Nobody
will accuse The Last Remnant of being too ambitious. Square Enix's latest RPG
mixes a dollop of tactical warfare into a familiar console-epic recipe,
tweaking conventions without breaking them. When a game executes the old
standards with Remnant's grace, though, a tweak might be enough.
Remnant's new ideas play out on the
battlefield, where instead of controlling individual fighters, you command
"unions" of up to five units each. You issue stirring orders like "Don't be
afraid to die!" to your troops, and each character takes action accordingly. At
first, this big-picture framework might annoy micromanagers, but there are
plenty of details to obsess over, like which mercenaries to recruit and what
formation best conceals your scrubs' weaknesses.
The
main story—a nuclear-proliferation crisis translated into the realm of
enchanted talismans—does a workmanlike job of moving the action forward. Remnant's narrative gems are
found on a more intimate level, in the interactions between protagonist Rush
Sykes and his companions. These are characters, not caricatures, and in spite
of the occasional patch of tin-eared dialogue, they form an engrossing
emotional connection.