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Review of Last Dream
The Crunch
In a nutshell, this game plays like a souped up mega expansion of the first Final Fantasy with elements from several of the other games. You choose between eight classes for four characters, with varying degrees of martial, magic and utility power. Which classes you choose can affect how much of the game you experience. Only hunters can tame chocobos(called giant moas but they're not fooling anybody), only engineers can pass through tunnels and only thieves can steal with impunity. These utility classes are mediocre fighters, however, and you'll be sacrificing some real combat viability not giving that character slot to someone punchier. Even in the other classes you have to make some hard choices. Grey mages(red mages) start out as the obvious best choice at first but plateau around the time monks finally start to become viable and more focused casters start to outshine them. This is true of FF but it's a bit harsher and more complex here. It seems to be a running theme throughout the game: tactical choices are deadly important. I dig it. Others who don't however can alter the difficulty and even change the frequency of monsters(very useful in dungeons where you just want to run to the boss)
Character upgrade is also quite a bit more complex. There are a lot of stats, and you can tinker them yourself if you want. I didn't check the tutorial, but figured it out eventually without ruining my guys. I've heard others haven't been so lucky. The game does have a pretty comprehensive tutorial system if you can slog through it (I couldn't). The abilities you can get are great and really let you make your individual mark on your play style.
They really let you feel like your hard work tinkering with the characters matters too, because the monsters are not pushovers; the bosses in particular are brutal and require real tactics and preparation. You have to manage healing, buffing, debuffing, and damaging with regards to turn order(there is no ATB, it's pure initiative, so it's generally predictable). That may sound simple, but the toughest bosses effectively mess with your standard plan, forcing you to get creative. On the other end of the spectrum, when you do meet pushovers, they can be disposed of with the least brainpower possible with the help of macros. This is really helpful in the grindier parts of the game.
I should probably mention the grinding. Grinding, more than crystals and hairdos, is really the one thing connecting all of the Final Fantasy games. It's pretty unavoidable here too. The grinding isn't as intense as 7 but if you make a habit of avoiding fights you simply will not survive the bosses. I found it pretty benign but if grinding is a deal breaker, there you go.
All in all the system is fantastic. It's familiar enough for a fan of the the old Final Fantasy games to appreciate, and there's enough sophistication and nuance to it to keep anyone challenged and involved. Systems don't exist in a vacuum, however. There's an entire world wrapped around this engine, so let's talk about it.
The Fluff
The world itself is fantastic. Like everything else it's evocative of the old Final Fantasies with a lot to explore. You quickly get to the point where you can travel freely and there is so much to do. Chocobo races, gambling, arena fights, and (my favorite) the Monster Hunter's Club, which is just a big boss rush. They're all interesting and reward you in rare items and such.
The music is also really interesting. Each continent has it's own overland theme and fight music, as does each town and dungeon. The songs are very different from one another, to an almost distressing degree. It swings from classical to acoustic to rock opera without warning or reason. It might have been nice to have as clear a theme for the music as the art style and everything else, but what we have instead is a kind of weird lovely mess. Maybe that is the theme.
The story is no great shakes but it's not the worst either. It's also an expansion of the first Final Fantasy and the villain is a more nuanced Garland, whose life we can see through neat little black and white flashbacks. The characters you choose are blank slates who don't really say or want anything except for the very begining.
I actually prefer that. Silent protagonists don't get enough love, and you can really pour yourself into a blank slate more easily than you could a fleshed out but mediocre protagonist. That can work against it, however, as the plot flies off the rails. Your character is basically Dorothy in that your prime motivation is to leave this magical world and get back to Earth to see your family. Yet somehow along the way, you are asked to build a doomsday weapon and nuke a city. Seriously. Every knowledgeable person you talk to tells you this is a horrible idea and directly led to the destruction of the previous civilization(that you know from first hand experience from the flashbacks). Yet you do this unquestioningly, even murdering the last elf Helios, who was nothing but helpful to you up until the moment you demanded the key to his doomsday weapon. This bothered me a lot. In my mind I was playing a party of happy go lucky adventures who raced chocobos to fund their treasure hunting. Now I'm supposed to commit genocide?
Funny enough, the dungeons fall off the rails almost exactly when the plot does. The dungeon design is pretty standard until then; there is a straightforward path, or at least obvious wrong directions. Those wrong directions will lead to treasures which may or may not increase your odds against the boss, but you will be risking more fights. It's a simple but effective risk/reward system to where the dungeon requires preparation, but is in no way abusive... until you get to the volcano dungeon. The volcano dungeon has rivers of lava that you must walk over. Not to get the hidden treasure, but to get to the end. This lava will destroy your hp fast. It will leave your party at 1 hp so you have to run from every encounter or you'll get wiped. This is just the first of many dungeons like this, and not even the worst (that distinction would go to the swamp where the air is poisoned). It's not just hard; it's obnoxious, insulting, and really sullies an otherwise elegant game.
The Verdict
Last Dream is the closest any videogame has ever come to making love to another videogame. Somehow this never gets weird and is, in fact, just as sweet as it thinks it is. All of it's flaws(and it's flaws are pretty serious) are mostly mitigated by the obvious love that went into making it. That is, if you're the kind of person for whom words like "jrpg" and "chocobo" have a positive emotions tied to them. If not, this is a great introduction to that world, but I couldn't recommend it as wholeheartedly.
