Last Remnant

I'm still playing the game, like, every day. It's definitely not a grind-game yet. I call grind when you go and fight just to get more levels. Here there's always side-quests to do.
My only problem with the game is that I don't have much say in what the characters or groups will do in battle. It feels like you're trying to herd sheep on a horse. You sort of push them in one direction, but sometimes they just won't do what you want them to do.
But so far I've managed to beat what I've found, though one boss bird took me like 20 tries (optional guild task).

Zloth summarized my cryptic point about grinding pretty well. I do consider running the same dungeon dozens of times to either add levels or to get specific minerals/components or to fight rare creatures to be grinding.

If you fight the same mob early in the game your initial captains do not learn new abilities like they do if you do so later and you are effectively foregoing the ability to level up the kickass generals you get later in the game on disk 2.

Grinding the early maps in the game you can be level 50 or higher before you get beyond the first disk. The game increases the stats of the characters faster when you fight enemies far higher than your party level so if you hold off that until you have the later captains they can benefit too. Most of the min/maxing guides that I saw back when I played recommended only being like level 10 by the end of the first disk which is probably masochistic. Those extra 30 levels or so help boost stats of your new captains much better than without. So basically wait to get your full set of captains and then after that go crazy to level them up was the general advise.

Anyway the game doesn't really require you to fight mobs for fighting sake and I wouldn't worry about it it unless you were actively trying to increase your party level early on by fighting the same battles for hours on end.

Anyway, the herding sheep fighting system was the best part in my opinion. You cant really know what they are going to do based on what option you pick and you dont know what options you will get on your next turn. It is far more strategic that way. You sort of pick the general strategy but its the troops on the ground that are actually going to decide what they will actually do. You can't just pick a certain option and know you will activate the attack all enemies super ability every time. It forces you to have a well balanced attack most of the time. Its also addictive like gambling hoping it will activate a new ability or move that you were not planing for.

Finished for the first time in ca. 80 hours at level 101.
I had no major problems with boss fights in the end.
All you need is a good troop mix: Spell casters, fighters, healers.

You can just hit a toggle key and it will tell you exactly what each character is planning to do. They typically follow the plan but some things can throw it off.

The biggest one comes from those action trigger things. If you can get two triggers in a row just before the last character in a union is about to do a normal attack, that attack will get upgraded (for free, I think) to a special move.

Another big one is healing/buffing. If a union A is assigned to heal union B and union A heals all of B's hit points before all the healers are used up then union A will often start healing itself. If you've got strong healing in A then telling A to heal another union will often result in BOTH unions getting fully healed. Characters will also sometimes toss in some buff powers.

Oh, and another tip - there is NO warning if you run out of components for the item powers. If you haven't got the herb you need to do a healing then the healing choice simply will not appear. That burned me bad the first time I played. I cussed out the game pretty good when unions suddenly refused to heal each other.

Last Remnant seems like it definitely has a very unique combat system, but I'm not sure if I would like it - I'm one of those players that wants to control every single thing on the battlefield, and this system kind of contradicts that. I am intrigued however, even though I very rarely play jrpgs. Is this a title that would appeal to a very western rpg player who almost never has an interest in jrps?

Nerevarine said:

Last Remnant seems like it definitely has a very unique combat system, but I'm not sure if I would like it - I'm one of those players that wants to control every single thing on the battlefield, and this system kind of contradicts that. I am intrigued however, even though I very rarely play jrpgs. Is this a title that would appeal to a very western rpg player who almost has an interest in jrps?

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To me its just a JRPG. I can't see that it would specifically attract WRPG players. I'd say that there are other JRPGs (although, none which are pc based) that do a better job at attracting WRPG players.

It doesn't actually matter when you grind in TLR unless your grinding for a certain skill. New Abilities are granted based on many times a certain ability is used or when you choose a new specialisation. Speed of gain is modified by how large you current chain is and how many monsters in the current battle. There is a guide on gamefaqs which explains the optimal way to master the skills you need. In the PC version you can also disable unwanted skills which means your character will only use the ability you want to level which results it in growing in power much faster.

Having said that I certainly don't recommend grinding until the very end so you can figure out which skills are the good ones (or read a FAQ). Certain optional boss mobs can only be defeated on disk1 so you still need to be powerful

see that's the thing. I haven't read (nor am I interested in reading) any FAQs or guides. I'm playing just the way I want to play, and it's very fun and there is no grind involved whatsoever. Just go to one of the towns, check the tavern and surrounding areas for people looking for mercenaries, help them and get rewards (and improve my members' skills while on that). After finishing the adventure, replenish my stock of herbs at the merchant, find another poor soul looking for mercenaries, and continue. When I can't find any more poor souls, I go and visit the castle to continue the storyline.
Can you grind if you want to? sure, you can revisit the same area 2 million times to get more exp, more components, etc. but it's totally voluntary and not something I'm going to do. Will I be able to craft the ultra-mega-sword-of-ultra-mega-swordiness? probably not, but I bet my mega-sword-of-swordiness will let me finish the game just the same.

This game may be underrated. All the reviewers focused on at the time were the load times and pop-up but it would have been fairer if they'd amended the reviews when installing games to the HD became available a few months later since the few sites that did mention this stated it went a long way towards minimizing load times and graphical glitches. I got the game after this so never noticed the slow load times.

In any case, I really like this game. Have played it twice, each time getting about 12or 13 hours in but stop playing for some reason or other. And it's not that I get bored, just other stuff comes up and then I just prefer to restart than continue and remember where I left off. Will have to start a new game when I have time.

But graphics are good, music is excellent, story seems decent as far as I got and the meat of the game, the battle system, is a lot of fun and has some unique elements. I certainly have enjoyed what I've played far more than I did FF XIII. And I loved the way the towns and travel were sort of streamlined - this seemed more of a natural progression for modern RPGs than did FF XIII's complete lack of towns and terminal based merchants.

I think the 360 JRPGs are all a little underrated or underappreciated. Lost Odyssey, Last Remnant, Enchanted Arms are definitely not outstanding but are all pretty good games. Many complained that there weren't any "classic" styled JRPGs on the current consoles - then whey they came out, the critics complained the games are too old school. Go figure.

I recently picked up Blue Dragon and if you can get over its cutesy character design (and it's "heavy metal" boss music with horrendous vocals/lyrics), it's actually a very solid JRPG.

Scrav said:

To me its just a JRPG. I can't see that it would specifically attract WRPG players. I'd say that there are other JRPGs (although, none which are pc based) that do a better job at attracting WRPG players.

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I think it possibly could attract a WRPG player if that player likes tactics or strategy type games or games with large scale tactical battles such as in Icewind Dale or later Wizardry games.

It also does away with travelling on an overworld map - you simply click the area on the map to travel there, sort of like Fallout. And while in town you can click from area to area without having to actually walk.

And recruiting random soldiers for your squads is another part of the game, so you're not stuck with one party make-up for the entire game. I'm sure someone else can explain that better though, typing in a rush atm, heh.

Yeah, your party changes quite a bit. Mostly it grows but you also end up replacing some of the early characters with better ones you pick up later.

I've been thinking about doing Lost Odyssey again. If I can find my old saves, maybe I'll skip by that early boss on top of a mountain. That encounter MUST have been screwed up. It was easily the hardest boss in the whole game for me and it showed up in the first couple of hours!

Just finished Last Remnant yesterday, boy is it long! (Steam says I played it for 90 hours). It is quite good, enjoyed it a lot. Plenty of tactical and strategic decisions to be made. Hard, but not too hard (except some optional bosses that I just decided to skip).
I would have preferred it if I had much more control over the characters' equipment and actions though. But overall, I'm glad I bought it.

My apologies in advance for reviving an old topic, but this game has proved worthy of the feat. Coming off the stellar game that is Trails of Steel the second, I really wasn't expecting much from the Last Remnant, but I continue to be surprised daily by this wonderful game. If you've not tried it and like tactical/turn based/squad type games, I plead with you to grab it!!

I guess you've just started it. Sooner or later you'll get sick of grinding that leads absolutely nowhere and is there only to waste your time till the game ends.
If someone seeks for a blueprint for wasted potential, just play TLR.

I hope someone somewhere will eventually take the brilliant combat system from it and make a proper gem instead of the grinder rubbish this game was turned into.

I've put maybe twenty hours into it, keeping several tips in mind from a friend that I got in advance, and only today have I actually started trying to hone BR and skills. I just hit eighteen BR, and I think I've decided on maybe a dozen or so people that I want to keep for the game, with room for another six I think. The last step I did plot-wise yesterday were several quests that raised my team capacity to eighteen, so after a bit of leveling I'll be looking to complete my roster.

One person curse might be another person blessing. I haven't played yet. Was gonna play but then decided to play ME:A; after ME:A I'll play this (unless I get suck into battletech or poe2 - I think i'll wait a year on poe2 for patches but battletech....)

joxer said:

I guess you've just started it. Sooner or later you'll get sick of grinding that leads absolutely nowhere and is there only to waste your time till the game ends.
If someone seeks for a blueprint for wasted potential, just play TLR.

I hope someone somewhere will eventually take the brilliant combat system from it and make a proper gem instead of the grinder rubbish this game was turned into.

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Man, did I run into a fight today!!

So yesterday I was clearing these six bases, and it took a while but really wasn't that hard. This morning, when I accepted a quest from some guy, it immediately threw me into some combat with an utter beast named the Fallen. It must have taken me five fights simply to survive and win just once, then I had to go back and do it again so no team was dead after the fact. This battle might go down in history as a strategic and tactical slug-fest, with a healthy dose of luck needed simply to pull out the awesome winz.

The Fallen <insert evil laugh done by a BASS, not some wussy tenor> is the start of the DLC for the game that's now been rolled into the game itself.

The Fallen is part of a set of three and probably the hardest of them because the opportunity vanishes at a certain point in the game. If you hit the other two too early, though, they're capable of messing you up quite nastily.

One of the other DLC boss fights is to take on all of the end bosses from the Six Bases - mostly two at a time. Ouch!

I've got a guide for the DLC bosses here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=129125443

After the Fallen, I've retreated back to doing some wimpy quests. The most recent has me running all over the place, I'm just hoping for a shiny reward for all the fetching I've done.

I'm still not certain if I've found everyone available to recruit, but unless I run into anyone extra awesome, I guess I'm stuck with them for now. My last two recruits seem pretty good, one being a Duke and another seems to have access to every kind of magic right from the get-go. Our battle rank is at forty-four now, so onwards and upwards, never back!

I rarely actually play games on the weekend, but yesterday I had like ninety minutes free and nothing to do, so I did a series of quests all given by the same person. Afterwards I felt kind of tricked, I had to keep running back and forth to this one instance to either kill monsters or harvest for items, and all I got for the quests was piddling amounts of gold.