Good old Imageepoch. They make some terrible stinkers when they’re working on their own, but the games they make for other companies are usually pretty good. Case in point, Last Ranker. I wasn’t expecting much when I saw the surly-faced main character, but it has given me a very pleasant surprise. The other characters could use some work in the ‘likeability’ department, but they’re all memorable. I really like the real-time-turn-based battle system, though skills are a pain to handle. The graphics are cool, the music is decent, the jury is still out on the story.

I’m about 15 hours in and I expect to be done any minute now. I’ll save a full review for when I’m actually done. I took a lot of screenshots when I first started the game, so I’ll just post them here by way of introducing Last Ranker‘s gameplay, then I won’t have to explain myself come review time.

Story: A boy named Zig gets tired of life in his village and runs off to the city to make a name for himself. He becomes a Ranker, i.e a fighter that goes around fighting people, doing quests and keeping law and order in the world. Rankers are ranked, aha, from 1 to 95,008, from strongest to weakest, and the top 7 rankers rule the world. If you can beat a ranker, their rank is yours. Zig started out at 95,000 but has now clawed his way up to 8,397. I’m slightly bummed that I didn’t have to defeat 80,000 other rankers to get there, though.

Let’s jump straight in with the menu:

In typical Imageepoch fashion, we have an all-English menu for a game that will (probably) never be localized. I love their stylish PSP menus, though. Explanation from top to bottom:

Style: Later on in the game you get to switch to different fighting styles to cope with different situations. Attack Style is regular attack style and lets you fight with twin swords. Break Style is good for breaking enemies’ defense using fists. Shoot Style lets you peck an enemy to death with a gun (useless so far) and Guard Style lets you use a shield to reduce enemy damage (also useless).
Item: Self-explanatory.
Equipment: Also self-explanatory. Note that you have to equip each battle style separately, which is a pain in the bottom.
Skills: Self-explanatory but very involving. I’ll explain below.
Trial Log: A quest log by any other name… Check current and past quests and fulfillment conditions here.
Rankers File: List of every ranker you’ve met in the game.
System: System options like volume, controls, etc.
Load: Load from save file.

The Rankers File looks like this:

The rankers below Zig are all rankers he has met and (mostly) beaten, along with their current rank. If you press Square you’ll get a little more information about them. The Rankers File shows every ranker you’ve met so far, whether you’ve beaten them or not. It’s useful for when you’re trying to raise your rank and want to see who is beatable around your level. It would be even more useful if it showed where to find those particular rankers, but it’s still good to have. I really wish there were, like, three times as many rankers to beat.

And here is the Skills menu, which will take a bit of time to explain:

You assign skills to buttons and use them accordingly. The grey skills are commands that are used with the directional buttons only. You can’t really reassign them, i.e. X will always be some sort of Guard and O will always be some sort of attack, but you can move them about on the skill map and you can swap one kind of Guard out for another.

R skills are the ones with green dots on them. They’re attack, support and healing skills that you mostly get by defeating other rankers. Power Edge is a powerful attack, Healing is for healing, Defend is a DEF buff, Powerful is an ATK boost, Chakra Ring is Regen (never leave home without it), etc etc. There are at least 30 such skills in the game, some more useful than others. You can change which button you have them assigned to. The game doesn’t remember what you put where, so you have to be very careful to stick to the same buttons every time you do a major reshuffle. Otherwise sheer force of habit will make you press X for healing when you’ve moved Healing to the Triangle button etc etc and it’ll be a huge pain to readjust. Also you have to set individual skills chips for each fighting Style, another pain in the bottom.

The orange skills are for boosting Zig’s stats. It’s all stuff like HP+75, ATK+3, DEF+2, that sort of thing. There are also pink skills, which I didn’t get a screenshot of. Those are super attacks that …don’t do all that much damage and make you incapable of using any other moves for the rest of the game. They’re good desperation attacks or finishers for enemies who do nasty things when their HP gets low.

There are also Auto-skills, which are blue. Skills like EXP +5%, or heal 10% HP at the end of each battle. Then there are booster chips, which affect surrounding chips. E.g. ATK Plus to all chips below, that sort of thing.  I really should have taken a more recent screenshot showing all these chips in action, but I couldn’t be bothered.

All right, you’ve got all your skills lined up just the way you want. You’ve found someone to fight. How do skills actually play out on the battlefield? …….. o________o I… I forgot to take a battle screenshot… x_x Brb, googling. Ta… ta-daa…

The 389 is Zig’s current rank (which is how you know it’s not my screenshot.) The reddish orange bar is his HP. The greeny-blue triangles are his SP, which is AP by another name. It takes SP to perform most actions and SP refills with time. You can attack as soon as you have enough SP to do so. That’s where the real-time aspect of the game comes in, because SP is constantly refilling in real time and you’re constantly using it up. It seems like the most broken skill/accessory in the game would be anything that makes your SP refill faster, but I’ve only found one such skill so far and it’s severely limited. Imageepoch is usually pretty good about balancing their battle systems.

The menu on the right is brought up by pressing R. That’s where you get to use your R skills. If you press Triangle normally, you do an attack/counter attack, but R+Triangle = Double Edge R Skill. Press L to change Styles and get access to the skills you’ve set for other styles. I spend most battles in Break Style, so what I did was I put all my buffs under Attack Style. Go in, buff myself, then switch styles to where all my damage-dealing skills are and go to town.

The blue and red meters at the bottom are Break meters. Blue for Zig, Red for the Enemy. Get hit with enough of the right attacks and you go into Break mode, where everything you’re hit with is a critical attack. I didn’t get a screenshot of that either, yay me. The little gold marks show the ‘danger zone.’ The break meter will heal itself with time in that zone only, and the more you get broken the longer the zone gets and stuff and it’s really too much trouble to explain so I won’t.

^^ That’s the little blurb you get before you fight with a ranker, telling you a little bit about the character. I forgot to get some of the funnier ones.

I quite like Last Ranker‘s battle system. It reminds me a bit of Grandia‘s in that you have to stay on your toes the whole time if you want to avoid being KO’ed. SP refills fast enough that you’re rarely just standing around twiddling your thumbs. And you have to do all kinds of trade-offs, e.g. will you defend against this attack, sapping your current SP and slowing down the refill? Or will you tank it and prepare for your next attack? And as with Grandia, if you time your special attack just right when your enemy is charging his, you can cancel his attack altogether. If you time it right, you can also counter an enemy’s attack and send them flying back to the other end of the screen. And with ‘Just Guard’ equipped, you can time your guarding so you reduce damage by 90%.

…It looks real nice when I lay it all out like that, but actually I suck too much at this ‘action RPG’ thing to bother trying to time anything. I’ve tanked my way through 15 hours of the game and I intend to keep tanking till the end. In fact I don’t even remember to counter most of the time, and all the times I’ve cancelled an enemy’s attack happened by accident. But if you’re any good at timed presses and action battle systems you’ll have a great time with Last Ranker.

All right, let’s finish this off with some random screenshots. The city of Ghandoar, where Zig spends most of his time:

For some reason the mountains look close when you’re right outside the city but then suddenly retreat into the distance once you enter. Btw, I’m sure you’re overjoyed to hear I’ve beaten all those guys on the bridge now. They weren’t so tough. 😀 I love the way ranks are displayed over characters’ heads. In the beginning you’re like *gasp* Rank 55640, when will I ever get there?! But now it’s like Psssh, pathetic worms! Bow before me! Rank 8397 is getting to my head just a little bit.

Check out my digs:

On the left is the dingy room I shared with 3 other guys when I started out. Once I hit rank 80,000-ish, I got my own room in another dorm, which I forgot to take a pic of. The room on the right is my third room, which I got after throwing my lot in with a bunch of petty hoodlums. Leave it to hoodlums to have the best rooms in the city.

The nice thing about having your own place is then you can make a Spare Key on the sly and invite friends, male and female, to come visit. I’m not really sure why you need a Spare Key to have them come over. I mean, what’s wrong with knocking and waiting to be let in? But it’s a nice addition. They just come in and you chat and you pick options to raise their affection and if they like you enough they’ll give you a present eventually. I wish they’d fleshed that aspect out a little more so you could befriend more NPCs. But luckily I’ve found the love of Zig’s life even within the limited options: Iris <3. He’s going to date her if it’s the last thing I do. Count on it! I love sweet, slightly awkward romances like that… which is why I totally forgot to take a screenshot of Iris as well =____= what am I doing?

Ah well, gotta save something for next time, I guess. I’m convinced the game will be over soon, but I just counted the remaining rankers and I’ve got at least 20 more to fight so… yeah. I might be here for a while longer. I’ll return to the topic of Last Ranker once I finally finish, but I’ll probably write about another game next time. See you then.