I bought the game yesterday and had the day off today so I have been able to put about 5 or 6 hours into it. At first I hated the game. The battle system and story made no sense and the graphics / performance were terrible. After installing the game to the HDD, getting used to the battle system and getting a bit further into the story I am now having a lot of fun. Once you get used to the battle system the game becomes very enjoyable even though it takes a while to get to that point.
I do, however, really wish Square never licensed Unreal Engine 3. In fact, I wish this engine would just disappear outside of Epic-developed games. I have played just about every UE3 game and every single one of them, outside of Gears of War 1 / 2 and UT3, feel like they are early beta or even alpha builds. I am so sick of this engine and its dogshit performance, texture-loading problems, bland colors and "screen-smeared-with-vaseline" look. There isn't a single UE3 game out there that isn't developed by Epic that doesn't suffer from major technical problems. Even the Epic games have texture-loading problems and other technical issues. When every single game has problems, I don't think the developers can be blamed anymore. The engine is obviously much more trouble than its worth.
Last Remnant is possibly the worst of UE3 games in terms of technical problems. I played the game for 5 hours before installing it to my harddrive and it was a horrendous experience. Textures took forever to load and in some cases they didn't even load at all. Big battles were just a huge mess of blurred textures and a jerky framerate. Even when the textures do finish loading, the game is very ugly. The character models look pretty good, but the environments are really bad in this game. Then again, this seems to be a theme with UE3 games unless they take place in completely destroyed / post-apocalyptic environments. Playing the game off the DVD was an extremely frustrating experience. I only have a 20gb HDD (which means only about 15gb of actual space when everything is deleted), so I had to delete a lot of stuff to fit the first disc onto my HDD, but oh boy am I glad I did.
After installing the game to the HDD it becomes a lot more playable. Sure there are still the texture-loading problems, but they pop in pretty quickly instead of taking 5-10 seconds+ or not loading at all like they did when running the game off the DVD. The load times, while still frequent, are very short now and I don't really notice them anymore. Most importantly is that battles are actually playable now. Textures load properly now and the game doesn't chop out as bad whenever a special ability is used. The performance is still pretty awful even when running off the HDD, but at least it is playable now. It is probably about the same in terms of performance as Mass Effect was running off the DVD.
Anyway, the game is a lot of fun once you get used to it, but unless you can install the game to the HDD I really can't recommend it. It is a complete mess performance wise, and only becomes playable once it is installed on the HDD. It is really sad that UE3 has become the engine of choice for this generation. I think a lot of companies didn't know what they were getting into when they licensed this thing, because so far it has produced nothing but shit in terms of performance. It is really too bad because games like Mass Effect, Lost Odyssey and Last Remnant are all very good games, but they are set back severely by UE3. I can only imagine how good these games would have been if different technology was used.
