Remember that post from Friday where I was all, "here are things I need to post about," and some of them are getting on half a year old at this point? Yeah, fuck that, it's queue-jumping time. Let's have some Chat Stew Last Remnant, everybody!

Because here is the thing: The Last Remnant is not the best game I've ever played, not by a long shot. It is in fact a deeply flawed game, especially the 360 version. But I love it to bits and after spending I don't even know how many hours on it getting all 22 achievements/1000G and finishing all guild quests (including DLC) except the three unsolvable ones -- it lacks a game time counter, that's one of those unforgivable flaws right there; another is that the 360 version has three unsolvable guild quests -- I am now doing nightly Google Hangouts with tcdohl to watch the entirety of his PC-version playthrough. I'm writing fic for the first time since Vesperia. It got me to detach from the Vorkosiverse, for crying out loud; what more do you possibly want?

Here, in no particular order save the fact that I'm using my Vesperia recap post as a loose guide, is everything you could possibly want to know about TLR. Mostly spoiler-free except for names and vague references to events that won't make any sense unless you're past that point anyway.

Plot: I'm actually going to start with the plot first, because everything else about the game only makes sense in its context. (And how awesome is that?) As worlds go, this one is fairly small and non-expansive compared to, say, Vesperia or the more recent FF titles; you get the sense that an army could properly march across the available map area in a few weeks' time. As threats to the world/humanity's survival go, I've seen it done better; war is an interesting consequence, world war even more so, but again: the world is small, and when they don't bother to explain to you why or how exactly humanity is in danger until you face the final boss, it's a little, um, lacking.

But. The Last Remnant is, without a doubt, the best, greatest, most enjoyable love story I have ever played; hell, I'd argue it's one of the best I've ever encountered in visual media. And viewed within that context -- two people meet, and fall in love; their personal, public, and political lives intertwine, and then the worst happens -- it's the kind of thing I find really, really compelling. None of this bullshit will-they-or-won't-they dawdling; not even the "hurr durr bestest rivals" thing that I freely admit a common preference for; and they manage to express legitimate emotion without sacrificing the appearance (or fact) of strength. A legitimate chance encounter turned spark of something more, resulting in one of the most devastating (and therefore amazing) endgame sequences I have ever seen: if for nothing else, play this game to see a love story done right.

(And for God's sake stick around after the ending credits -- I know most of you are old hat at Square's tricks, but trust me, this review would have done a 180 if not for those few lines of dialogue.)
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Characters: I don't even know or care if they're tropes anymore, they're splendid. As tcdohl put it, Rush Sykes, the protagonist, is one of the rare truly enjoyable shounen heroes -- the kind of guy who rushes headlong into everything and is kind of a dumbass, but he's so open-hearted about it you wind up liking him and rooting for him anyway. My personal lord and savior, David Nassau (aka "His Holiness the Marquis of Athlum", as one Tumblr user prefers it), is everything you could want in a small government ruler/vassal -- cool, collected, slightly Machiavellian, and drop-dead gorgeous. But it's the supporting cast that makes it -- Emma Honeywell (I) is the most badass female party member this side of Lenneth; Glenys, despite suffering painful voice miscasting, is just unreal, and many of the other "unique leader" hires you can pick up during the game have nuanced stories of their own that lend wonderful flavor to the whole enterprise. You have to work for it -- much of the background text is contained in optional dialogue and sidequests -- but the rewards are well worth it. (Parameter bonuses, anyone?)

FWIW, the 360 version is gimped in that you can only have six "leader" units in your active party at any time, so my go-to guys were Rush, David, Glenys, Emmy, Bauslon, and either Blocter or Caedmon depending on whether I needed weapon arts or one-turn status recovery more. The PC version lets you have as many as you like, and via tcdohl's playthrough I am already discovering the wonders of Paris and several others -- meanwhile, I just can't wait until he hires Khrynia. *evil grin*
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Voice Acting: It does not hurt that the game shares a voice team with Infinite Undiscovery, augmented by the inclusion of Johnny Yong Bosch as the main character. Let me tell you, adding Lelouch into the mix just makes things that much more fun. In all seriousness, the voice cast did an excellent job with this game, and although I don't know what the fuck is going on with Jason Liebrecht's accent, and some minor characters suffered from acute overacting syndrome -- which always happens -- this game is proof positive that Jason Schreier should have his Kotaku privileges revoked, because this is a pile of bullshit and TLR knows it. Leaving aside the fantastic FMV voice acting, the in-battle voice snippets -- commenting on everything from specific battle commands to the strength of the enemy to the changing tactical situation as it unfolds -- makes this one of the richest character experiences in the modern voiced-game era.
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Writing/Localization: This is where the game truly excels. Instead of making Rush sound backwater by giving him some painful southern/fake-anglicized-"Osakan" accent, they just gave him ridiculously informal syntax and horribly outdated/never-popular slang like "ace" and "mint". I cannot convey in words how endearing this is. Khrnyia gets an entire sequence where she references Baby Got Back (2nd paragraph), and then, a scant few lines later, Guns N' Roses. The reason the dialogue (and thus voice acting) works as well as it does is that this team finally figured out how to write believable exchanges between adolescent and adult characters and pull off the timing in a way that flowed like real conversation, not pointless monologuing exposition. With lesser writing, Rush could have been whiny, David a tool, Hermeien a caricature, anchors dragging the plot down with them. With the unbelievably slick script this game gave them, they soared.
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Combat: This took a lot of getting used to, but once I got it down, it proved incredibly fun. I actually voluntarily spent postgame time completely unnecessarily fleshing out my characters with arcana, just to make them that little bit more badass. In short: Physical attacks, combat and weapon arts, status/attack magic (invocations/evocations/hexes), status/recovery magic (psionics/remedies), item arts (herbs/potions/lotions), item attacks (shards/explosives/traps), arcana, summons, and unique arts. Is that all? I'm probably forgetting something. You can spend hours fucking around with this shit, and not just because of the graphical slowdown! Ooooh, ice burn.

I have to deduct a point because of the poorly behaved RNG in the combat options, some (but not all) of which was made more generous in the PC version. For example, there are certain battles -- spiritlord types, I am looking at you -- where the most sensible option is to send one union in to get cursed (aka 'royally fucked up') and leave all other unions in standby to not get fucked up and help fix things on the second turn. But invariably, you don't get the option to stand by, or heal when you need it, or use the Gae Bolg, or whatever it is you actually wish your characters were doing at that moment. That's kind of horrible, and leads to a lot of resetting and redoing of perfectly winnable fights waiting for the right combination of commands to happen your way.

It's still ridiculously fun, and where the game world lacks in expansiveness the battle system makes up for it in spades. Controlling up to 18 characters at a time (plus guest unions), against 20-30 enemies (more when they reinforce) -- it's like every day is Luca Blight day here on TLR. Better have the spare hour to spend every time you initiate one of those late-game sidequests or base battles, though...
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Music: Brilliant. Have the soundtrack. Love the soundtrack. For as much as certain sequences were re-used (hello, every dungeon that sounds like Siebenbur), so many of the musical themes were truly iconic in a way I haven't seen much since the old-school PS1 days. Melphina! The second Athlum city theme! (especially 1:09-2:14 or so of the latter) The like twenty themes that conveniently indicate what kind of battle you're fighting and how many turns you've spent trying unsuccessfully to finish it! But for super-duper extra wonderful, try The Bonds of Friendship, a gorgeous track I never even noticed playing in the background of a cutscene (3:48 onward) that, well -- remember what I said about a love story?
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Areas/Dungeons: I loved the rich, glimmering detail of the cities, the city map system, and the presence of unique remnants as per plot events. Utterly gorgeous, and the combination of graphics and music really gave each town area its own unique flair. Many of the dungeons were similarly thoughtful, from the intricate ruins of Mojcado or Robelia to the lush expanses of the Ivory Peaks or Crookfen. I'd dock it a point for Siebenbur -- seven non-ordinally-appearing paths when all parts of the Final Fortress aren't even joined and passable at the end? -- but I'd just have to give the point back for the ingenuity of keeping most dungeon areas fresh by expanding them (and/or implementing climate change; cf. Darken Forest) as plot events develop. That's pretty sweet. I would have loved a map in the Ancient Ruins (added difficulty: not necessary!) and the final dungeon seemed to be a pretty phoned-in reproduction of Xenogears, but other than that, it's really hard to find fault.
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Sidequests/Achievements: I'm of a divided mind on this. On the one hand, most of the achievements were routine/easy (defeat X enemies, bind Y treasure chests, etc.) or involved defeating a powerful enemy (awesome!), and for once I appreciated the utter lack of "achievements" awarded for simply making adequate progress through the game's plot. On the other hand, I would be remiss for not registering three pretty substantial complaints:

• The 360 had the goddamn Monster Dismantler achievement for taking apart 500 monsters. When a) not all monsters can be captured, and all but a few of those that can have a less than 40% drop rate; b) a normal playthrough nets you fewer than 100 monsters to dismantle in the first place; and c) a competing game mechanic requires you to sell whole monsters for trade points, not to mention badly needed funds -- this is a fucked-up achievement and whoever thought it up should be punished.
• Ditto for whoever came up with The Assistant, which is basically "Graduate School: The Sidequest", complete with increased urge to drink and loss of interest in life.
• As previously referenced, it is virtually impossible to assemble 3 Scouts, Commanders, and/or Runemaidens in a single late-game party; fuck you, only three guild quests I couldn't finish. So glad you changed this to one of each class for the PC version. That helps me not at all.

Those problems aside, the combined achievement, sidequest, and guild quest systems were pretty fantastic and added a tremendous amount of fun shit to do. Sure, some of them are a little boring -- many of the guild quests in particular boiled down to "spawn rare/re-fight rare until you get the correct drop", but the great thing about the combat being as engaging as it was is that I didn't even care. :D They also fleshed out the main story in a compelling and believable way; I suppose if you're the kind of person who doesn't do all the sidequests, you won't get much out of the characters or the plot. But then again, if you're the kind of person who doesn't do all the sidequests, why are you even playing JRPGs?
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So yeah, basically I love me the hell out of this game, and while I'd be happy to answer questions or fend off concerns, I'd also pretty much be happy to float a few people the money to try it on Steam, because it is, seriously, just that good. (The PC version, anyway. Sigh.)

Invaluable for anyone who may play this ever, on any system: 1) The Wiki (you will not survive long without this); 2) the chronological sidequest guide (built for the Xbox, strong enough for the PC). I have a few more guides where those came from if you need specific advice beyond what I feel like typing up for a comment, but those are enough to get most people started.