The Last Story

• 1. Introduction

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  The Last Story arrived on the Nintendo Wii in January 2011, carrying the weight of a question its creator had spent years trying to answer: what was he doing wrong? Hironobu Sakaguchi, the man who invented Final Fantasy, had watched his post-Square work at Mistwalker receive mixed responses. Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey had kept gameplay traditional while straining for narrative novelty. Neither felt quite right. So Sakaguchi sat down with a design document and a conviction that something had to change. What emerged was a game set on Lazulis Island, a seaborne fortress where mercenaries chase knighthood and an alien force drains the life from the world itself. The questions that drive The Last Story outward from its opening hours are deceptively large: who put a cosmic parasite inside this world, and can a mercenary with a mark on his hand stop it from finishing the job?

• 2. Sakaguchi After Square

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  Hironobu Sakaguchi left Square in 2003, founding Mistwalker to make the kind of role-playing games he believed in. The years that followed did not go as planned. Reflecting on Blue Dragon, released in 2006, and Lost Odyssey, released in 2007, Sakaguchi identified the same flaw in both: the teams had innovated on story while keeping gameplay rigidly traditional. The market had moved and his games had not moved with it. Around that point, he connected with Takuya Matsumoto, a designer at AQ Interactive who had worked with Sakaguchi on Blue Dragon. The two men discovered they shared the same frustration and decided to collaborate on something genuinely new. Nintendo entered the picture through Shinji Hatano, who contacted both Mistwalker and the team behind Xenoblade Chronicles. Hatano's instruction was to build games for a wide audience using what he called a "romanticist approach". Sakaguchi accepted the Wii as the platform partly because a large share of the late development staff, including testers, came from Nintendo itself. According to Sakaguchi, working without high-definition graphics created real technical limits; some of his intended ideas could not be implemented on the hardware. Still, the team set a deliberate goal of producing something that would look competitive beside titles on high-definition consoles.

• 3. Development and Design Battles

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  Development of The Last Story took somewhere between three and four years, depending on which interview you read. Sakaguchi told IGN it was three years; Matsumoto told Gamasutra it was four. The first year, by Sakaguchi's account, was consumed entirely by trial-and-error work on the battle system. A test environment built at the project's start hosted roughly a year and a half of iterative work. The designers settled on two key words: "order" and "chaos". Whoever commanded order on the battlefield would win. From that principle emerged Gathering, Zael's ability to pull all enemy attention onto himself. In early testing, Gathering created too much chaos and the mechanic required extensive refinement before it became functional. One concept that never survived was called "Replay": after an enemy cast a spell, players could rewind the last few seconds of battle from an overhead perspective. It slowed combat too severely and was cut entirely, though traces of it survived as the freeze-time mechanic and the top-down command view. Nintendo's influence on development was considerable and, according to Matsumoto, did not always sit well with him, even when the suggestions ultimately improved the game. The original story was set in science fiction, but Nintendo rejected it outright. The team started over with a fantasy setting, though science fiction elements remained embedded in the final narrative. Illustrator Kimihiko Fujisaka, who joined at the project's beginning, had redesigned his initially bleak world around a brighter fantasy aesthetic after the scenario changed. He noted that the city hub began taking shape in 2009, relatively early in the timeline. The game's voiced dialogue was estimated at 12,000 lines, and Sakaguchi incorporated actor adlibs and continual script adjustments to sharpen each character's voice. The dialogue system itself began as a joke about Zael's habit of kicking doors open; companions would comment on it each time. Positive feedback turned the joke into a structural feature of the game. Dialogue was woven into gameplay rather than restricted to cutscenes, an approach inspired by the television series The West Wing and the game Uncharted.

• 4. Nobuo Uematsu and the Score

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  Nobuo Uematsu, who had composed music across the Final Fantasy series as well as for Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, returned as composer. The collaboration did not start smoothly. Uematsu's first three submissions were rejected, and then he went silent for a period long enough that Sakaguchi began to worry he might quit the project. Uematsu had in fact been rethinking his approach entirely. When he submitted his second batch, he stated plainly that if those pieces did not fit, he would leave. They fit, and he stayed. The resulting score departed significantly from his earlier work. Rather than the melodic set-pieces and what he called "jogging music" that characterized much of his Final Fantasy output, Uematsu mixed video game composition with film-scoring techniques to foreground emotion and ambient texture. He also avoided his signature jingles and fanfares. The main battle theme ran seven minutes long but was broken into small segments that could be cued dynamically to match battlefield conditions. The game's theme song was composed by Uematsu with lyrics written by Sakaguchi. The lyrics center on the feeling of being in a world that is not where one belongs, with the phrase "going home" recurring throughout. Sakaguchi described the theme as quite personal, saying it also captures the "foreignness" of the game. Multiple reviewers singled out Uematsu's score for praise, and IGN awarded the game "Best Wii U/Wii Sound" in its Best of 2012 awards.

• 5. Operation Rainfall and Western Release

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  Shortly before The Last Story launched in Japan on the 27th of January 2011, Nintendo announced it would remain exclusive to Japan. The stated reason was the effort involved in localizing it alongside other significant releases, including Kirby's Epic Yarn and titles for the Nintendo 3DS. Nintendo did acknowledge a "strong possibility" of a UK release given that market's growing appetite for RPGs. A fan campaign called Operation Rainfall emerged in response. Targeting The Last Story alongside Xenoblade Chronicles and Pandora's Tower, the campaign organized letter-writing drives and petitions aimed at Nintendo. Nintendo acknowledged the effort and then stated there were no plans for a North American release. Takuya Matsumoto, on hearing this, was severely disappointed and believed the game would never reach North America. Xseed Games intervened. The company had built a reputation for publishing niche Japanese titles, and its staff played through a Japanese copy of the game, came away favorably impressed, and pitched Nintendo for the North American publishing rights. Xseed was the first publisher to formally approach Nintendo about The Last Story. Nintendo had confirmed it had no plans to publish the title itself, and after evaluating Xseed's proposal favorably, granted them the rights. A new English localization was considered but ultimately abandoned in favor of Nintendo of Europe's version, which the North American team felt better matched the game's atmosphere and aesthetic. The European release came on the 24th of February 2012, with a limited edition including a CD of seven music tracks and an artbook. North America followed on the 14th of August 2012, though distribution problems led Amazon and GameStop to delay their orders.

• 6. Sales and Critical Reception

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  Upon its Japanese release, The Last Story topped domestic sales charts, moving 114,722 units in its opening period. Media Create analysts noted that while the game outperformed Xenoblade Chronicles in initial sales, Wii hardware numbers remained low, suggesting most buyers already owned the console. By the end of 2011, the game had sold just over 157,000 units in Japan. In the UK, it debuted at number 15 on the charts. After its North American release, Xseed Games called The Last Story their most successful title to date; the Premium Edition sold out quickly and had to be replaced with a different special edition. On Metacritic, the game earned an aggregate score of 80 out of 100 based on 61 critic reviews. Critics were broadly positive about the battle system, with one reviewer calling it "one of the best combat systems I've played with in any RPG, Japanese or otherwise". Opinions on the story ranged from appreciation for its character work to criticism of predictability and formula. The British voice cast received widespread praise. Visuals drew mixed responses: some reviewers called them among the best seen on the Wii, while others pointed to low-resolution textures and frame rate drops during busy sequences. The game received nominations for Best Wii/Wii U Game at the 2012 Spike Video Game Awards and RPG of the Year from GameSpot, and was cited by multiple outlets as one of the best games released that year.