Last Word (PC)
In the nation of St. Lauden, battles are fought not with weapons, but with words. Should someone engage in debate with someone else and lose, they are at the mercy of the victor and must acquiesce to whatever request is made of them. While this sounds like a more civilized means of sorting out disagreements, the brilliant Professor Chatters has made an invention that exploits this social norm. Called The Mouth, this one-way intercom is always able to get in the last word since the speaker can’t even hear the counterarguments. While a strange threat to a bit of an odd society, the role-playing game Last Word sees you needing to find a way to prevent St. Lauden from becoming a society dominated by people who do not listen.
The Mouth is revealed in an early part of the game where a group of people of consequence are invited to a party at the professor’s mansion only for the socialites to realize their gift of gab has no sway over the device. Despite finding yourself rubbing elbows with people from well-to-do houses who work as judges and generals, you play as Whitty Gawship, a photographer who isn’t even sure why she was invited to hobnob at this uppercrust get-together. This does put her in a fairly useful position narratively though, because while she does have a quick wit and holds her ground in a regular conversation, she can’t quite measure up to the people who do competitive discourse regularly, meaning the player will have to gradually gain experience to be able to hold their own in a debate against the better conversationalists.
In your efforts to learn if The Mouth’s edge in a discussion can be overcome, you’ll need to speak to the other guests fairly regularly, Chatters’s estate fairly small and the guest list similarly limited in its scope. Each character is represented through a colorful silhouette with a single identifying feature when walking about the mansion, but when you do strike up a conversation you’ll see a more detailed piece of art that captures their character fairly well. The jovial old Judge Boasting, the flirtatious yet polite Holden McCall, and the rather dismissive servant Will Banter all capture their affectations well in their single bit of character art, and as you have likely noticed, a good deal of delightful puns on talking terminology are weaved through St. Lauden’s characters and setting yet never get pointed out as such directly. While you will engage in conversational combat with anyone you can speak to, another important part of the experience comes from gathering information on the wider plot elements at play. Talking to a person lets you Gossip and Chatter with them without it becoming a fight, these lower stakes chats all about what you know and what you’re trying to find out. You gradually gather various key topics to discuss with each guest and can level them up by learning specific details, other information only available once you have the proper level of understanding. This does give Last Word a fairly authentic feeling of gathering intel by way of gossip, fraternizing at the party slowly unveiling the secret histories of the guest and how they can connect to Chatters and the current strange situation. However, you will also eventually find yourself just asking everyone at the party about a key topic one by one, unlocking the next level, then doing so again, some artificiality seeping in despite the structure still having that feeling of gradually uncovering juicy details by piecing together various tidbits of knowledge.
When it does come time to engage in Discourse, curiously, Last Word’s fighting system doesn’t feel as connected to conversations as the information gathering. Nominally, the fights are still verbal exchanges, and the lead-ins and talking after Discourse do at least have the characters go back and forth a bit before the Discourse battle screen appears. When in battle, besides some wordless exclamations, you won’t see or hear the characters going back and forth on the subject they’re discussing, the player instead engaged in a RPG battle. Your attacks are all named for ways to handle a conversation though, such as trying to be subtle in how you talk or being overt, but a lot of the specific attack names are essentially irrelevant compared to the systems at play.
In a Discourse battle, there is a meter at the bottom of the screen. If the indicator is pushed too far to the left you lose, and if you manage to push it all the way to the right, you win. The two conversationalists will push the marker back and forth along the bar with their actions, and you have a few other elements to keep track of to succeed. To best move the bar in your favor, you’ll need to first build up power with conversational attacks, then convert the power built up into Tact with more passive conversion moves. Once you have Tact, you can then deal the heavy-hitting blows that move the bar in large leaps, regular attacks sometimes nudging it but victory often comes from the Tact-fueled blows. To add a bit more substance to this, the attacks, conversions, and heavy blows all come in three Tones, as indicated by a circle, starburst, and square. Each shape beats one but loses to another, and if you counter someone’s shape with your action’s tone, you will fluster them a bit. The more flustered someone is, the more damage they take from those Tact-fueled attacks, a battle mostly about trying to work up the enemy while gaining power for some strong hits to take them out. At the same time, you do need to make sure they don’t push you too far, but in a fair few battles, the straightforward approach of building up power while flustering your foe will do the trick. To avoid it being too basic though, the tones are tied differently to the three attack types. The circle tone for example is applied to the attack that builds up the least power, but if you are choosing to do a Tact conversion, the circle tone gives you the most, meaning sometimes you might sacrifice effectiveness in attacking for the sake of making the opponent angrier or vice versa.
What makes battles feel different from each other though are the abilities. Both you and your opponents will have different passive powers that influence battle strategies a touch. For example, an ability may give a character some power and Tact at battle start, allow them to earn Tact if they match tone symbols instead of beat them, calm them down a bit if they counter a tone properly, or even survive the meter reaching their end one time. Taking on a better debater also gives them an early advantage where the meter will move a bit towards your losing side to start, so when you’re punching above your current strength, you will need to be smarter during Discourse, and the unpredictability of your opponent can lead to some moments where you make tough judgment calls on whether your safety is more important than building up for a powerful attack. Usually, a first bit of Discourse with a character will be an interesting bit of combat, but Last Word’s RPG design does unfortunately force some repetition on you. You will have to fight the same characters repeatedly at times to build up experience, not just so you aren’t hit with the level penalty as much, but because some people in this rather limited cast won’t even engage in Discourse with you until you reach a specified level. Similarly, experience points are used to buy the abilities to give you more interesting edges in conversations, these passive powers often crucial to having a hope against someone higher leveled than you.
Luckily, there are other ways to earn experience, mostly by investigating secrets around the small manor or successfully breaking through key topic locks. You will inevitably have to spend some time picking on the wimpy Seymore Saymore to get easy wins for growth, easy Discourse battles at least not very long. However, if you also wish to see every bit of the game’s secrets, you also need to fight Seymore far too many times to help him become a better conversationalist by proxy, the game hiding a set of challenging Discourse battles behind helping him grow. The challenges require more strategy than any other battle in the game, but if you do approach Last Word for its main story alone, it thankfully isn’t too long even with the time you might spend pondering how to solve one of the mansion’s secrets or engaging in some of the repetitive battles purely to afford better abilities.
THE VERDICT: Last Word’s story does a nice job of having details unravel by gossiping around the small party of socialites, uncovering the truth gradually through your conversations a nice way of capturing the game’s emphasis on discussion. However, despite the combat nominally being battles of words, the talking stops for them and ideas like grinding to gain experience feel at odds with their presentation. Needing to build up experience through repeated Discourse fights slows down the adventure for a battle system that can feel weak when you’re not facing someone stronger than you, but the story and light exploration elements still make Last Word a game worthy of some praise.
And so, I give Last Word for PC…
An OKAY rating. Transforming talking into an RPG battle system does seem like quite a challenge, and cutting out the actual discussion during a fight is, while a bit disappointing, one of the smarter ways to handle it to avoid it being too complicated. However, while the game tries to couch your actions during a fight in conversational ideas, you quickly learn to ignore the names and instead think of your attacks as their tone symbols and mechanical functions. Selecting Aggressive and then Overt barely registers compared to thinking of it as doing your strongest Tact-fueled move, although that can also be because of the terminology chosen for the attacks. The game does thematic naming for abilities a bit better with names like Common Courtesy, Polite Smile, and Piercing Gaze, but the need to work up to abilities also adds in that unfortunate repetition that diminishes the novelty of a combat system that only really works well when you first take on a new foe. Perhaps a bigger party or even the other guests getting stronger like Seymore does could help ease up on the repetition, but needing to level up through conversational grinding is an unfortunate road bump to trying to see more of the story or take on people who will actually put up a fight. Luckily, most other elements of the game are interesting enough to make seeing through the experience points building worthwhile. The mansion has enough intriguing discoveries, the slow roll-out of vital info through gossiping is handled very well, and there are fun reveals that help turn the party from a group of strangers to characters with important connections to the situation involving The Mouth. Some patience for repetitive elements is key, but the overall experience still has its charms thanks to defined characters, an enjoyable tone-setting soundtrack, and the nice way you uncover what’s really going on at Chatters’s estate.
The last word on Last Word is that it does not quite nail its most crucial component, Discourse being a system that needs more consideration or even replacement despite there being some successful fights that show it has some promise. The surrounding elements make its weaker moments worth tolerating and provide the more memorable elements of the experience, but for a game about conversational battles, it feels like the debates are less meaningful to one’s enjoyment of the experience than the casual gossip.