Last week I picked my second RPG in a row, with The Last Remnant (TLR) and I was pretty annoyed really. After suffering through Final Fantasy XII (12) I really didn't want to play another stupid long 70 hour game. The funny thing about the TLR is that it doesn't seem to have a play-time counter so I couldn't even begin to tell you how long that I have spent playing it... it could be near 10 hours, I have no clue. This game reminds me of my time with Too Human, the potential of TLR is just being pissed on by terrible programming.

The battle system for instance is really cool with a neat group element, but for every wicked looking battle animation there is a bout of terrible frame-rate issues... And I am not talking just less than 10 FPS slide shows here, I am talking complete and total stoppage, that's right ZERO frames-per-second! That's right, the game sometimes pauses for a second or two before regaining its composure to a more suitable 10 - 15 FPS. It's not always slow sometimes the action moves fine, but most of the time it is a sad sight to see, because the battle animation and overall general art direction looks great. It is clear that Unreal Engine went and kicked the ass of the poor Japanese developer and said "Fuck you! I can only be used to make MANLY SHOOTERS, bitch!" and went off to play some more Gears of War 2. Like I said, TLR looks pretty damn amazing when it is running at its peak, but it is a fickle one.

Of course the same can't be said about the main Character's running animation or the stilted/robotic animation in terribly directed cut-scenes. Near stationary characters featured in near stationary camera angles makes for some awesome cinematography. While the story is kind of interesting and the characters are kind of neat, the cut scenes are BOOOOOORRRRIIIINNNNGGG to watch. Don't get me totally wrong, I'm being a bit "ranty" here, as there are some good camera work in some of the scenes but that is few and far between. I also need to mention the numerous loading times, really, they are not all that long, the standard sort of 10 to 20 seconds but they happen so often that they might as well just be one giant one. Also at times the loads before NORMAL battles also kill, waiting for a battle for 15 seconds then fighting for 3-5 minutes takes up a lot of time. When it comes to TLR it all about failed presentation issues rather than gameplay issues.

There are a few gameplay problems as well, nothing game breaking, but the progression triggers can be REALLY hard to find and will have to running back and forth from sections of towns just to hope you find the right area where a person with red text bubble will show up. Or you could talk to a man in a bar and then the next person you need to talk to is in an undisclosed place in the city. It's not clear and the way the cities are broken up in to sections each with a loading time it makes finding the next trigger a pain. The other annoying parts include the action triggers which show up during battle, these timed button presses are a semi-interesting addition to the game, but even when the erratic frame-rate in the battles isn't messing up the timing (or some cases making them easier to hit) the game doesn't really give you a good read as to when they are coming up. They are just random and will surprise constantly, the problem is getting a perfect here will trigger not only an unblockable critical-hit but push up your union-mates turns with a feature called "teamwork". So missing one can be a matter of winning or losing in extreme cases. Sure you can just turn them to an Automatic setting and they will just be randomly successful, but the advantage is worth the effort on your part to do them yourself.

Even though I am going to disqualify TLR from Alpha's Picks, I still want to get back to it at some point because of the really cool battle engine and interesting premise... though because of the other reason I am quitting, it might have to wait until I get a new 360 because the drive on my current one is really hit and miss and causes a lot of DDEs (Dirty Disc Errors) or in the case of TLR lock-ups during loading screens. Please don't blame TLR for these, this is the same reason that I couldn't finish Fable 2, it locked at loads all the time, certain games just hate the drive and are sensitive to the disc slowing due the drive being worn and if any data is lost then they lock-up or crash with a DDE, oddly others don't mind it so much. Problem is I can't even install games because the same problems apply to installs, if the installed data isn't perfect then you get DDEs even off the HDD. On one hand I am kind of proud to have a 360 that has lasted going 2 years and 7 months without signs of RRoDing on me, but the drive is starting to annoy me...

TLR is a game that breaks my heart, it could have been a really great one, but a few issues here, a few more serious issues there and you have ruined a potentially great game, making it hard to stomach even for an RPG devotee. Honestly there is no excuse for it, those frame rate issues should have been optimized before the release... no excuse... not one.

After all that ranting on TLR and failing it, guess what the Game Over part of the title means? It means, that I have to put the killing blow to Alpha's Picks Series 2. I'm not having fun any more... I was actually going to make a new pick to replace TLR with all the RPGs removed from the picking box. Unfortunately that meant that 40% of the remaining games where eliminated... that's right 40% of the games available to be picked were RPGs. After looking through the remaining stragglers, I knew it was the end when I didn't have the urge to play any of them. In fact that happened a lot during the making of my picks videos...

While the pick you ended up seeing was random it would be usually after I had to retake the video because a game would come up that I would groan about or just not want to play. Sometimes it would take two or three takes that to get a game that I sort of felt like playing. You saw it in the The Last Remnant video, just watch how long I stare at the pick... I am deciding if I really want to play that game... don't get me wrong I wasn't trying to trick you or anything, there was no real deception intended, but I realized that that really defeated the point of what I was trying to do; pick random games from my backlog to play and clear.

This is why I am calling Alpha's Picks Series 2... There where reasons I stopped playing many of these games... not all of them bad, but some of the ones I threw in there I just don't think I want to force myself to play. Really I blame Final Fantasy XII, after suffering through that I realized that I didn't really want to force any more games to completion. I'm just rambling now, bottom line, this form of Backlog shortening is not doing it for me and wasn't making playing games fun. Was it a complete failure, hell yeah, 2 out of 37 completed, 1 failed and the remaining 34 will remain unfinished for now. I should have realized that when I'd pick a game, then wuss out and do another take that this would end up in epic failure. That doesn't mean that I am going to stop trying to finish these games, but I will do them as I feel like it, which probably means that the backlog will just keep growing, but so be it.

As for what I am going to playing next, I think it is time to go back to Grand Theft Auto IV, I actually kinda want to play that as I also want to check out that The Lost and Damned stuff but I'd like to finish the main game first. Will Alpha's Picks return? Maybe this summer with a different format or maybe by then I will have recuperated after the enthusiasm sucking Final Fantasy XII and be ready to try random picking all over again. I love the idea behind Alpha's Picks and I thought that this would be a great way to finish games, but with so many RPGs on the list it was a destined failure. Maybe by summer I will have cut down on the amount of RPGs (by playing them when I feel like it) and will have better luck. Until then, I'll talk to you later. C'mon let's kick some A! Loading Complete!