Customer Reviews

Last Rebellion

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

If you're a fan of NIS games then you already know what you'll be getting from this game: convoluted battle and growth systems, average (to put it nicely) graphics but unique artistic style and a narrative that only anime fans will get any enjoyment out of. The game stars two characters: Nine, a sword wielding knight who focuses on physical damage and Aisha, a mage who, predictably, specializes in spells. To be sure there are some positives that make this a worthwhile game. The battle system, while somewhat complicated at first, is rewarding once the right combos for an enemy are discovered and saved. Essentially each enemy body part is listed as a potenital target and it's up to the player to hit them in the right order to trigger "bingos" and combos. Hitting the right body parts will "tatoo" that monster and make it ripe to be hit for extra spell damage. Thankfully the game allows you to save discovered combos as templates for later use, negating the need to memorize combos for a given enemy. It's worth mentioning that the game has a fun strategic wrinkle to it in the form of switching between Nine and Aisha mid-battle. Deciding who to attack with first in order to finish the battle as quick as possible is definitely a strength of the combat system as it leads you to try out different tactics even during routine level grinding battles (you'll be doing plenty of that). As far as I'm concerned any game that can make grind battles even remotely interesting isn't all that bad. If you can make it past the cliche ridden narrative (something about two warring gods and Nine wanting revenge for his murdered father), PS2-era graphics, and the truly laughable voice acting then Last Rebellion can be an enjoyable game.

This is a game that could have been a great game, but unfortunately it has some gaping flaws that keep it down.

The good things: A unique combat system that is extremely fun most of the time. A decent storyline (that you can skip through if you don't want to watch it). Nice art and production values.

The bad things: Maybe 20 hours of game time, and that's with a fair amount of level grinding (which is necessary). Absolutely zero replay value beyond that 20 hours, no post play, no reason to go through it again. And "paralysis" type status effects that effectively shut you down in combat with no possible way to recover - there's a cure paralysis spell, but no way to cast it!

If you like turn based battle and JRPG storylines, definitely pick this up if its at a bargain price, or better yet rent it.

Run. Run far away.
To be blunt, Last Rebellion is the most unmemorable, tedious, frustrating, empty, shallow, and downright painful RPG I've played in quite a few years. Even for major fans of the genre or imported titles from NIS, I couldn't possibly recommend this. One bit of (somewhat) good news is that the pain will end in about 15 hours of total play, and I was done with all content and had a Platinum trophy in less than 20. The target audience for this game is typically accustomed to needing ten times that commitment (or more) to "100%" an RPG; Disgaea or GUST titles being good examples. Most of my 20 hours felt like a forced march-- the plot resolution is practically handed to you only a few hours in and lacks any true surprises or twists. Battles are little more than time-consuming walls working against trying to complete the game as quickly as possible.

There are a few more positive things that show that game had some kind of potential that simply went lazily untapped. Its core story concept provides a rather clever solution and answers the proverbial gaming dilemma of "what if your main character dies in the opening scene?". The runaround is the basis for the battle system, which, as being played out on a 3D-view field (more seen in ATB battle games), is a refreshing change in a more tactical or turn-based JRPG. Graphics are finally fully rendered and no longer the well-worn (but loved) dot matrix character models. World movement is also in the style of an adventure game as is typical in most RPGs, but is again something new for the type. Personally, I found battle incredibly tedious and repetitive fairly quickly, but I can see how it could allow some creativity. I really wish I could add more into the list of "good things", I truly am sorry.

Characters are unremarkable, shallow, and number about 5 in total. The fairly attractive attempt at the 3D world is harshly contrasted by truly appalling 2D character pop-ups in dialogue scenes. Even the dialogue interface is frustrating... menus and pop-up windows are slow to load and scroll, and text seems to draw itself at snail's pace. Great patience is required, despite this sounding like a total contradiction to a 15-20hr max playtime. Sorry, but there's no specific player I could suggest play this game. Even as an avid player of NIS titles and all sorts of RPGs, I'd have preferred dental work. As I said above, at least it's an easy 100% trophy set...

It's interesting how badly this game is generally rated, yet I didn't find the approximately 12 hours I put into the game all that horrible.

Sure the graphics don't push the limits of the PlayStation 3, and the game could certainly have been released for the PlayStation 2, but given the current pricing of the game I'd argue it's worth a purchase.

The story isn't all that bad. There's a couple parts where it seems we're missing something, and the ending isn't all that satisfying, but the story is certainly passable.

The game has an interesting aspect where you need to know what order to attack enemies body parts. Each enemy has a different number of these, and a different order, with some battles resulting in the order changing (but otherwise all instances of an enemy can be attacked with the same order). There's a number of guides online that have already mapped this ordering out for you, if you choose to go that route, but it adds a certain flair if you try to determine these yourself. But getting the order right consistently results in more experience per battle, which means you level that much faster.

This is especially important because combat is otherwise fairly easy once you determine the order, and once you surpass enemy levels you get almost no experience at all. On the other hand, you can 'seal' (defeat) the enemies immediately at this point, instead of having to knock them down to 0 HP first. But, for the most part I found myself just attacking enemies, and very rarely needing to buff, until the optional, secret enemies.

If you like RPGs and you can get it for around $20, I'd say it's worth it for the approximately 12+ hours of play and 19 fairly easy trophies. For these reasons I give Last Rebellion 3 of 5 stars.

Currently playing Last Rebellion and---it's not bad or good---it's kinda---well, I can't really go on about the game seeing as how I just got it on Friday. But the game is kinda bland and boring but I want to try to survive the rest of the game before I try to sell it back. (It's like playing Tales of the Abyss---not really a game I liked before either). The only thing I have a serious problem with is that Nine, who's a main protagonist along with Aisha, has a TERRIBLE voice actor. I mean, I've heard terrible voice actors but Nine's voice gets on my nerves a lot. Firstly, he's a 25yr old man but sounds like a 16yr old brat. His facial expressions seem to make him look like he's mature with a decent enough voice but he's so arrogent that it gets on my nerves but the game has such nice paintings and music that I might finish the game. once I'm done, I'm diffenetly going to sell it. I just wanted to test the game out because the cover looked interesting and the gameplay looked interesting. The gameplay is poor. It's not even fit for a PS3 or PS2 because I've seen better PS2 games with better gameplay than this. It just looks like they worked on this game in a week and wanted to sell it to us to make a quick buck.

Over all rating---
Soundtrack: B+
Character Art: A
Gameplay: C-
Storyline: D
Voice Actors: F(Sorry, but they really are terrible)


Even though I talked **** about the game, it's decent but not for everyone. If you don't want to waste your money, don't get it. Even if you're curious, don't get it.

Loved the gameplay. But in border to ensure your wins and or survival, you need to battle in areas that are above your level, otherwise it is an endless feat to lvl up. The story line is good until the end of it. I want to file a complaint with NIS. I am sure there will be a sequel to this monstrosity. If not the ending sucks!

I am a fan of turn based RPGs, and I was really looking forward to this game. Unfortunately, the quality of this game is poor. First of all, the graphics look like an average PS2 game. Second of all, there is no animation whatsoever, not even during character dialogs.

The music is subpar; nothing remarkable here. The story is not rich or compelling in the least. The gameplay is turn based. However, it really plays like a number puzzle minigame, trying to figure out what sequence of numbers will yield you the most damage on any given enemy. There are items and other RPG features in the game, but the package has very little that is redeeming.

This game bores you from the get go. I barely managed to make it through the tutorial. The combat system is clunky, repetitive and makes little sense. (In the "How is this supposed to be fun?" kind of way.) The whole concept behind the main characters exists for no reason other than to have a gimmick, or to substantiate the otherwise entirely cliched execution behind their design. The worse thing is, these two characters control essentially the same once you are in combat, which brings up a whole series of questions on their own. Of course, outside of combat, they are different. One regenerates MP, albeit slowly... the other regenerates HP, albeit slowly... because we all know that slowly waiting to regenerate MP,HP and CPs in between fights is so much fun that you should have to do it twice each time? The graphics are bad, the illustrations look more like gouache than watercolors, and they seemed to have a pretty lifeless quality to them. The only hook this game offers is the "I can't believe I just spent $50 on this, so I might as well try and get my money's worth." This game feels like the spiritual successor to "Forever Kingdom"... *shiver*... that's about the only thing you need to know to stay far, far away. I'm not sure how a game so bereft of enjoyment even makes it to publishing.

Short game....emphasis on very short game. It has its own unique fun, in its own way anyway. When you play this game I suggest not using the faqs otherwise it won't be very challenging. If you took my advice, then this game difficulty will definitely increase. If you didn't take my advice and use the faqs then the game will probably b a breeze. Anyway prepare for some very semi-complex battle system. Certainly takes a little bit of time to get use to.

I finished the game probably under 20 hours clearing everything and all the trophies. I played through all the Atelier series and the Mana Khemia series and those were one of my favorites from NIS. Those usually took at least 40 hours to beat and had a lot of depth.

Like other NIS games I wasn't surprise by the graphics as being very Playstation 2ish since that's how a lot of their games are. Also there are no animated cut scenes like of their games, but character designs in this game were very nice! I liked the drawings a lot.

One of my biggest disappointment was that this release had no Japanese voices. To me the English voices were pretty bad and I kept skipping the voices and just read the text most of the time. For the amount of space they have on a blu-ray disc they should have at least given us Japanese voices as one of the choices.

The story is very short about 20 hours of game play if you follow the guide to correctly attack each monster, game will probably take longer if you tried to learn the correct order of every monster yourself. It didn't really give the story much to understand about all the characters which means there were really no character development at all in the game. Throughout the story you actually learn about Nine's younger brother Alfred instead of the Nina and Aisha. I was wondering to myself what were the Nine and Aisha's past like and they didn't really go into much depth on it. The story was pretty straight forward where you just followed and there are no side quests to do.

The combat system is where The Last Rebellion shines. The combat system was very fun and very unique. Since you control Nine and Aisha as 1 entity you can double your attacks on each monster. Every monster has a different body parts and you are to attack them in different orders in order to get the correct order to gain the most bonuses and damage. Without a guide for bigger monsters with 10 bodies parts will probably take you a while since it's blind luck to get the parts correct. Of course the game mechanics help you save the order if you correctly attack each part so you can modify the order until you get the right order, but this is also one of the downfalls of this game. You have an amount of Chain points(CP) which allows you attack as many parts as points you have. You are limited in the beginning and as I was playing I wasn't getting the parts correctly and your CP doesn't replenish as fast as you attack the monsters, so it becomes hard if you don't get it the first time around. This lead me to using a guide to clear through monsters.

Another cool thing about the combat system is that in order to use offensive spell on monsters, you have to stamp the parts by attacking the parts physically. The more parts you stamp the more parts your spell will attack, but I think later on you can get an item that allows you to cast spells on them even without stamping, but I didn't bother using it since I was following the guide to speed up the game. Offensive spells was pretty useless to me since I hit like 5 to 10 times harder physically than any spell I can cast even when they were maxed out. There are too many spells in this game so more than half of them I didn't bother using at all and some where only used for like 1 or 2 area. Also spells can be upgraded or degraded. You receive something called Aria paper after boss fights which allows you to upgrade spells up to level 5 and allows you to use the spells level 1 through 5, but if you don't need the spell anymore you can degrade the spell back to level one getting back your aria paper to put into a different spell. Also spells can be interchanged to who you want to cast the spell. You can change up the spells to have Nine cast them or Aisha, so spells are not limited to just one character.

Overall: The Last Rebellion was an okay game, I enjoyed it since the combat system was fun and unique, but the game was extremely easy for me(since I was following the monster guide). I would not recommend playing this game without a guide unless you plan to spend hours finding out the correct order for each monster. I usually beat the game first without a guide and then use a guide to help me complete the things I can't find myself, but this game made me use a guide right away because of how boring it was to try to find the order to attack each monster under limited movement. Since I wanted to complete the enemy database, I find myself looking for certain monsters at certain areas and that also consumed some of my time which kinda pissed me off while I was playing. I kept running around in circles until I finally found one.

Unless you plan to play this with a guide, this game will be very boring for you. The combat system was very fun and unique, but with the amount of limited movements it really takes out the fun of this game. I found myself casting chain points recovery spell after every fight because you never know when you will find to fight a 5 monster group with each monster having at least body parts. I got this game for under $20 and really think you shouldn't pay more for this game. As much as I like NIS JRPGs. This game was a pretty big disappointment for me and was kinda glad the game ended so quickly. I couldn't stand looking for some monsters that just won't show up and the horrible English voices that I kept skipping which this game almost like playing Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner where there are no voices at all.

I'm looking forward to play Atelier Rorona when it comes out and Trinity Universe when I get it! Enjoy!