Vanndril said:
Oh, hey. I've had that game for ages, but never really touched it. If you try it out soon, let me know what you think.
If you've played the SaGa series and enjoyed that, you'll like The Last Remnant. Kinda. It does some things... really poorly. Like equipment. We couldn't just buy equipment or commonly find it in chests or as drops, no no no. Whoever thought "man, it'd be really fun to have equipment gated by a random crafting drop you're given no clue as to its location" and then saying "you know what, let's make that like a 10% drop too on a once-per-instance encounter" really needs their head examined. But you can bypass the system... by getting equipment yourself that you have no idea whether or not your allies will take. At least equipment is bit less important than most games.
Basically, the battle system is like managing a raid, but single player. You give a general directive for each squad (attack, debuff, heal other squads, those sorts of things) and then individual units will decide the details. A quirky thing is that an entire squad shares its resources (HP, MP) and that individual stats only matter for adding to that pool of shared resources. (okay, technically speaking if a single unit takes absolutely massive damage that individual unit can get KO'd, but that's generally enough damage to kill the squad outright anyways)
Your enjoyment of the game will greatly increase if you realise a few things:
1) The in-game description of raidlock is terrible. How it works is basically if you've given an order to a squad that would result in a deadlock (basically, anything that includes an offensive attack other than a long-range magic) you can't be raidlocked. Otherwise, you will be raidlocked if any enemies decide to engage you. Which they pretty much always will if they're not already engaged.
2) As far as I can tell (probably as a result of 1), enemies will never break deadlock. This is fairly useless on its own, except...
3) Bosses generally don't have attacks that hit all squads. Those only hit squads deadlocked with the boss. You also have these sorts of attacks, but they're effectively RNG for you. You can also get attacks that actually hit all enemy squads, but they require some effort to unlock.
4) Turn on the auto-save. It's very helpful.
5) Item commands draw from a crafting pool on the fly. Make sure you keep stocked up on those components.
The leveling system is the SaGa leveling system pretty much. You'll sort of randomly get stat ups after battles depending on what you did and how strong the enemies were. Your individual units also get new skills randomly and your skills also get stronger as you use them more. Enemies level with you... kinda. Effectively they have a level cap past which they don't get stronger and a minimum below which they can't be scaled. The game basically encourages you to take the hardest battles you can possibly manage.
The plot isn't great, but it also isn't full of holes. There's lots of sidequests to do, but they're not particularly interesting mechanically or story-wise in of themselves, but they can give interesting battles that are quite different from normal battles.
Overall, as I said before, if you liked SaGa games, you'll probably feel right at home. The correlation I've found is extremely high.
Oh, also the person who thought it was a good idea to have you walk across a giant empty desert like 10 times to do sidequests needs to have sense slapped into him.
