The Last Remnant

Took the plunge and ordered The Last Remnant today. I've been playing the demo on Steam, and although I'm not entirely sure what was going on most of the time I found it pretty enjoyable. For those not in the know The Last Remnant is an RPG by Square-Enix (of Final Fantasy fame) that was released on Xbox360 last year and ported to PC (with lots of bug fixes, enhancements and extras) earlier this month. It's kinda strange, rather than the traditional J-RPG model of build team of guys> go on adventure where you then give each unit in your team orders each "turn" in battle you rather build up several teams called Unions which you give general orders to, usually limited to which enemy union to attack and "how" i.e. you don't tell each character exactly what action to take, but might order 'attack with combat arts' or 'attack with mystic arts' there's a wide array of commands available depending on the situation, for example you may 'Finish this' or 'save them at all costs', sometimes you can even let the units make their own decisions. Unfortunately the demo contains no form of tutorial so you're pretty much dropped in the deep end and really have to play things by ear - not the best approach to demoing when you've invented an unorthodox approach to RPGing. Still, for all that I think the game will be worth a look, primarily because the game itself should be enjoyable, but also because interest in The Last Remnant might convince Square that the PC is a format worth developing for. Basically I have a small vain hope that FF XIII will make it over to PC. I really doubt it, but one can but hope. If not FF XIII then maybe other Square projects. I don't have a current gen console right now and I'm missing a lot of good RPGs as a result. The upside of that I suppose is that all the good games I'm missing will be nice and cheap by the time I step into the current console market. Should mention, the place I've ordered from is www.gameplay.co.uk for a mere £15.99 (free 2nd class postage, 99p for 1st class). The overall prices on there are excellent, recommend anyone check it out if they're looking for games on any platform. Final note, a major selling point for me of this game was actually the title music, check it out, it's epic:

freedoms_stain, out.