Note to self: Do not schedule yourself to review two epic RPGs within days of each other. These two games kicked my ass for the past couple of weeks. At least in one case, I enjoyed it.

That case was not Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. Pretty much everything I could say about this game is in the review—there isn’t too much to break down. There are glimmers of a thoughtful story, moments where I said, “Ah! Here’s an interesting angle!” but nothing ever comes of them. The fights are fun, which is saying something in the RPG genre, where battles are often a slog. The monster collecting is kind of neat. Everything else is just OK, except for the characters, which are obnoxious. I gave it a C+, the letter-grade equivalent of a shrug.

I liked The Last Remnant a lot. The hero, Rush, and his supporting cast are unusually realistic and relatable characters for the genre. For once I wasn’t embarrassed to watch the cutscenes of an RPG with my wife in the room. (New World was a nightmare on that front.) The settings are lush and gorgeous. I loved journeying to new places in Remnant’s world.

The gaming press has criticized Remnant a great deal for its graphical issues. Long story short, there is a lot of choppiness during battle sequences. The developers obviously had a deadline to meet, and they couldn’t get the visuals 100% polished in time. Not an ideal situation, but not a dealbreaker, either.

One common complaint about The Last Remnant among reviewers has been “texture pop-in.”¹ This may be the pickiest nit one could possibly pick, but to read some reviews, you’d think it burns your corneas. One critic wrote that the texture pop-in ruins the game’s dramatic moments by “killing any emotions they might convey.” Now that is a bit much. If you are complaining about texture pop-in taking you out of the game, you weren’t very much into it to begin with.

Like I said, people’s opinions will differ, and I don’t mind that many writers liked The Last Remnant less than I did. (I have long suffered gladly as one of the few who believes that Final Fantasy VIII was a highlight of the series.) But I am bothered by the obsession with glitches. When we focus such inordinate attention on benchmarks and framerates, we get the games we deserve: vapid, technically capable exercises in shock and awe.

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1. For those who don’t know what texture pop-in is, it’s a phenomenon of 3-D graphics where parts of the image appear blurry for a second or two while the computer finishes rendering. If I showed it to you, you would blink and say, “People complain about THAT?” ↑