I am going to try and avoid doing a detailed recap of this game. After the first half hour, I had three pages of notes filled with the various proper names, relationships, and plot implications. That's pretty par for the course for these sorts of games. Though The Last Remnant got pretty involved, pretty fast, I've actually seen worse in this regard. It was only about 15 minutes or so before I got control of my character.
The Last Remnant is hilariously Japanese. The main character is named "Rush Sykes" and no one at all seems aware of the oddness of the name. There's another character who looks to be about thirty-five and is written as if she were eighty years old. Her name is Emma Honeywell. The authority figure who helps you out, the Marquis of Athlum, David Nassau, is an astonishingly pretty man (and the over-accentuated way they pronounce it Dah-veed as if it were an exotic name).
The general plot of the game is that there are these ancient magical relics called Remnants which range from minor doodads like self-opening treasure chests to landscape-dominating features like the giant sword in Athlum. Rush's parents are researchers who study the Remnants, and one day his sister was kidnapped by monsters. Rush would have died, but he was saved by a mysterious power. Now these Althum people are helping him, presumably out of the goodness of their hearts (though I have a suspicion that they're doing it to get to Rush's parents).
I'm not far enough into the game to have a strong opinion about it. Rush is a huge dork. I think his impulsiveness and lack of tact are supposed to represent a charming openness and innocence, but when he called David "Dave" I was like "who the hell is this dork?" I really wish the main character had more maturity and, um, badassness. On the other hand, the outfits are halfway decent. They're not especially great, but they do look like something humans would actually wear (do you hear me Vaan and Fran).
I've already got a couple of pointless missions under my belt, and I'm moderately optimistic about the battle system. You control a large-ish group of characters in a kind of ersatz mass combat. You've got different postures you can order your people to take, and they get bonuses or penalties based on the relative positions of the various units. It's all a little overwhelming, and I'm positive that I don't have it all figured out just yet. I haven't even touched the advancement system yet. I keep getting stat increases and I'm not sure why, and I keep collecting random junk that I know will be used for crafting later, but I don't have a clear picture of how it will all fit together.
Overall, I'd say The Last Remnant is a fun game, but I doubt I'll ever take it very seriously. I'm interested in the origin and secret of the titular Remnants, but Rush's dilemma with his sister is kind of ridiculous (his tone is all over the place, and he's just so generally boyish that I don't have a lot of respect for him). However I am perfectly comfortable with a ridiculous plot - it's a nice change of pace from the perfectly non-ridiculous plot I just got finished playing.
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