The Last Story Is One Of The Best RPGs I’ve Played In Years

Lost among this week's barrage of awesome new video games is The Last Story, a role-playing game that's slipped pretty damn far under gamers' radars considering it was designed and directed by the man who created Final Fantasy.

You might be tempted to ignore this one. It's for Wii. You probably haven't touched yours in a while. Maybe it's in the closet, collecting dust with your Ninja Turtle action figures. Maybe you still haven't finished Xenoblade (it's hella long). Maybe you're playing Darksiders II or Papo & Yo or waiting on the new Mario game. Maybe you were just going to let this one pass by.

Don't. The Last Story is one of the best role-playing games you can get on a console today—and one of the best I've played in years.

Maybe it's the effort. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the infamously mustachioed ex-Square maestro responsible for shaping the childhood of anyone who grew up with games like Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, spent almost a year-and-a-half building the combat system for The Last Story. He and his team looked at Japanese games. They looked at Western games. They prototyped. They tweaked. And Sakaguchi, directing his first game since Final Fantasy V almost two decades ago, didn't leave the lab until he had forged a set of systems he was proud to play.

The resulting product is sort of a hybrid between the best of Japanese and Western game design, a combat system that blends first-person shooting, stealth, strategy, and hack-and-slash action. In theory, it sounds silly. In practice, it's transcendent.

See, what makes The Last Story special is that it takes you to a battlefield and says, "Hey, you're on a battlefield!" Fights are frantic and chaotic, almost the medieval version of a Western shooter like Gears of War or Call of Duty (minus the guns and ridiculous bro chatter). You control Zael, a Genuine Hero and member of a charming group of mercenaries who fight together in groups of four or five. They're not your average RPG troupe; as your party moves through dungeons and caverns, they will maneuver around like a battle-hardened team, hiding behind pillars and flanking doorways as you sneak through enemy fortresses and mystical forests.