It has been quite some time since a notable Square Enix has made the transition to the PC. Enter the recently released Xbox 360 RPG, The Last Remnant and a date of "March". Powered by the Unreal 3 Engine, the RPG should "port" elegantly enough to the PC.

As though to reaffirm this case, Square Enix have released a benchmark client which allows users to have a glimpse as to how the actual game will run on their PCs. There's options to run either in a window, full screen, and at multiple resolutions.

In order to see how your PC will handle The Last Remnant, it is a simple matter of downloading the 275 MB benchmark client (Unmetered data for Internode customers) and extracting the ZIP archive somewhere on your PC. Next, go to the folder "binaries" and hit the executable.

You'll be confronted with a read me of sorts (in Japanese) - click the button on the left, and it will launch the benchmark client, complete with English menus and options to select resolution, and to start the actual benchmark.

The Last Remnant begins on the island of Eulam, centering on the character of Rush. Oblivious to power struggles over mysterious artefacts known as "Remnants" elsewhere in the game world, the "evils of the outside world" are suddenly realised for Rush, when he witnesses the abduction of his sister, Irinia. Embarking on a quest to find his sister, an elaborate adventure begins, in which "exhilarating, large scale battles" and "ground breaking graphics" dominate.


More screenshots can be found on the mirror.
No official system requirements have been released as of yet for the title, but the benchmark client should give a fairly clear indication as to how the game will on any given system. It seemed to run well enough on my system - returning an average of 96.40 FPS at 1280x720 (in a window), with an average of 57.6 FPS at 1920x1200 (full screen) (this being on a 2.4GHz Quad Core, 8800GTX, 4GB of RAM, Windows Vista x64, and many background applications running).

The Last Remnant is currently scheduled for a release on the PC in March, though no specific date has yet been announced. It is currently available on the Xbox 360, with a PC and PlayStation 3 version currently in development.