Ultimately a good game, but not one without significant flaws based around 'randomness'...
Now first of all I must say, this can be a good game, but unfortunately a great many things are pretty random in it. I would strongly advise you to visit some information sites, like the last remnant wiki, to get the most out of the game (while of course not getting any major spoilers), otherwise you will definitely miss out on a lot of things. I consider myself an avid gamer who always completes all quests and tries to get everything accomplished, and I always succeed, but here, in this game, it would be just impossible due to some sheer randomness of some tasks and the time they appear/disappear without warning.
Graphics 10/10
The graphics are easily one the best parts of the game. You can clearly see that a lot of work went into crafting individual towns. While the first one or two look similar, all the other towns have a unique graphic and feel to them. You will especially enjoy the remnants - kind of like big magical buildings - in each town. Other outdoor areas areas look equally well.
Too bad the same can't be said about the dungeons, the caves, the castles. They all look boring, empty inside, usually you can't find anything of interest in them, besides monsters and few chest of course. I wonder why the producers didn't expand them, didn't put some items inside them to make them believable, like broken chairs in desolated castles, or fungus in caves, etc. This was all possible with the nice graphics the engine can render, still I consider dungeons a great part of gameplay and have therefore lowered the gameplay part for it.
Sounds 9/10
The music is really impressive. Some monumental soundtracks, especially in some boss battles, create really tense atmosphere. Even the menu music is really nice.
Too bad (again) that the same can't be said about voice acting. Most of the characters, especially the lead character, sound like young brats (perhaps because he is a young brat, but this is the culture shock I mentioned, together with the fact that usually 12 year old girls are THE most powerful beings in this game.....). Still not all voice acting is bad, the one which stands out most and which you will likely enjoy the most is Emma, a mature lady who acts as one of generals the main character will be travelling with. She has some nice lines and makes them sound believably, too bad that....well that's all, otherwise this would be a spoiler :).
Story 7/10
The story is nice, but perhaps not from the main characters (your) point of view. What I mean is, the producer originally intended that the main antagonist of the game, called the Conqueror, will be the main lead character. But somehow he ended up as antagonist and instead of an interesting lead character with great backstory and interesting goals, you get an average nobody who makes the story sound like a holywood black-white cliché "let's save my sister from the bad guys".
Gameplay 5/10
The main reason why I think gameplay isn't good at all is combat. This game has an absolutely unique turn-based combat system. Instead of controlling individual characters, you give turn-based orders to entire unions consisting of 1-5 characters. Now this sounds interesting at first, it looks like it will make combat be less of a random button mashing and more a planning and intellectual thing. Unfortunately this is not the case. Mostly because you can choose from about 3-5 commands for a single union which get generated at random, well, not actually absolute random, more like controlled random, but still random. The combat tries to be something more than just a random brawl, but ultimately fails to accomplish its goals during the most important fights. From the beginning while you control only a few characters the combat will be boring, then towards the middle and later on, the combat is at its best, especially battles in the second half are more controlled and less random and really bring out the fruit of your character skill development. Unfortunately towards the very end, the battles get random again, mainly during boss fights. Sometimes the bosses just spam a spell which kills all of your unions in a single hit despite them being at high health, other times they will hit you with single-target manageable attacks. Sometimes you get great combat options which use a lot of character skills, other times despite having high AP (action points which are used to cast spells or do combat arts) these options just won't come up, or rather, the option to use skills comes up, but only one or two characters in the union will use them, while the others waste away precious turns doing standard attacks. You will definitely be replaying a lot of tough fights and you will notice sometimes you won't be able to win at all, while other times you will win the same fight easily despite not changing tactics. I spent like 8 hours fighting the end-boss despite having completed all the side quests and having leveled my skills and spending time getting good weapons for my characters. While other people who played the game might have gotten him in 15 minutes during their first attempt. Just, random...
The second problem is, that you can't possibly know how some things affect the gameplay or the quests. In the gameplay there is absolutely no explanation for many things, for example how classes work like what does Mysticknight class do, etc. If you don't want to feel random you will just have to look these informations up on the internet. Next stop quests. For example after you end the first of two DVD's roughly 3/4 of the sidequests from the first disc become unavailable, but the game won't warn you this will happen! Also it won't warn you that if haven't completed certain quests on the first disc that other quests in the second disc which give you a lot of backstory won't even be available! Add to that the fact that certain quests which are really great and challenging are sometimes available only for a very limited time (usually only between one or two forwards of the main story) and you have a pretty random world in which you have almost no chance to accomplish every quest or task on your first playthrough (actually there aren't that many of them still you are bound to miss some since they dissapear after some time), even though you might be an avid gamer who will spent a 100 hours with it.
The third reason for the low rating is as I said earlier, the dungeons, which are plainly put, boring. For example tthe mechanic in spamming rare monsters is : enter dungeon, if you will not encounted some leave it and reenter again. Sounds easy? Well consider that sometimes I had to enter a single dungeon 100 (or more) times to spam 1 goddamn monster which I needed to slay for a guild task...
Replayability 8/10
Well, I think the producers made this game so random, so you-cannot-complete-it-whole-the-first-time-unless-you-look-up-external-information because they wanted people to replay it, to not find everything the first time around. I used the internet so this little trick did not work on me, for those of you who like replaying, well, this game gives a good opportunity to do so.
All in all, I really loved the world and how huge it was and the story wasn't a complete fail either, but the sheer randomness of some quests, some requirements and ultimately a bad combat system, which instead of giving you more control over the combat flow made it just more random, ruined some parts of the game for me. Still a great RPG which rpg fans should give a try and not give up after the first 5 or 10 boring hours :).