Introduction

The Last Remnant is a Strategy JRPG developed by Square-Enix for the Xbox 360, and later ported to the PC. It was developed by the team which made the SaGa games, which like to hide the working of their mechanics from the player, and boy does that show in Last Remnant.

Music: The First Awakening (Title Screen Music)

The story revolves around Rush Sykes, a young man whose family gets caught up in a conflict over control of Remnants. What are Remnants?

“Academy Visistones 1-3, 46-47” posted:

[Remnants 1] – Remnants are mysterious objects that hold powers beyond those of men.
[Remnants 2] – No one knows when or how Remnants were created.
[Remnants 3] – Men have used Remnants as beneficial tools since ancient times.
[World Races 1] There are four main races in the world: mitra, yama, qsiti, and sovani.
[World Races 2] It is said that sovani ruled over all of the other races during ancient times.

That should be enough for now, as the game explains other important aspects as the plot advances.

The game also nixes the usual fantasy races. There’s nary an elf, a dwarf, an orc, or a goblin to be seen. For that matter, there isn’t any such thing as a human, either – the local human analogues are known as Mitra. The other three major races are the Sovani, four-armed bipedal cats, the Yama, big hulking Fish-men, and Qsiti, really short guys who look kinda like lizards with rabbit ears. Despite all this, the game shies away from using fantasy racism as an issue. The races intermingle, live, and work side by side without anyone batting an eye.

Refreshingly, the game also doesn’t use the “teenagers saving the world with friendship” JRPG trope. I believe only one party member is below the age of 18.

The plot is fine, but it won’t blow your socks off. Nevertheless, as is standard, no plot spoilers. That includes "nudge nudge, wink wink, if you get what I'm saying" type comments. Gameplay spoilers and the names of spoileriffic party members are okay in tags.

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The Xbox version was widely panned for a lot of technical problems, and a bug that punished you too harshly for fighting too much, but the PC version was a dramatic improvement, fixing a lot of the problems, giving you more freedom with party composition, adding in new classes and integrating the DLC into the game. That’s the version I’ll be playing.

I’ll be doing this as a hybrid LP. Most of the game’s dialogue is unvoiced, including all side-quests, plus screenshots can cover a lot of territory that would make for too-long dungeon videos. This game has a number of grindy things which would make for bad videos.

Screenshots alone will not suffice. The main plot videos are fully voiced, and the motion/facial capture really looks good, and trying to get a screenshot of everything cool in the cutscenes would make for browser-killing updates. The highlight of the game is its fantastically fluid combat animations, which really has to be seen in motion. I know that some people don’t watch videos accompanying screenshot LP’s, but that won’t really work that well for this game. If you don’t watch the videos, you’ll miss out on the main appeal of the game.

Screenshots will be used for information, and videos will be used for dungeon exploration, cutscenes, and boss battles. This will let me present the game most efficiently. I don’t plan on having any commentary in the videos, because there’s either not much to say (there’s only so much to say about the dungeons), or there’s TOO MUCH to say in too short a time. It’s better to do that through comments between screenshots, where I can devote as much or as little time as I need.

I am planning to do dungeon videos for every dungeon of reasonable size. Some of the really long dungeons may get speeded-up videos, or maybe none at all. If no one cares, it'll only be cutscenes and major battles which get videos. After the opening tutorial bits get out of the way, I plan to update once a week or so. Twice a week if I have a lot of spare time.

This icon is my commentary.

This is official system messages.

- This is a video so you should watch it!

This is totally real dialogue from the actual game! Awesome, dude!

Too bad we don’t have a silent protagonist. You’ll just have to make do with this additional, made up dialogue.

This is me making a journal entry. This dialogue is also completely real!

I’ll be making frequent use of the Last Remnant Wiki. It’s an excellent resource for information about the game, and it’s easy to avoid spoilers unless you specifically go looking for them.

The wiki is practically a necessity when it comes to fulfilling the requests of party members, which I’ll explain when they start coming up.

I am going to do a New Game Plus run, which carries over a lot of stuff which will make doing the LP a hell of a lot more convenient for me. My first playthrough was a 100% sidequest complete run (not counting guild requests – but that was pretty close too), so I’ll start out with 4,546,603 gold in my pocket. There’s not a huge need for that much unless you’re doing a lot of crafting and fast upgrading to the game’s best weapons – but I’m not going to do that, I’ll be upgrading my weapons at about what would be a normal pace for the game.

What carries over to a new game:

All crafting components. - These are for crafting and upgrading weapons and items. This is not as useful as it sounds, as it’s only helpful for Rush. Everyone else is too polite to ask for things from Rush’s inventory, so you have to get them fresh. Even if you have 100 in your inventory doing nothing.
All magazines. – This IS very useful, because it allows enemies to drop additional upgrade components. Your party members can ask for those things before you have unlocked the magazine that allows them to drop.
All Formations. – This is the specific placement of your units in a union. I tend to generally set them to something which increases the stats I want for that union and forget about it, because even I can only stand so much mind-numbing tedious crap to look over.
Rush’s Arts. – This lets Rush start the game with the first skill of all the possible Mystic and Item Arts. In a fresh playthrough, you slowly accumulate those through quests over the course of the game. This is very helpful, but you should turn most of them off as soon as possible, to force you onto the path you want to take him.
Harvesting upgrades and digs count. – The digs count is the total number of times you can harvest during a dungeon, so this means searching for components is faster, and you don’t have to leave and re-enter dungeons to restore your digs count. The upgrades increase the chances for recovering more and better quality components. Everything on my equipment is maxed out.
All area maps – So you can see where you’re going. Very handy, as sometimes the maps are found in the middle of a dungeon.

Don’t worry if some of this doesn’t make much sense - I’ll explain in detail what this stuff means when it comes up.

Want to play along?

Stabbey_the_Clown posted:

All right, Here is a .ZIP of two LR save files for those who wish to play again. Rehost it somewhere else if you want, I do not care.

savegame4 is at BR 103, just before the final boss. From there, you can still go back and do other things if you want, although all sidequests and most guild tasks are done. Laugh at my hilariously bungled party! MASSIVE SPOILERS, OBVIOUSLY

savegame49 is the "Continue to New Game" save. All you can do with that one is start New Game Plus

By default, the save directory is:

C:\Users\{USERNAME}\Documents\My Games\The last remnant\RushGame\Save

This is a linear JRPG, so there isn’t a lot of interactivity which can be done in terms of the story or quests, but I’ll see if I can find places for audience participation – probably asking people which units they want in the active party, or possibly asking what the audience what direction to take some of the characters - the Arts they should use. We’ll see.

I have my heart set on trying to make Rush the (PC-exclusive) Ninja class. Note that I said “trying”. A character’s Class is determined by what they do in battle, and sometimes by what equipment they use. There are 44 classes in the game, and they’re tiered – once a characters stats advance far enough, they’re automatically changed into another class, whether you wanted that or not.

Ninja is an elite class, with a Mystic and Combat balance.
Requirements: STR/INT 59, Mystic arts are higher than item arts, Dual Wield 22 and Katana 19.
Skill: Ambush, No Instakill.

Ambush lets you perform a rear assault on a deadlocked union – without needing two flank attacks first, and No Instakill will make Ninja Rush immune to instant death attacks, which is extremely helpful for a union leader. The STR 59 stat requirement will probably take until mid-Disc 2 to reach, though.

I'll be attempting to guide people through how to get the most out of their unions and deal with some of the more obtuse mechanics.