Have you ever played an RPG and for the first half it was so much fun you couldn’t stop playing, then the last half was pretty meh and draggy, so much so that you didn’t feel like finishing it and had to force yourself, but then when you finally finished it you were glad you did? Long lead-in sentence, but I’m sure anyone who’s been playing RPGs for a while knows what I’m talking about. I’m still a fan of Last Ranker and I would still recommend it to any fan of action RPGs, but it didn’t quite live up to the promise of the first 15 hours or so.

But first, all the great things about Last Ranker. The graphics are awesome. Bright, happy colors! Varied locations, interesting character designs, a little heavy on the palette-swaps but still within acceptable limits. I posted lots of screenshots last time and will do the same this time, just in case you still don’t believe me. Basically Last Ranker has some of the best graphics on the PSP, all without having to cover most of their outdoor locations with fog (shame on you, FF Type-0). In keeping with the colorful palette, the mood of the game is also… not quite light, but never too dark and heavy either, even towards the end. It’s actually pretty funny sometimes.

The soundtrack is excellent as well. Like, I don’t normally notice soundtracks in RPGs, but this time I had to stop and google who did the soundtrack. Yoko Shimomura, the google told me. She’s good. Not that every tune was 10/10, but everything gets an above-average mark and the best themes were really, really good. The voice acting was great as well, but some of the later-game dialogue was just so cheesy that it didn’t matter. The pacing of the speech also felt a little ‘off’ somehow, with people taking unnaturally long pauses between sentences. Overall it was quite good, though.

The game interface (??) was pretty good. Could have been much better, but they did a decent job. It was very kind of the developers to let you warp around the map from place to place once you’d been there once. If something takes place in Libra Forest, you can warp there, do your quest, warp straight to headquarters to report and then warp back to your dorm to rest. The problem is they only warp you back to the entrance of the forest or the entrance of headquarters, and there really should have been a way to take you directly to certain places. For example you have to talk to the dorm caretaker every single time you want to go to your room, which is just a pain, not to mention unrealistic. Having to rearrange your skill chips every time you get something new and useful is another pain, but I think I talked about that last time so I won’t go into it again.

Traveling through the fields isn’t too bad though, because you can buy plenty of monster-repelling items in the store. That and Escape works 100% of the time against monsters, usually before you take too much damage. There are oddly-strong monsters named Evinos roaming the map like the dragons did in 7th Dragon, but 1) You don’t have to fight them unless you want to/it’s for a mission and 2) They give good drops that you can sell for money so it’s not too bad. The doling out of money was just right as well, since I’m on the subject. You’re never rolling in so much cash you don’t know what to do with it, but at the same time nothing is so prohibitively expensive that you have to grind for money.

You never have to grind for EXP either. And here comes my first great problem with Last Ranker: the battles get too easy too quickly! I forget exactly where, but I know I’ve praised Imageepoch for their difficulty balancing before. Definitely not in Sands of Destruction, but games like Saigo no Yakusoku no Monogatari, Arc Rise Fantasia and Criminal Girls all stayed moderately challenging all the way through. Not so with Last Ranker. Field enemies are a joke from start to finish. Evinos hit like tanks but can be easily avoided (which is strange considering how important they are to the plot. But more on that later.) But the rankers! The ones you’ve spent so much time clawing your way up to fight! It’s like they just give up halfway through the game. And the sad thing is it would have been so easy to make them harder, because where they go wrong is in simply not having enough HP.

It’s like this: instead of having MP or SP, your attacks all have a finite number of uses. You use Healing three times and poof, nothing for the rest of the battle. So the developers seem to have calculated the average number of ‘turns’ each battle would last for and the kind of attacks you would have at that stage and adjusted the HP of enemies accordingly. And that means almost every battle ends just when things are getting interesting! Just when you start thinking “Uh-oh, what is Zig going to do now?!” the enemy drops dead. It never fails, and it never fails to disappoint me. The consequence is that the rankers I faced when Zig was ranked between 70-95,000, before he got all kinds of uber-attacks, were far more challenging than the so-called higher rankers. What a shame. And what a waste of a great battle system.

Since most of my issues with the game were story-based I’m going to have to spoil from here on out, sadly enough. Usually I spoil when I don’t like a game, or when I just feel like spoiling >:D but this time I’m going to have to spoil to make a point. If this would bother you, i.e. if you intend to play Last Ranker in the near future (and remember, I encourage you to do so), please turn away now. No hard feelings.

Before I start, I should say that it’s not a bad story at all. Really. The individual elements of the story are a bit meh in several places, but when you take them as a whole it’s not too terrible. That said, it’s not that good either. Also they did that thing I always fault Falcom for, i.e. they knew they had a long story to tell and yet they wasted plenty of time early on making you do inconsequential quests and missions. Not everything in a game has to be tied to the final story, sure. But when you spend too much time on other quests before introducing the real point of the game, it makes the player feel like they’ve wasted their time. If you’re going to be a Frontier Gate Boost+ kind of 2000 missions-in-a-row game, fine. But if you have a story to tell, the sooner you get started the better.

First story problem: they wasted a perfectly good premise. The game was supposed to be about a world where the strong rule. However not only do stronger rankers actually seem weak because of the aforementioned drop in difficulty but also, storywise, the higher Zig’s rank rises, the less important rank becomes because of other issues going on in the story. So not only do I not feel like he’s getting stronger but also he doesn’t get any perks or in-game rewards for doing so.

Secondly and more importantly, the story didn’t live up to its early promise at all. Early on it seemed like Last Ranker was going to explore exactly what sort of world you get when the world is run not by capable persons but by whoever is strong enough to beat 95,000 other people into submission (as opposed to whoever has the most money/connections like we do it in real life.) Thus the Bazalta Council is made up of wildly unsuitable persons with very unhealthy agendas who are (theoretically) so strong that no one can stop them. And it seems like Zig is getting roped into a movement that forcefully resists the rule of force, with all its attendant contradictions and complications.

Halfway through, however, the writers changed their minds. Forget the Council, Zig, the real problem is actually aliens. From, like, another dimension and everything. And we don’t know what they want and they don’t know what they want but we have to stop them. Also the Council is a good thing and rule by strong madmen is a good thing, because they have to fight the aliens, you know? Also you’re the last survivor of an ancient race that knew how to stop them, blah blah blah etc. And just like the surprisingly similar Suikoden Hyakunen, the monsters that are played up as a huge threat never actually live up to that promise and the quality of the story just goes further and further downhill the longer the game goes on. Things do end very happily, but it’s more because the writers forced everything to work out rather than the happy ending being the natural result of Zig’s actions.

Third problem: the lack of freedom to raise your rank as you wish cuts the fun of the whole premise in half. When I started I expected to find myself hunting rankers all over the world down and challenging them whenever I thought I was ready, but first  off there are fewer than 100 rankers in the whole game. I didn’t count, but I’m sure I’m close enough. Second, the vast majority of ranker fights are either scripted or limited so you can’t even do them until the game is ready to let you. They’re also scripted so you automatically lose when a character way above your level challenges you before the ‘right time’, even if you totally think you can take them on. There are also scripted events that force Zig to jump several ranks in no time at all, e.g. from the 60,000s to the 30,000s and from 3 digits to 2. And no matter how bogus the method he used to get there, once he gets there he finds the rankers that were supposedly 30,000 ranks above him are actually no threat at all. The rankings are all kinds of messed up. Someone even points it out in-game and I was hoping it would be explored further but it never was.

My fourth problem with Last Ranker is the supporting cast, which lets the game down by not being very likeable. The bad guys aren’t likeable either but the good guys are hard to root for as well. It’s an unfortunate situation, and the writers seem to realize it. That’s why they keep making the bad guys (Yuri in particular) commit atrocity after atrocity to stir up the player’s hatred for them. “There, that was terrible, right? You hate him now, right?” It sort of works, but not that well because I still kind of dislike my own party. Plus all the time and energy spent establishing Yuri and other members of the Bazalta Council as very bad people only makes it even more unsettling when they pull out the “The true enemy is aliens! The Council is a good thing!” card.

So, what exactly about my allies makes them so unlikeable? Lots of things, but mostly the way they treat Zig like some sort of puppet right until the almost-end. It’s actually pretty cool to find the one RPG in a million where people don’t fall over themselves treating your MC like a Messiah. It’s just too bad they went too far in the opposite direction and had him being essentially bullied and given the runaround and treated like a bit player for most of the game until the end, then suddenly Savior of the World!

The characters you do end up caring about tend to be minor characters who don’t show up too much after a while. Which brings me to my final and most personal point: IRIS. IRIIIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!! Iris was the blue-haired sweetheart I was hell-bent on setting Zig up with. And it was going pretty well too. Zig helped her through some issues, she repaid him with intimate massages (no, really), she gave him a great accessory as a present, she was on the verge on confessing, then she decided to put it on hold while she went on a mission… AND SHE DIED!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! ;__________; WHY, IRIS, WHY?! Of all the characters the game could have killed off, why Zig’s one true love?

And the game tries to play it off as a way of proving how evil the Council is. But actually the real killers of Iris are 1. Zig: for giving her false confidence and making her believe she was up to a field mission. Pro tip: if you’re playing and you spot a blue-haired girl in front of the mission office, DON’T TALK TO HER! LEAVE HER ALONE, YOU KILLER! Also 2. Ren: for coming up with the stupid suicide mission that got Iris killed. Unforgivable. I googled around for a bit, but there’s no way to stop Iris from dying once you see her third event so just leave her alone, okay? Thanks.

TL;DR, wrapping up this long, long review, from a visual and aural standpoint there’s nothing to fault Last Ranker over. The battle system also has a number of interesting features that should keep you experimenting for a while, at least in the early stages. But just as the later battles didn’t live up to expectations, the story is also a huge, messy letdown in the latter half of the game. Story doesn’t matter too much in an ARPG, and there are legit ways to make the battles harder without making it feel like you’re doing the programmer’s work for them (using Shoot and Guard Style instead of Attack and Break, for example). So if after everything I’ve said you’re still interested in Last Ranker, give it a try. If nothing else, at 27:27 hours long it will be over before you know it.

And then you can watch the cheesy ending and be happy you finished the game just like I did. All’s well that ends well (Iriissss!!!)!