The Wikia has turned a good game into a great game!
The only thing I would point out that's missing from the review is the way advancement affects the game. In most JRPGs, you can sit in an early part of the game and trash easy monsters to pump your level up. When you add new characters to your party, they will scale up to match your level. The enemies, however, don't scale up so the game becomes a cake walk. In The Last Remnant, those scales are reversed. If you blast away at low level critters until your Battle Rank is high, you'll find yourself in a world of hurt because most of the bosses and special battles will scale up to match your level but the new characters you add to your party will not! If you just play the game normally you'll do fine but if you try to exploit this game by doing the old power level trick, it's going to strike back hard.
What wasn't around when the review was written was the Wikia (Lastremnant.wikia.com). That has made a MAJOR difference to this game! When a character would ask you to go find some "superior cotten", you would have to stumble around several areas that might possibly have that kind of thing before you would find it. With the Wikia, you just type it in and can find exactly where to go. When you pick a formation you just get a vague indication of how it works. The Wikia tells you exacly what benifits it has, making detailed plans possible. When you're trying to decide what arts to encourage you'll have no idea what power an art will give you when it advances, but the Wikia does. The list goes on and on.
Having all this knowledge makes the game far deeper. Instead of just trying to defeat the monsters in battles, you're trying to encourage specific skills to advance. You might even be trying to balance skills to encourage a character to be a specific class. Putting your unions together becomes something deliberate instead of simply tossing characters together into formations that sound like they might be good and hoping you luck into advanced variants.
Is this all sounding a bit TOO deep for you? Would you rather just get to fighting the bad guys instead of spending half an hour setting up formations? NO PROBLEM! You never *need* to get this deep into the game to get through the main story or even the vast majority of the quests so you'll have no problem getting your money's worth. For those that get deep into the game, several optional encounters, a special dungeon (originally part of the game's DLC), and a 'hard mode' are included in the game now.
Unfortunately, though I love the combat system, I really can't give the game a 10. While the game itself was improved a lot between the XBox and PC, the controls were badly ported. Keyboard and mouse do work but they should work better. There are also some optional guild goals that involve running into a dungeon over and over in hopes that the rare monster you are supposed to defeat actually spawns. Tedium should never ever be used to 'challenge' the player - not even in optional quests. Finally, while the animations in the battles are fine, the in-game cutscene animations are downright robotic.
The big question you'll want to ask yourself when you're trying to decide whether or not to buy the game is whether or not you'll like the combat system. If you're going to get upset because you can't tell character A to heal character B using spell X, forget it. If you like the idea of making characters act how you want by choosing to use skill A instead of B, C, or D over the course of the whole game (a la Elder Scrolls) then this game will give you a unique and deep experience.