just keeps showing the mouth moving regardless.



Overall I'm enjoying this quite a bit, but there are definitely elements which are lacking, indicating that Niinou is still getting familiar with directing a full 3D RPG, and so a lot of the scale and scope in terms of content is being limited, especially compared to 7th Dragon which felt like a much bigger game and a much bigger world.
-

 

[Bebpo]

Yeah, I'm a little behind ~8000 rank, but I agree with most of those points and am enjoying it a good amount.

I think the game would have been better if random battles were eliminated, since they feel thrown in to give you something to do in dungeons. Also more variety in the battle system. Even if you experiment around, there isn't a whole lot to it. I think the reason the game is fairly short is because they only have enough depth in the battle system, locations, and story to last about 20-30 hours. Which is good, as if they stretched it out to 50 hours+ with this system, I think it'd get boring.

It's definitely a good little rpg. Imo, it's not really on the level of big rpgs like KH BBS or Xenoblade or even RoF, but it doesn't try to be. It's more like those old rpgs on GBA that knew exactly what they were trying to be, a short fun portable rpg experience.

 

[Shouta]

Finished it last week and enjoyed it overall. Definitely feels like a game that they wanted to keep the scope in check so it works well overall rather than trying to jam into too much. Though, it feels like they could've put some more into it. Random battles definitely weren't needed but I guess they a bit of sense.

I definitely think they should've played around with the battles more to really force different styles of play. I barely used Guard and Shoot because they weren't really needed but they were pretty cool.

 

[Bebpo]

14 hours in now, ~rank 700.

I hate that I always come off sounding negative about the game, because I really do think it's a nice little jrpg that I would easily recommend to psp jrpg fans.

Things I like about the game:

+The character designs/character models are awesome! When you see several main characters together in a cutscene it really looks like a top notch PS2 rpg and leaves a last impression. So much of the character personalities come across just from the designs. This guy really needs to work on games more often! One of the best character designers in the industry.

+Having dozens and dozens of battle themes in place of dozens of field/cutscene music. I think this is the most progressive thing the game does for the jrpg genre. Having unique music for each enemy type and each major character or major groups of characters makes battles against them feel more distinctive and exciting. Since you spend 75%+ of any rpg in battle, I'd like to see other rpgs try to do this and have 20+ battle themes instead of 1 or 2.

+The world art is really good. Some of the dungeons have great texture work and look almost FFXII quality.

+soundtrack is quite good. Makes me wonder what Xenoblade would have sounded like if Shimomura had done all 4cds instead of like 8 tracks, lol.

And just to throw in a random negative, I've started noticing slowdown in battles with 3 big enemies at a time whenever there are effects on screen. Once you kill one of the enemies and drop it down to 2 the framerate gets back to 30fps, but still kind lol

 

[Oichi]

Also, the "virtually no load time" thing isn't true near the end of the game. sometimes it takes 2 - 3 seconds to load a zone, which is really different from the beginning of the game. I guess they preload areas when you press select to fast travel, but near the end of the game where you have way more areas to explore, the preload isn't as effective.

 

[Bebpo]

Yeah even though I installed it I noticed little weird loading stutters during the cutscene

Spoiler

in the ice glacier place with all the antis fighting the monsters

 

[Urban Scholar]

This weekend I was also able to complete it.

Spoiler

The point from the beach of fighting both Faz & Ren to securing a spot in the top 10 was epic. I mean the whole build up to the Sengoku fight, wow. The battle with Harth was annoying but well worth it.

Did anyone do the the side quest with the young lady that would visit you? She visited often & am I mistaken in thinking she died? My title remained saved by Valkyrie for the reminder of the game.

Overall a fun ride, short & straight to the point for a JRPG. A good fit for a summer game.

 

[Einherjar]

Ugh, the premise, combat, music, art, etc. are all great, but the story is meh and so much potential is wasted. Reading the game summary, I thought the game would be very open world, kinda like Radiata Stories, and have varied characters.

Playing through the game, it's extremely linear. It might look like you have freedom, but the game is 100% from point A to B to C, talking to character X then Y then Z in that order.

Also, with apparently over 99999+ "rankers" or enemy npc's, you only actually ever fight ~90 of them.

The game itself is good enough to play through, but I just feel like I was deceived into thinking the game was even somewhat open world.

 

[Bebpo]

17:30, rank 35 now.

Heading towards the

Spoiler

tower

. Guessing the game is almost done?

Like Shouta I wish the game rewarded you for using a variety of skills. I wanted the game to be like SMT when to get through a boss fight, you need to figure out the exact group of skills to beat that particular boss and each boss would require a different set.

Instead I've never used the gun style or shield style or even attack style for anything besides a style to throw all my support buffing on. I fight entirely in Break style.

Double Edge really breaks the game, although it wasn't difficult before you got it. On a broken opponent I'm doing about 5500 damage each time I use it.

This is what I do for every single boss battle in the game until now:

(start in attack style) = DEF UP, HP REGEN, ATTACK UP
(switch to break style) = O,O,BREAK FIST (if not broken one more O), DOUBLE EDGE, then if they're still barely alive, POWER EDGE

boss is dead. If they have tons of life, I just repeat that once more. Most of those skills are from the first 5 hours of the game. It's like they give you the best stuff right at the start and then you can just keep destroying everything in your path with it.

I don't dislike the battle system, but stuff like that, lots of worthless skills, and lack of difficulty make it so I won't say it's a great battle system either. I haven't played 7th Dragon, but I think EO's battle system was a lot better. Plus EO was intense and challenging. The challenge in Last Ranker feels more like World Destruction where it's easy, relaxing and fun instead. I'm always up for relaxing fun though, so I still like the game, but I would've preferred something closer to EO or SMT in challenge that requires you to really make strategic use of the battle system.

 

[Bebpo]

Beat it ~21 hours.

Some of the end stuff was pretty cool. Game has nice presentation and does a great job at making badasses feel badass.

Overall was a nice little game that is easily recommendable but if you play a lot of rpgs it won't blow your world away. Feels like one of those "my very first rpg" games with a lot of good ideas but a game that doesn't actually capitalize on them. Gameplay was underdeveloped and easy from start to finish, with probably the shortest final boss fight ever in an rpg. Never had to use anything other than break style w/buffs & HP regen.

Story was enjoyable with a good cast as most things Nojima are, but it's definitely a short story. Graphics & music are great, but not enough areas. City was really small & dungeons were like 3 screens and 5 mins long (I actually kind of appreciate that as they weren't painful in the least). Ougis were half-assed. They look cool but were no challenge to dodge and posed no threat and personally I found them pointless to use as they are a last ditch attack and the battle never gets bad enough that I ever need them. Plus you can't skip the looong animation.

I'll give Niinou credit for taking something that seemed tough to make work (1 on 1 battle system) and making an entertaining game out of it. Definitely an rpg worth playing if you have a psp and you like rpgs. But hopefully Niinou's next 3d rpg will have a bit more meat to it.

I'd give it about a B or 8/10. Maybe a little higher just for the handful of great tracks that came from the production. Will definitely get the ost.

 

[GhaleonQ]

Thanks for the impressions, all. It sounds like it didn't overcome its self-evident limitations. Do you think that this turned out to be a worthwhile experiment, or was the concept underbaked and this turned out to be "for fans of the genre" (i.e., this generation's norm)?