Happy New Year to everyone! I spent this day of the year to play The Last Remnant some more, as you can already see.

Day 2 on the pretty-boy-isle, and it's come to my attention that I really should try and explain how this battle system functions as I think I'm starting to get the general gist of it.

Regardless of how it wants to market itself, this game is not really a strategy RPG. It is simply a turn-based system made up of lots of different teams or "unions". I suppose you could call it strategy as to how you assemble these unions but it is no different to the strategies you tend to use throughout JRPG history - tanks in the front, magic users in the back etc. There are lots of confusing words that pop up such as "Deadlock" and "Raidlock" and "Buggeritwe'rescrewed", but the main thing you need to really focus your attention on is the "morale" metre on the top of the screen. All you need to know about this handy little fellow is that blue means good, red means bad. Very very bad.

SO I left off last time trapsing through an odd little town on my lonesome attempting to do the Mr.Diggs (don't ask) sidequest and not really getting very far. So I bit the bullet and consulted the manual to find I could actually hire bodyguards to do my bidding. Handy that. Sidequest complete it's back to Anthem to help out David once more. One thing leads to another and we eventually find Irina - Rush's sister - at the hands of the flying Remnant (stop me if I'm going too fast). What happens next is probably one of the most thrilling battles I've ever had the pleasure of playing through as hoards of things come flying at you plus their reinforcements. It's up to you to decide who to flank, who to attack magically, who to help out (or not) - I SUPPOSE that could be defined as strategy, but it's more a case of charging into baddies and seeing what happens.

What this game is doing great so far is the sheer scale of epicness to the battles. The pace is fast and fluid, the trigger events hang a great sense of achivement and actually affect the flow of battle and the general movement of the characters seems realistic, expecially the dodging. It manages to find that balance between fantasy over-the-top and naturalistic realism. David's accent is still debatable though. He's gone through RP, cockney, Australian, South Aftrican and just a touch of American so far. Plenty of countries left to get through then.

Random fields of baddies later and I'm in Elysion - the city of many pronunciations. This pretty much takes the biscuit where graphics are concerned - it's lovely. We're hanging around here waiting for an assembly to start, presumably to do with this rogue Remnant flying about, but apparentely there's a bit of time before it starts so what better to do than a few sidequests? Freedom of union control has started now too, which is great as it means I get to be completely confused again, but it's all a matter of practice really. I'm currently using the "Arrow of Anthlum" formation, which means nothing to most people, but it's proving very useful.

And I know this is a bit obvious coming from me, but the sexual tension between the two lead boys is absolutely fantastic. Still not entirely sure if it's intentional but for minds like mine but it's a brilliant touch. Yeah, yeah, "just good friends" I know...sheesh...

The strange thing is that there seems to be nothing BUT sidequests to do at the moment. And there appears to be a shortage of Iron Ore. I bought some, but apparentely that's not good enough for my greedy party who insist I need to dig it up raw. I've only had to consult a walkthrough once so far and only because of my needing to follow somebody and I wasn't really paying much attention to the direction they were heading in.

All in all, I'm absolutely appauled at the reviews this game has got. Unless it radically changes to impossible difficulty or the lag gets a bit worse I can't fault it's design and ingenuity. Music could be a bit better and the story is a bit predictable so far, but the characters are solid and likeable, the battles are great and numerous providing a bit of a challenge, you can save ANYWHERE and it's damned funny! I'm hooked, I tell you!