The Last Remnant was originally released on the Xbox 360 in 2008 and half a year later they released it on PC, but in an upgraded version. I highly recommend playing the PC version, because it has some positive gameplay adjustments and also you can choose between English or Japanese voice acting.
Gameplay
The Last Remnant is a JRPG where you fight with multiple squads of characters, giving the game a bit of a grand strategy atmosphere. In the tutorial it is even shown that you fight with a full army which is represented by those squads. While that is an interesting take on the JRPG formula, it also makes it a bit silly at times, when you run through narrow caves and fight small animals and then remember that this is symbolic for your whole army being there. The developers at Square Enix did get a bit lost now and then and fell back on classical JRPG tropes instead of fully committing to the army theme, but that did not hurt my fun with this game at all. I still enjoyed the vast majority of my 60+ hours or so with this game.
The squad system also played into that feeling of being an army commander in that you didn't give commands to individual characters, but the whole squad and the AI selects the characters own moves, depending on how much mana the group still has and if you ordered: defend, heal or attack with everything you have! In that last order fits one special gimmick of the game: big attacks with special animations from the titular remnants or mage groups working together to do one big spell. And the presentation is great! They often took some rounds to be active, but having your mages do a spell which put the whole battlefield in darkness was great. So a bit similar to the Final Fantasy Summons. I wouldn't say I always liked the "AI chooses the possible commands", as there were certainly moments where I wanted to heal but no squad had a heal command available. But mostly it was fine and again: it fit the theme of you being the commander and it not always working out due to the unpredictability of the battle.
In your squads you can have normal random NPC mercenaries, if you are boring (or play the Xbox version, because there you could only have one special character per squad), or you can fill them with unique characters with their own side quests, ultimate attacks and voice lines. Especially those voice lines were a big plus point for me, because it gave each a distinct personality and with continuing time hearing them was nostalgic instead of annoying.
You can then give each squad a different formation and develop your companions by giving them weapons, which are upgradeable.
And this was done in an intelligent way, were you didn't need to do everything by yourself, the characters also asked for certain materials and then crafted themselves the upgrades, if you agreed. One downside was that the formations also have different strength levels, but only the official guide book, sold extra of course, told you, what the requirements for unlocking these levels were. Like "only mages" or "lance carrier as leader and then bows in the back row", so definitely not something you could find out for all of them by yourself. \
Story
The story starts on a bit different note then normally: you are not a helpless little hero. Instead you are together with the head of a smaller nation, trying to navigate the bigger neighbours without upsetting the political landscape so much that others are allying against you. While that sounds unique, it still has roughly 50 % let's say "anime" content and with more play time it gets more to the "kill god" direction and doesn't play it's political side to its full strength. But it is at least a bit different than again starting in Heroes Hometown #26 and fighting against the evil Dark Lord KillThemAll.
And the world had a unique feature: Remnants, magical items of immense power where some can level a complete city by themselves. Logically, the owners of those artefacts are the leaders by virtue of nobody daring to oppose them. So each nation is built around one of these remnants and the bigger ones try to subjugate the smaller remnants/nations in order to be safer against even stronger enemy nations.
Another positive thing was the variety of side quests. Or at least the story side of them. There was so much variety in there, it didn't feel like the classical "kill 10 bears" but sadly gameplay wise it was exactly that. In principal it was always one of three things: go in that region and kill number of certain type of monster, that big monster, or find special resource. That felt so strange, to put that much love and care into the beginning of the quests, but their design themselves.
Music
The music to this game is great! The main menu theme is something I can only call crystalline. Which shouldn't make sense for music, but together with the graphical effects of the menu, crystalline is the only word that comes to my mind. You can listen here. It is an orchestral soundtrack fitting to an epic story told and it highlights the story moments expertly.
Monster Design
I specifically highlight the monster designs because they are so varied and unique. While a few later enemies are recolours of earlier ones, the models are still so different, it is great. Especially the big Remnants really portray the power they confer and feel like an emperors tool to take over the world. They really nailed the feeling of scale in this game.
If you like long JRPGs with a lot of world to explore and some unique game play mechanic, give this one a try.
