I can't say I've ever played a game like this. The Last Remnant is an RPG that feels somewhat a part of the design trends of Final Fantasy XII and XIII, experimenting with ways to abstract battle into looser systems aided by AI tweaked by the player. In this case, some of it works, but some of it really, really does not.
Evoking a sense of larger-scale battles than your typical party RPG, the number of your fielded characters in battle will eventually reach 18. You split them off into groups called Unions, where all the party members will pick what they think is the best option when you give them a blanket order such as attacking or healing allies. Depending on the formation you place them in while out of battle, their stats can change drastically. You unlock more formations and upgrades to them too along the way, so trying out new strategies is recommended.
There's also a morale bar that moves back and forth based on things like who has strategic advantage, such as flanking Unions, and whose Unions are falling in battle. Keeping this bar maxed out in your favour leads to big damage and defense boosts, so it's especially important in boss battles where low morale will likely lead to a death spiral. The music will change based on how the battle's going, and there are some pretty great tracks that suit the mood very well. My favourite track is probably The Gates of Hell. That part where it goes back and forth between the bells and electric guitar is so unusual, but it always gets me pumped! But honestly, the soundtrack has a lot to love here. It's worth giving a playlist a listen. But anyway, back to battle mechanics...
There are timed hits called Critical Trigger that sometimes occur during your attacks. I never figured out if these have multiple uses, because they don't actually lead to critical hits I don't think, but a successful one will allow characters in your Union to act before the enemy can have their turn. It's actually possible to turn these off and have the game just do them for you with occasional failures, which tells me there wasn't exactly much confidence in the idea's relevance.
The final big piece of the combat puzzle involves Remnant moves and these are a mess in their own way. These are sort of Limit Break-esque attacks that, as long as the leader has the ability to use one, tend to become usable once their individual morale gauge is full. I say "tend to" because it really feels totally up to RNG. The individual morale bars are the orange vertical ones to the left of the Union HP. Notice how Unions 3 and 4 are also full? For some unknown reason, they cannot use the Remnant moves that they know on this turn. If they could, there'd be a flame effect behind their menu window like for Union 1.
What is normally a cool system in most RPGs, an ace in the hole in case things get dire or simply when it's time to turn up the heat, becomes this arbitrary thing that sometimes comes out right as you need it. This system will let you down time and time again, I promise you. The Last Remnant is not a game where grinding your stats will let you force your way past roadblocks, either. Learning the ins and outs of how to find power in this game is unlike any other game I've played, but that isn't exactly praise in this case.
The problem is, as you might have started to realize...this game is obtuse, in almost all aspects. It simply does not explain its systems in any way, and by trying to understand them by looking to external sources, you might end up sabotaging your endgame like I did. That sounds dramatic, but I'll explain that later. For now, check this out:
This party member is asking for a material, either dropped by a monster or mined from a rock someplace. Why is Maddox asking for Necrotic Metal? Where do you find it? Does the yes/no answer here mean anything? None of this is explained, and honestly none of it really matters, it turns out. This is part of a system where your party members, as you level up, will seek upgrade materials for their weapons. It seems like, if they don't have the materials, they will use their own money to buy them. I have no idea where their money even can be seen, and I don't think it's taken from the player's cash pile.
Every time you boot the game up, you'll get accosted by around five or six of your party members asking you for this stuff. You can't even find the materials at a shop and give it to them! You can only ever give them new weapons or accessories you have on hand if they happen to ask for it later. It's so hands-off, it becomes frustrating. Should I give them this thing? What if it makes them worse? I can't see the stat comparison. Should I buy this weapon I can't wield, hoping someone else will want it? It's not a fun system by any means.
"Considering the amount of work to make graphics that deserve HD, it is hard to make towns in the conventional style" is a quote from Motomu Toriyama, director of Final Fantasy XIII, which came out in 2009, a year after The Last Remnant. I think the answer to towns was right here alongside Final Fantasy XIII's development as it struggled to find its footing. They really succeeded at making these towns feel grand and impressive, while still heavily restricting where the player can go. The relatively small play spaces here are great: with our protagonist Rush's movement speed being ironically capped at a light jog, all the important buildings and NPCs are within arm's reach, often all accessible from one or two maps. This also helps with looking around for quest markers, since there's less space to look. But uhh...the quests...
A lot of these are bad. Like, pop open a guide instead of even bothering to figure it out. Go find this guy in this place without even being told which place or where. Wander a massive maze tower with no end in sight. Solve a mystery in a desert while still having to contend with a light jog to get from place to place. At the very least, you'll often actually get recruitable party members to hire from doing the quests, and they often take you to locations you either can't even visit yet, or side passages that weren't there before. You can easily fill your party with characters you actually helped out through various side activities, and that's genuinely a really appealing part of this game. It's just that so many of them are permanently missable, or really confusingly laid out. The bounty monster missions are especially terrible.
Let's say we want to take out Sledgehammer, a monster found in the Catacombs. First thing we'd do is look up where exactly it is online, because the game just expects you to wander aimlessly I guess. It says on the wiki that it's in the Eastern Area in a certain room. We go there and...
Those giant beetles are not the Sledgehammer. Monsters, even bounty monsters, are subject to a spawn table. This means that the intended experience is to wander around in a dungeon you've already cleared, getting hounded by enemies you don't care about looking for something that might not even be there. Thankfully, I'm playing on PC (and that's a little weird, so we'll come back to this later)! There's a handy unofficial tool that connects automatically to your game's save file, which feels invaluable for anyone playing The Last Remnant, called TLRPlanner: http://enceler.github.io/tlrplanner/
You can see here that currently, the rare monster that's here is the Artaxa. That's not what I'm looking for, and if I'd already slain the Artaxa there might not even be any rare monster in the area at all. With this tool in hand, I can leave and re-enter the Catacombs until Sledgehammer shows up in that list in the bottom right. Tedious, but the console players would have it so so much worse.
And that's kind of a big problem when you find out that this game used to have a PC version available on storefronts, but once Square-Enix released the remaster on consoles in 2018/2019, they must have taken down the original game from PC...and never bothered to release the remaster to replace it. The best way to play this game, with access to information that makes so much of the game's flawed design less painful, cannot be purchased. Either you already had a copy purchased, you buy a key of dubious origin from a key reseller (please don't do that) or you find an archived copy by other means. Playing the game without TLRPlanner is just not something I even considered the moment I first tried it out. This game has very easily missable quests! Doesn't a tool like that just fire you up to clear them all in spite of it?!
Quests, which have no easy way to be found in the world other than by obsessively checking every pub in every town after every plot beat, can expire through plot progression without any warning. It's incredibly frustrating considering you'd be missing out on potential party members and more, but from the perspective of someone who has cleared all of them (well, one of them was a superboss that I decided to cheat through), I'm starting to think it was an intentional flaw baked into the game.
I finally made it to the final boss, only to be met with a foe who could wipe my entire party in a turn or two. There's simply no chance whatsoever. I don't understand the battle system well enough to win, and none of the bosses, aside from the one superboss, could possibly have prepared me for this level of brutality. As I mentioned before, grinding is not the solution to strength in this game. Often, raising your Battle Rank higher actually works against you, as the game has formulas that assume higher player BR means they can handle bigger challenges, unlocking stronger enemy moves and higher max HP. So I looked the boss up online.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing. They made so many of these quests such a pain to find and complete. A big reason that you do side content in RPGs is to prepare your characters for big boss fights and the endgame, right? This game will take you down for doing that. By being so convoluted, pushing me to outside sources, and eventually finding my way around their insane internal game logic, I found myself face to face with a fight I knew I was never going to beat. I sabotaged my own endgame.
There's really nothing more to be said on my strategy for this fight. I knew for a fact, looking up ancient gamefaqs pages for advice on the superboss from before, that the ways you make your Unions stronger was way beyond the effort I was willing to put in. Meticulous focus on setting very specific formations, rifling through every unit's list of abilities and turning off anything but the exact ones wanted...a battle system all about macro management very suddenly became about extremely micro management, and I was neither prepared nor willing to learn. The vast majority of the game can be cleared by just trying to experiment with what you think will be a good set up. This gulf in difficulty, without anything in-game to guide you towards better strategies, is demoralizing. I don't think the battle system holds up well enough to even want that level of mastery, either.
I felt compelled to see The Last Remnant through, not because of its story or any particular attachment to its characters or mechanics. More than anything, I was intrigued by the massive battles. Some of the high points of the game have your relatively small band of heroes take on 40+ opponents, trying to figure out who to prioritize, whether you should try flanking when you know it'll leave you open... I wanted to see how far they could take a battle system so unique. It turns out it doesn't really matter how many party members you have or what skills they can use if a single move can wipe them all out instantly.
