25 people found this review helpful
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 69.4 hrs on record (69.4 hrs at review time)
Posted: 21 Jan @ 7:19pm

Early Access Review
I've been following this project for many years, and it has gotten continuously better with time. The Last Sovereign is probably the best RPG I've ever played, with meaningful decision making, and well thought out construction of the consequences of those decisions.

The game begins at a small scale, with your decisions mostly impacting your immediate surroundings, and grows in scale to encompass decisions impacting entire civilizations. The creator has made an effort to design variable systems to track both the small and large scale consequences of your actions, which allows consequences to always feel like they belong. Random strangers will not walk up to you and say "wow, you sure killed X baddies with a pistol in that last mission, good job!", instead areas will shift over time as the political environment changes, and you will only occasionally run into NPC's who directly reference the specific details of singular decisions.

The result is one of the best narrative experiences in gaming. Some choices are objectively better than others, but often how good or bad a choice is will depend on the other choices you've made. As a random example, in certain scenarios playing defensively helps you if you're behind, but actively hurts you if you're already ahead, because it allows the opponent to regroup. You also generally have multiple objectives you're trying to accomplish, so in the most "decision heavy" sections, a good portion of what you're doing is prioritizing what objectives you're going to focus on.

The combat is also fairly difficult for large portions of the game. There's some degree of RNG to some fights, particularly some very early optional fights where status effects like blind are important, but not 100% reliable, and the specific details of how 5 enemies choose to target their attacks matters, but broadly RNG seems fairly minimal.

Since I've been fairly completionist in my approach to the game, it obviously gets easier as I have progressed further into the game, because the distance between my party and the "worst possible" party grows larger and larger.

There's a lot of sex in The Last Sovereign. It's built into the world and setting. It's built into the magic system. It's built into cultures. But unlike most games that feature a lot of sex, I don't think you need to be titillated by it to enjoy it.

You do need to have an open mind, obviously. If you can't appreciate the humor of a horny JRPG protagonist trying to figure out how to have sex with a plant monster the early game will be fairly difficult to comprehend. If the game seems like it's ridiculous to the point of parody at times, it's likely doing so deliberately.

The further you get into the game the less relevant the genre conventions that surround it become, however. I think TLS largely speaks for itself, and what it has to say is very interesting.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
Comments are disabled for this review.