The Last Remnant has all the pieces to be fantastic, but spoils it's own work through some shambolic game decisions.
To start at the good, the game really suprised me, and quickly surpassed early expectations. It has a tight, well woven story, interesting characters and a quite brilliant and wholly innovative battle system that lends itself to complex tactical strategy. The occasional lag, poor textures and stuttering frame rate are all quickly ignored and forgiven. The pacing of the early plot is quite superb and some of locations are straight from the final fantasy school of crafting.
Then at the end of disc one and the start of disc 2 the game drives itself off a cliff. The end boss of the first disc is insane in its level of difficulty, which could be forgiven were it not for following another difficult boss with no saving in between. Failure leads to repeating a good 45 minutes of gameplay each time. This is exacerabted as the battle can be affected by sheer dumb luck, with the game sometimes randomly assigning actions to your characters (grouped into what are called unions) randomly or anthema to your requests.
When you finally pass this ill-judged hurdle the game fully detonates throwing you into a selection of 6 'base' battles that each involve a long and boring battle against tens of enemy units before a very difficult boss fight. Each takes over an hour, failure causes a repeat and there is no saving between the the battle and boss sections which is simpy one of the most inane game decisions ever made. The fact that some of the fights require some trial and error with some having pre-emptive attacks you couldn't possibly predict without seeing first, and that as before sheer luck can play its part you can easily sink tens of hours into this making zero progress. The level of stupidty this game displays at this section is beyond reproach and I can imagine many many people will simply just give up at this stage.
Such then is the game, the developers created a masterpiece and one of the finest examples of RPG fare in recent years, before then hamstringing the game and finally crippling it.