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| The Mercenaries |
After years designing games Hironobu Sakaguchi had arrived
at a crossroads at the start of the production process for The Last Story. “I just felt like I was at a slightly
different point from everyone else. As if I was surfing alongside the others,
but had ended up riding a different wave from the one I should have aimed for,”
he admitted to Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. “This project came about just at the moment
when I was becoming aware of this,” Sakaguchi added. “That’s why, if I'm honest, I feel a real
sense of gratitude towards this game.”
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| Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi Image courtesy of Nintendo |
His first game as director in 18 years, The Last Story is not a typical Sakaguchi
game. “We knew that we wanted something
that differed from the way things had been done before. We wanted to express
the game world and story in a whole new style.”
The result is a more modern take on the Japanese RPG, with elements
borrowed from western RPGs such as branching decision points. That said, The Last Story is not an open
world exploration role-play[ing] game. It remains a story-driven game in the classical
Sakaguchi style. “I’ve always attached great importance to the story,” he noted “It was
no different with this title.”
Sakaguchi however did go in different directions in the structure and focus of the story. The game is an episodic fantasy with many chapters
that can be played out of order, bound by an overarching narrative of war,
friendships, intrigue and betrayal. The game offers a vignette of events at a crucial
turning point in history at a place called Lazulis Island and the player is dropped in-media-res
with a band of mercenaries on their way to meet the island's powerful Count. The game alludes to a
wider world where a human empire won a decisive victory against a another
race of humanoids generations ago at a high cost. This is a world in which Lazulis Island is a key player, but only
just a player. Yet the story remains
focused on the island and its surroundings. The world-spanning Final Fantasies are condensed into a
single city of Lazulis, a city worthy of a massively multiplayer on-line
game. While it does not share the world
maps of other Final Fantasies, it is in a way a far more intimate and richer
game than any of Sakaguchi’s previous efforts. Quests abound, storylines
interweave, and the winding alleyways and side streets all come together to
create a living world. It is this
Majora’s Mask-esque familiarity with people and places that really works to the
game’s favour.
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| Lazulis City Market |
Despite having what may on the surface appear to be a
typical RPG plot, it manages to engage in a way many other RPGs don't. At its core, the game is a human drama as
much as a struggle of the forces of good against evil. Whichever side wins is less important than the
person who wins the victory. Virtues
such as avarice, ambition, courage, love, temperance and honor can be found in
nearly every character in the game. The
band of mercenaries the players lead are hired to fight in a racial war. There are echoes of Chrono Trigger’s racial
dichotomy of an oppressive human kingdom discriminating against
non-humans. The leaders of the land are
torn between ambition and duty to protect the people, and in this tension the
script weaves an excellent narrative and character arc as key characters sought
to combine their ambitions, motivations and their duty to advance their own interests.
While the turncoat or the morally conflicted character
is not new to the genre, the way in which Sakaguchi and his script throws the
players knee deep into this duality is fresh.
There are entire segments of the game where there are no good choices.
And in order to proceed, the player must choose the lesser of two evils. Making a less than desirable choice knowing
the alternative is ruination of the kingdom.
In the back of the player’s mind, we know the decision is not right, but
we are taken for a ride anyways. In the end, the script finds a way to extricate the hero out
of the moral quandary. However, the tensions between doing what others expect
of you and what you know to be right creates the core of the game’s narrative
conflicts and plants seeds of an emotional journey that reaches right into the
Epilogue, aptly titled "The Last Story".
This is a notable achievement for a game that is essentially
linear with many dead-end choices.
Despite this, I rarely felt a decision was forced to serve the game, the
decisions that progress the game serves the overall narrative arc and enriches the overall experience. It makes the revelations to come even more bittersweet. It is also this play on human drama rather
than a focus on lore or an overwrought
mythos and backstory that makes this game enjoyable. There's not a lot of high-fantasy babble and convoluted plot lines. The story is far simpler, but just as rewarding because of its emphasis on human drama. From Sakaguchi’s point of view, the fantasy
setting is merely a vehicle for the story.
By giving the world at fantasy setting, it is “actually easier to bring out realistic
human dimensions in a fantasy setting,” Sakaguchi explained.
Taking a cue from the real-time battle systems of Final
Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XII, Sakaguchi’s battle system blends the strategic with
fast-paced action where it feels more like a hack-and-slash ARPG than a
RPG. “I would say it’s all about order
and chaos” noted Sakaguchi. “In battle,
the side that manages to impose ‘order’ on the battlefield will secure victory.
Or to put it the other way round, disrupting the ‘order’ of your enemy so it
degenerates into ‘chaos’ is the key to victory. That’s something I wanted to
express in the battle scenes in the game. But I didn’t want this to be achieved
in a logical, methodical manner like Japanese chess. I was looking for a more
intuitive battle system in which you can feel the flow of time.”
The result of this innovation is the emphasis on strategy
and placement of enemies and kills orders that is more deliberate than the lock-on-target
and whack away real-time battle strategies in the recent Final Fantasies. As a
result, some have suggested The Last Story’s innovative battle mechanics is
perhaps something the Strategy-RPG genre can look to in place of the deliberate
and contemplative turn-based combat mechanics popular in the genre.
In an unusual move, Sakaguchi further emphasizes the
flexibility of his battle engine by inserting an on-line multiplayer mode, allowing players to replay the game’s many boss battle
with several other real people over the internet in a co-op mode or against each
other in a deathmatch mode. Winning reward
players with special weapons and craftable materials that is otherwise unobtainable
or difficult to obtain outside of the game’s story. All loot earned can be used in the single player game. With a New Game+ mode allowing players to
carry over their levelled up characters, weapons and armor into a new adventure
with more difficult enemies, there is a special demand for the rare craft
materials that may only drop once in the entire game to power up certain armor
and weapons to +99 ratings.
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| Nobuo Uematsu (Left) Hironobu Sakaguchi (Right) Image Courtesy of Nintendo |
In The Last Story, Nobuo Uematsu reprises his role as the
composer to a Sakaguchi epic. While many
of the compositions are ‘typical’ Uematsu fare, the overall soundtrack is quite
well rounded. The main theme "Toberu Mono (Those who Can Fly)" is sufficiently sweet to evoke the right sort of emotions. It’s the kind of
melancholic theme Uematsu is famous for and compares favourably to "Theme of Love" (Final Fantasy IV) and "Melodies of Life" (Final Fantasy IX).
Uematsu’s best work in the soundtrack is a piece that is
played near end of the game, likely forgotten in the shuffle to get to
the ending for some, and for others, in the depths of an emotional gut punch. A piece titled "New Days", an extended version
of a violin piece called "Bonds", the
music serves as the bookend to a narrative journey. Starting with a minimalist piano, it builds
to a crescendo before receding back into a melancholic end. "New
Days" is a theme about moving away and moving on to new beginnings where old
bonds end.
Uematsu affirms his unique approach when speaking about The Last
Story. “For this title, I put aside the rulebook...my priority was to create a
certain atmosphere... The music isn’t there to help explain or underline what’s
happening on screen. Rather, it exists as another kind of sound effect. There
is a unity between the persuasiveness of the images and the power of the music,
and I think they fit together in a very natural way.” On the subject of the soundtrack, Sakaguchi adds, “I feel
that The Last Story itself changes as you listen to the music. That’s the power
of Uematsu-san’s melodies. It’s not simply that the music is beautiful, it’s
also the fact that his humanity comes across in them. They are instantly
recognisable as his songs.”
Although parts of the game could have used some extra polish
– There is a broken (though not game-breaking) quest in the mid-point of the
game involving a chase through the city streets – The Last Story is a dazzling
and beautiful game with a solid core of humanity. Unlike Sakaguchi’s previous efforts, there
is no massive marketing machine and brand solidarity to power opinion to the
near unanimous praise his previous games enjoyed under the Square-Enix banner. But as a long-time fan of Sakaguchi’s games,
I feel The Last Story stands as one of his most unique and emotionally powerful
works, even if it may not be his best.
The Last Story is Sakaguchi’s period in the long sentence of a
genre he had popularized globally in the 1990s—The extravagant story-driven
fantasy opera with archetypal leads, damsels in distress, heroic arcs and
mythical beings.
The Last Story (Wii) is published by Xseed Games in North
America and Nintendo in Japan and Europe.
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