Hironobu Sakaguchi’s The Last Story could be a sorely needed positive addition to the Wii’s RPG library.
Nintendo and Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi are teaming up to create Wii RPG The Last Story, which Sakaguchi has said is not a Final Fantasy rehash despite the very similar name. Now that Last Story‘s first gameplay trailer has been released, I think we can see he was telling the truth.
I don’t know about everybody else, but after seeing this trailer I’m pretty excited to see more. I don’t know too much about the game’s premise, as most of the information released has been from Sakaguchi’s Japanese development blog, but Last Story appears to focus on a group of characters with varying armaments that are shown in an opening encounter with a Final Fantasy-like faceless, spiky monster. They aren’t prominently detailed in this first look, but at least one of them has an eyepatch.
While there may be similarities between Last Story and Final Fantasy‘s monsters, the combat system looks much more action oriented than the combat systems of Final Fantasies past. Players use cover, leaning to the side to soften up enemies with a crossbow before leaping out and executing a brutal slash. Other combat abilities shown are aerial maneuvers and massive area-of-effect attacks. It also looks like there is an evasion system that allows characters to backflip over debris while moving away from enemies.
Sakaguchi may have ripped off Assassin’s Creed‘s bumping-into-pedestrians engine, but that’s fine if they can fit into a Wii game. I also see some ships that I’m feeling could potentially take to the skies. And it just wouldn’t be a JRPG without a woman humming a heartfelt song while a meteor shower brightens the night sky, now would it? This is an intriguing first look at the upcoming Wii RPG, which has only been announced for Japan so far, but it certainly has the potential to make it to other regions too.
