Last Rebellion (PS3, 2010)

My history with gaming goes back to the moment I met Mario. Mario was an overwhelming experience for my young mind, until Sonic the Hedgehog came along and showed me how much more intense that formula could be. So I saved up money from Christmas and birthdays and bought a Sega Genesis. I was confident that that was the best choice out there as, Mario just couldn't compete in my eyes. Then I went to my friends house and he showed me Chrono Trigger, and from that point on, JRPGs were a part of my life, especially my next find, Final Fantasy VI (my favorite game to this day). Needless to say the Japanese Role Playing Game format has been fading away as of late, with Final Fantasy XIII pretty much abandoning decent storytelling techniques in favor of trying to make Call of Duty loving American's like it's new fast paced action. Meanwhile, the Western style RPG has been growing greatly, being all about doing whatever you like, which is fun, but personally I miss the days of having a story so compelling that you yourself wanted to keep moving the plot forward. Ultimately, that lead me to, after beating Skyrim and Dark Void, dust off Last Rebellion which has been on my shelf for a bit. It's a JRPG, I wondered if it would fill the JRPG void in my life.

First off, in recent years, a large staple of Japanese games is to have overwhelmingly obnoxious characters as your protagonists and to have every conversation be about as wordy as a Dostoevsky (without any substance). That guy on the cover, his name is Nine. He's a prick and is always making things more difficult than they have to be. The girl, she's relatively logical magic type chick named Aisha, her arch is to realize that she should be more like him who does nothing but talk shit to everyone and whine a bunch. Also, they totally fall in love in less than 10 hours.

My other big gripe with this game is that it looks like an early Playstation 2 game, which doesn't matter that much, because my favorite game of all time looks like this.

This is easily one of  my favorite moments in gaming history.

I had to mention it, but I was easily able to look past the visual problems. In spite of the bad graphics, I really liked all of the character designs and the level designs. The game shows you lots of beautiful places...in bad graphics. Still, it provides a unique experience in that respect.

The nice thing about Last Rebellion is the imagination that it puts forth. It's one of those classic Japanese feeling storylines, where there are two competing gods. One with the power of life, the other with the power of death. The life god has grown too powerful and is making it so that people and monsters aren't staying dead, thus the world is gradually becoming a monster paradise and they can't really be stopped. The death god then assigned two different types of people in this world to deal with the problem. There are Blades who are there to fight the monsters and Sealers who are there to seal their souls away so they won't come back. The main characters meet when Nine, the strongest of the Blades, is stabbed in the back and is dying and Aisha casts a forbidden spell to absorb his soul into her. Thus they set off on a journey to set things right, where only one can exist at a time. So if you're playing as him, you can abruptly change to her. This also works in combat, and allows you to attack a whole lot more because of it.

The big thing about this game is that the music is fantastic! It sets the mood very well and I often time would find myself just leaving on the main menu while working on other stuff, just to hear it. In fact, the music was way too good for this game, which is a terrible shame.

Overall, the joy of a JRPG is that  you can sink 100 hours into an engrossing story and feel a great connection to the main characters while it happens. You know a JRPG has been successful, when you are watching the end credits out of respect, and reflecting on the great moments that you were lucky enough to experience. For this game, during the end credits, I was only thinking of how cool the music for this whole game was in spite of the nothingness that was the game. It was too easy, and finished with all side missions and everything in 11 hours. That's just depressing. It's a pretty terrible game, but at least I got a bit of that Japanese gaming that I've been missing.

Oh, by the way, I killed this dragon! That's 3 games in a row with dragon killing! Booyah!