I’d lean toward saying that the art direction is what first attracted me to NIS America’s latest PS3 RPG outing, but it’s more a case of art promotion. The game’s two central characters, Aisha and Nine have had some extremely note-worthy artists give their own take on portraying the pair. Within the game proper, both characters possess a hand-painted edge that cuts them free of the barren and brown landscapes players tread across while leveling up, fighting monsters, and all the other many splendid things one expects to do within an RPG.
As I’ve come to expect from titles NISA publishes, Last Rebellion cuts its own path as if there were no standards for the genre. I respect that resistance to the “me too” illness quite a bit, but my respect for an approach does not inherently make Last Rebellion a good game – that and there’s always the possibility Hitmaker couldn’t afford fancier presentation for the title. The game lacks the CG sequences expected from the genre, offers up monotonously bland landscapes, and serves it cold with voice acting that is every bit a set of freshly painted nails running across a chalkboard.
At times the dialogue seems to hit inadvertent spots of humor, at other times making little sense at all, but more often than not leaving me convinced that when the voice actors asked for motivation, someone simply shrugged at them.
But I can get past those issues so long as the game beneath the dressing, or lack thereof, offers something interesting. So I guess we better talk about the battle system, since that’s all we’ve really got to work with in the attempt to back up the title of this post.
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