Square Enix is hoping that The Last Remnant, the company's next RPG, will appeal to gamers all over the world. The company is promising a simultaneous North American and Japanese release, with a release in Europe to follow. GameSpy and other members of the press took part in a roundtable interview session with key members of The Last Remnant's development team: Nobuyuki Ueda (Producer), Yusuke Naora (Art Producer) and Hiroshi Takai (Director). Read on for the first details on the game's premise, info on the combat mechanics, and tidbits about working with Epic's Unreal Engine.



GameSpy: What was the inspiration behind creating The Last Remnant?
Square Enix: A group of our designers got together to talk about this new IP, this new game, and they came up with the idea of the Remnant, a mysterious object. That started the creation of the plot and story.
GameSpy: What separates The Last Remnant from other Japanese RPGs that we may have played in the past?
Square Enix: What most separates this game from the usual RPG is that in those games you generally give one command to one character, and one character will act. In this game, with its massive battles, you give commands to a bunch of characters, and they react differently.

GameSpy: We noticed a couple different character designs in the trailer. There's a big musclebound guy with a minotaur-horned helmet, a frog-like race, a sexy human female, can you tell us more about these?
Square Enix: We don't consider the game to have a huge variety of characters. It's a pretty stereotypical mid-century fantasy RPG. What we did try hard to do was watch lots of movies and actors, and observe how people change their appearance just by cutting their hair, or how they talk. We wanted to implement those subtle characteristics into each character. That's where you can really feel the difference with our characters.

There are only four different humanoid races in the game. The different races that you saw in the trailer are those, and anything outside of those is classified as a monster. The human-type characters are called Mitras. The cat-like people with four arms are the Sovannis. The frog-like little characters are called Qsitis. The larger fish-like people are the Yamas. Those names aren't final, they may be changed.