The Last Story, new Wii game

[RollCasket]

Some of you have already heard about this, but this is a new action RPG coming out that looks pretty damn good. All the main info is in the link but here's some of the importants...

Developed by Mistwalker, this is the first game that Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi has directed in 18 years, music from Nobuo Uematsu, and up to 6 players online.

http://www.destructoid.com/the-last-sto ... 0362.phtml

The only BAD thing...is it's not clear on if this is coming stateside yet or not x.x

[Luc of True Wind]

Wow!

This looks like an amazing game! This is definitely something I would want to play
I hope this does come state side I would not hesitate to buy it!

[RollCasket]

Smallish news, but The Last Story domain has been reserved by NOA and along with that Xenoblade which is another good looking jrpg I was hoping they'd put out here.

I guess once E3 hits there will probably be a confirmation of this. I really hope both of these come out x.x

[Bear]

This game had a lot of hype for it because of its credentials and the fact that for a long time they had intentionally not releases a single screen shot of it. I guess they were trying to be mysterious and gain some intrigue from it. When screens were eventually released of it, I thought - ugh...what's wrong with this muted palette? There is no sense of color or vibrancy from what I've seen so far and that was the first step toward killing my interest on it.

Now after looking at the video, it looks even less appealing. Is it an action game that wants to have RPG elements or an RPG with action elements? If this is an action game, it already fails from bad pacing. If it is primarily an RPG, it needs to make the action elements more pronounced or give it more energy in some way. The point being that the action parts of it look slow and cumbersome. Is this so RPG players can have something similar to active time battle? Slow down the action so that players can make choices mid-battle and be partly strategic? If thats the case it sucks all the excitement out of the action side of the game. All characters seem to move slow and it's like all of the action was sapped out of the game. I don't think its a hardware issue because they should be able to recognize that as an issue and speed it up - if they wanted.

I guess maybe they can get away with the slow action. Parasite Eve kinda stratled genres and did pretty well. As far as the pitch though (even if I can't understand Japanese), it was really tepid. I really wonder what people see in this game to merit the excitement.

[RollCasket]

That's a surprising comment, especially after watching the vid o.O

While I'm not the biggest fan of the muted palette myself, it's a stylistic choice and reminds me of how Vagrant Story looked, or more modern, Dragon Age. Speaking of, the combat is kind of similar to Dragon Age as well, since it's mainly action with moments where you can have a party member cast a spell, use an ability, etc. Even more than that though, it looks like you can also get surprise attacks by not rushing headfirst into battle and sneaking around, destroy parts of the environment to take out enemies, even lure a group of enemies into an area of effect spell, and other effects by moving into an aoe fire move to set your sword on fire or having two mages cast different spells together. That's already way more strategy than most action rpgs have and I don't see how anyone can't be excited about that.

I'm not sure what you mean by the speed though. It's not as fast as some action rpgs but it's certainly faster than some. Monster Hunter in particular comes in mind and the one thing that will always plague that game for me personally is the slow speed, yet that game is stupidly popular. Still though, if you've played the Dragon Age games the pacing seems to be most similar to that which is perfectly fine.

[Bear]

Yeah, I guess it's just not my kind of thing. It's funny you mention Vagrant Story, because I drew a similar conclusion about it being a style choice, though VS looked more appealing than how Last Story is coming off. I've had a number of games I've enjoyed that had similar art choices that I thought were great. Painkiller, ICO, Shadow of the Colossus all come to mind and even the new Alice game looks more promising while having a lot of earth tones or a dulled palette made vibrant by effects.

Perhaps its the bad video that makes it look so bad... I went and checked out some still shots that looked better - I think that it will be one of those things where I will have to see it to make a better determination. As it stands though, free time is already such a limited resource for me that this game pretty much sealed it shut out from being on my radar. Nothing in it looks appealing enough for me to go out of my way to try it (or even look up much more info on it). If the visual style isn't there for me, the game has to be really groundbreaking for me to want to check it out.

What does this game do that others (even in different genres) haven't done before? It seems to me I've seen all this before elsewhere. What am I missing about this game? Right now the appeal seem to amount to nothing more than hype.

[Tehwilburforce]

LAST STORY CONFIRMED FOR US!!! COMING IN SUMMER!!!! YUUUUUUUSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I will need a brown paper sack to keep from hyperventilating when I get it!!!