They just released the sequel, (sadly not up to its predecessor from what I gathered), and it's Halloween, so what better time to talk about this special vampire game?

It was the last game by Troika and they were creating a mix of RPG and Acton and an early version of open world with a lot of incredible side content. And it is precisely this optional content that fleshed out the world so much and made it feel more real. The action part was not exactly stellar, although it was kind of funny as a Nosferatu in the late game to simply be invisible for ever and just stealth takedown all the enemies. Boss fights did not go so easily in contrast... I would even say the main story is nothing to write home about, although with a fun twist. The side content is what I enjoyed immensely however. Because it didn't feel like the game was telling me: oh, go down that alley, it looks like there could be something with a big arrow. Instead I was simply put into the world and was free to explore it. And if I stumbled on something, that made the enjoyment that much higher, because I felt that exploration was rewarded.

It's great strength is also that it takes role playing serious and let's you commit to a certain character. Depending what vampire clan you belong to, your game experience can be very different. I chose the butt ugly Nosferatu, which meant I couldn't even be seen on the street by humans without them calling me a monster and attacking me. So i was forced to move in the sewer or go invisible. That made certain interactions much harder. But other Nosferatu NPCs were cool with me but aren't so friendly to normal pretty face vampires in contrast to how they treated me.

This game is set in the Vampire: the Masquerade setting of World of Darkness, which is normally a tabletop RPG. You do not need to know anything to enjoy the game. It contains a lot of explanation for new players to understand the world. For me it was also the entry point without any other knowledge before.

If you want to try it out: use the fan patch, it fixes bugs and adds some cut content.

So to those who played it: tell us some of your stories and what you liked about this game, to wake the interest of new players.

Just to make one thing clear from the start: this game is many things, but it is certainly not a Metroidvania in the tradition of the Castlevania series. The only nod in that direction is that in most levels there are some small hidden areas with collectables that you can only reach with later abilities. But that means you need to replay an otherwise fully linear level just to reach that small thing in the middle. That is a pretty bad design choice.

But with this caveat out of the way, so that you don't have false expectations, now to the good stuff and why I still recommend it:

It is a good game, if you look at it separated from its series. The art style and especially the music are of really high quality! The gameplay itself is entertaining and was for me a good mix of not too hard and not to easy.

Gameplay wise it is an action hack&slash in the style of God of War. That means it is mostly linear levels with boss fights at their end. The puzzles are just to break the stretches between fights but don't annoy. I enjoyed the combat and also most of the boss battles. The best fight in my mind isn't even the final boss, but rather the one directly before it. Because that fight feels like a knights duel with a very competent opponent similar to your own character where it's really about being able to utilise your combat abilities most effectively instead of a puzzle boss like the final boss is.

The problem is with how those levels are connected though. The story is sometimes a bit too forced and also disjointed for my liking. It strings together the levels and explains why you are doing certain things, but it still didn't flow nicely in my eyes. The DLC is even more forced and fast, where certain things happen at a breakneck speed. The development team had problems if I remember correctly, so the DLC had to come out fast. It ended on something that just screams': we didn't have money for the proper story, so here is the absolute quickest skeleton version of it. Sadly the result of that is the DLC just doesn't have a good story.

I still like it however due to the atmosphere of the game, which is simply wonderful. The loading screen to each mission has only spoken text, but the voice actor for the narration is from none other than Patrick Stewart. I didn't recognise his voice at first, but was simply wondering who has such a great narrating voice. After looking up who the narrator was, I wasn't surprised anymore that it was such high quality.

The music also helps carry the atmosphere and is something I highly recommend you check out, even if you don't play the game itself. The Orchestra is really used to its full potential here, producing not only bombastic songs, but also quite and solemn ones. After playing through the game I bought its soundtrack and still listen to it. It fits well to the theme of the level and what is happening in the game at the moment. In my opinion they utilised music very well in this game to enhance the atmosphere of the moment.

Last but not least, while art design is subjective, I really like Gothic spires and architecture in general, so the castle levels were my personal highlights. And especially the later levels are a feast for the eyes.

OneShot is similar to Undertale, in that the story is the most important part, while gameplay is just to give the player something to do, here even more so then in Undertale. In OneShot the player is however acknowledged from the first moment as somebody different from the protagonist. That would be Niko (who is most definitely not a cat!) but is referred by most in the game world as the messiah, because they carry the sun of this world and is supposed to bring light back to their world.

The sun is missing for a long while and thus most of the world is in ruin. Niko themselves comes from a different world though and wants to go home to their mom. And so you help navigate Niko through this world by solving puzzles and encouraging them to carry on. These puzzles sometimes cleverly make use of the fact that it is a game on a PC and has interesting metapuzzles. Which is one reason why I highly encourage to play it on a PC and not on a console. The fourth wall breaking stuff don't work as intuitive if they have to be faked.

In between you will meet a lot of NPCs on your way who need your help or will help you. All of them nice people, I don't think there is a single bad person in this game. Still it has a very melancholic feeling to it due to the end of the world looming on the horizon. And yet you will find a lot of beautiful places in this world, nicely portrayed in pixel art style. With the Solstice update released, the story is now fully completed. If you enjoyed Undertale for it's story and don't mind even less game play, then give this game a try, it's roughly 6h long.

Ever wondered who premiered the "hiding in shadows", "taking down enemies silently from behind"and " making noses to distract enemies", that is so prevalent nowadays in many F/TPS?

While there were a lot of other games that paved the way, the genre defining 3D game series was Thief, developed be Looking Glass Studios. The first two games should be considered together, since the second was developed right after the first one and directly continues the story and it has the pretty much the same gameplay.

If you rather want a video introduction to Thief, Errant Signal has a good one

I will try to convince you that it is worthwhile to play one of the early 3D games which pioneered many mechanics that are still used today.

Is it for everyone? No! You need patience and a pretty good orientation sense in order to not get lost and frustrated. But you will be rewarded with 2 good games with clever level design! I played them last year after just trying them a bit when they originally came out. And I had a lot of fun! The gameplay is still entertaining and the worst mechanic is the melee fight. But you are a thief and shouldn't even get in a fight, so from a certain perspective, that fits to the character you are playing.

So what is great:

As said, the level design is exquisite: very varied and fitting to the themes of the mission. A mission inside a bank plays very different from breaking into a prison or a cultists hideout. And they already use a lot of environmental storytelling in these games. Especially the second game has very atmospheric missions, you can see where Dishonoreds roots come from.

And it is also partially an immersive sim: you have a set of tools and are presented hurdles to your objective. How you solve them is up to you.

Tricking the guards and slipping into a building without anybody seeing you is as fun in this game as it is in any model stealth game. And the AI is also already well developed: you can trick them, if they see you you can hide from them in the shadows and honestly, today's guard AI feels very same to this ones.

They also took an interesting and very fitting approach to difficulty: the levels and enemies are pretty much the same, but your objectives change. The higher the difficulty, the more loot you need to steal to proof you really are a master thief, and also you are not allowed to kill em all or anybody, since that is also unfitting to a master thief.

Story wise you are Garrett, master thief and former prodigy of the enigmatic Keepers, who try to uphold the balance in The City. No other name is every given and it seems to be the centre of human activity. The balance is in danger because two factions, the Hammerites and the Pagans are always at each others throats. The Hammerites are a catholic church combined with an industry factory. They are the power of progress and technology and bring order to the chaos. Which is the element of the Pagans, which they revere. They try to bring humanity back to it's original roots in the ancient forest without any fire or technology to conquer nature. Garrett couldn't care less about that and just want to be able to pay rent at the end of the month. Preferably with other peoples money however.

The weakest part of the first game are the fantastical themed levels, which are interesting in themselves, but not really fitting to the stealth game of the normal human missions. The second game nearly fully commits to being thief, greatly increasing my enjoyment of this game. The fantastical elements become understandable when you learn that the game originally was supposed to be an King Arthur themed game.

Best way to play is Thief gold edition and use the mod manager, which allows you to use high Res texture mods, these make playing the games nowadays a bit easier on the eyes.

Also: there are a ton of fan made maps for Thief 1+2, meaning you get so much more content for free.

Cyberpunk stories are often action filled and you as player are directly in the middle, deciding the fate of mega corporations and technological progress of humanity. But in this game? Here you prepare drinks and hear stories about the world outside the bar doors. What crazy stuff goes on, what happened to some celebrity and when the next riot is supposedly happening. It is a Deus Ex story, but you don't play JC Denton, you play a barkeeper and try to make ends meet, so you don't get evicted from your apartment at months end.

And it is glorious. I really started to like games, or stories in general, that don't put you in the shoes of the 1 in a million special protagonist, but in the shoes of one of the other 999.999 randoms, who have to live in that world and can't just change the world by fighting the bad guy.

Your bar has some random people coming, but also regulars you will talk to more often and build a connection with. And each one will have a story to tell you. Now the game play is not exactly breath taking, either you do the drink right or not. Mess up too often and you don't have enough money for the rent. Sometimes you can influence the customer a bit by deciding how much alcohol you put in their drink, but that's it. So mostly you can consider it as a Visual Novel (if you want a cyberpunk bartender story driven game with a bit more gameplay focus, yes there is another one with that description, check out Red Strings Club). But the stories are just so interesting and fun. And following the circumstances of certain regulars was captivating for me.
Especially as you have a lot of variety in your customers: poor people down on their luck, a private law enforcement officer that didn't just join because they wanted to stomp on citizens. Or a cybernetically enhanced dog with a Hawaii shirt. Yeah it's not taking itself always seriously =) And it's mostly about human stories, how they get affected by their society etc. Not about saving the world, but about how they can find a good food store now that the old one was busted for illegally selling cyberware below the counter. So a lot of world building is done through your customers stories.

Biggest drawback of this game? If you enjoy it, you also have to wait for it's sequel N1RV Ann-A like the rest of us. Which still doesn't have any release date. But as Silksong proved: good games take time!

Yes it hurt looking up how old this game is already.

But to those who don't know it: why is this game so great?

1. Because it's lineage (from Total Annihilation to Beyond All Reason) is the only militaristic sci-fi strategy game I know, where it's really a resource flow: you generate them, store them and then use them. You have an upper limit of depot space, so you can't just hoard resources like in other games and then just instant build another army but rather need to smartly build your economy so that the produced resources are then used up and give you an increase in units, technology or economy. You need to constantly produce and not only periodically manufacture waves.

2. You don't command little squads of maximum 100 units, you command armies with 1000 (unmodded unit limit) units. Those armies are land, air or sea based and each faction also has experimental weapons: big game ending weapons that will bring your economy to its limits by constructing them but also destroy half an enemy army by themselves. ... Except if the game goes on too long and you are printing them en masse and it feels more like a Warhammer 40k battle than anything else. But that is great in it's own right.

Strategic launch detected

That voice line will put fear into you if you haven't build counter measures against them.

3. In addition to point 2, you really feel like a SciFi army commander, the atmosphere is great. For example: if you zoom out completely, you see that the game map is just an holographic reproduction inside of the commander robot, your most important and starting unit on the field. There is a rudimentary physics engine, which can lead to your air units intercepting the enemy nuclear missile by being just above their launch pad at the right moment by chance, leading to hilarious interactions. Or you can overlap your shield generators, so that they can recharge while the next ones hold the line. Or put your artillery behind a hill, so direct fire doesn't hit them. So there are a lot of physics interactions you can use to your advantage.

4. They managed to create 4 factions that while fundamentally similar, have different play styles and also importantly: all have different design to them. The blocky UEF, the hexagonal, insectoid Cybran, the round style of the Aeon, which was inspired by the completely alien and levitating style of the Seraphim. All are wonderfully unique and not just a recolour of the same basic unit.

5. One reason why it's still the greatest game to me is that sadly there are no real successors yet. SC 2 was a heresy against everything that made SC great and why? Because they wanted to port this mouse&keyboard centred game to consoles, which is a bullshit idea in the first place and it needed to be dumbed down in multiple ways to enable that.
   Then there was Planetary Annihilation which looked promising in the beginning but than revealed itself as early access cash grab by the developers which made them switch their name from Uber entertainment to Planetary Annihilation Inc. so that new players wouldn't see the bad news about them. Fuck them!
   Most promising at the moment looks to be Beyond All Reason, which is a open source and free reimagining of the true spirit of SC and TA but still in alpha development. I wish the developers all the best in their endeavours, it looks promising.

At sale events you can often get SC:FA for under 5 € and I highly recommend you try it out at least once, because it is fun to create your army of titan sized robots and let them fight against other similar dimensioned enemies, especially with others in multiplayer against other humans or against the AI. For that you should use Forged Alliance Forever, which is a mod that adds another faction but crucially enables servers for online multiplayer after the original ones were shut down.

Always wanted to laugh maniacally while sending out minions to ravage the country side? Then play Overlord and harass the poor peasants as you wish!

You play as THE overlord, the current evil guy©®™ incarnation in this world and the world is overrun by goodness, blergh. Time to get busy and conquer them by force and your minions. In principle it's Pikmin but with uglycute evil gremlins instead of standardcute plant persons. You also have different types for different jobs (can go over water/fire, etc) but they can collect weapons and armour lying around, making it possible to strengthen them on the battlefield even more.

You roleplay as the evil guy by choosing how to decorate your tower, what mistress you take and also how to solve certain problems. While in Overlord 1 the game let's you chose between evil and good but with evil methods, Overlord 2 is more committing to the act. Here you really chose between 2 evils: genocidal madman or tyrannical overlord, which fits more to the theme.

And while that sounds till now like I'm a sociopathic edgelord that should be put in an asylum: the greatest strength of these games is their black humour and parody of classical tolkienesque fantasy stories. The good forces are mostly incompetent and laughable, while the shenanigans of the minions are simply adorable. Foremost your advisor Gnarl, who helps you find your footings in your new spiky boots. And always has a quip ready and his catchphrase:

Evil always finds a way

And the story of Overlord 2 even managed to make me feel a mixture of disbelief and laughter when they revealed who the endboss is. So great work from Rhianna Pratchett! I haven't played any of the other Overlord games, but 1&2 I highly recommend, for the pure chaos and fun of it. It's not like it's hard fights or has any hard puzzles, it's mostly Zelda puzzles: you acquire new skill in a dungeon and then use that skill to solve the obstacles.

Umurangi Generation plays In the near future, and you are a photographer earning money by selling pictures of interesting motives. In order to do that you are put into levels of various size which you explore in order to find the asked for motives. After reaching an earnings threshold you can advance the plot and leave for the next level. You obtain multiple lenses in order to fulfill requests or just take some artistically interesting shots.

When you play the first level it's just you and some friends partying on top of an abandoned under construction skyscraper and the only strange thing are some fighter jets flying above you, but with each level more is revealed about this games world without explicit dialogue. Instead you see various facets of the world at those levels, with you directly documenting how people are reacting to the crisis. Protests, governments reaction to those protests, the underlying problem and so on.

Now to the discussion which spoils the whole thing:

To understand this game, the background of the games developer is relevant: he is Maori and was frustrated by the Australian governments mishandling of the bush fire and Covid19 catastrophes in 2019/20. That frustration is what generated the protests in the game and the government completely ignoring it's citizens plight and declaring more and more autocratic laws to stop unrest instead of helping the people. And especially in view of the ongoing climate catastrophe, he felt that there will be more and more political unrest of the rich against all others with everybody paying the price.

So is this a good game? If you go simply by game mechanics then no, Eastshade does the "take pictures inside the game" better and more well rounded. But that is not the goal the developer intended to portray. If you go the way of RagnarRox and judge it not by its isolated performance, but rather by it's intention, then in my eyes it fulfilled that. This game is less about artistically taking pictures and more about the story it tells by putting you in various situation with the goal of documenting it. If that is something you like, then try it out! It's not long, so if you really don't like it and are not hooked by the third level, then you are still in the 2 hour return time. But the first 2 level are just for setting the scene and should not be seen as the representative of the whole game.

This game is one I sadly never finished, because somehow it doesn't like my PC and crashes a bit too often, losing the save game in the process (so warning there), but what I played fascinated me.

As the post title says, you are leading a fantasy tribe roughly in the bronze age. You generate your tribe through some questions at the start of each campaign. And you have to think like a bronze age chieftain, not like a modern person. To help you with that, you have a council of advisors, one each for different topics, where you can choose who to put on which position. Different characters have different strength, personalities and weaknesses and maybe most important: alignment to a certain god of your pantheon. You better choose wisely which gods you don't represent in your council. Tragedies happens and if a god is not represented, your tribe members are quick to put blame there and on you for failing to respect the gods.

The game is turn based on seasons, where each year has 5 seasons and you need to decide what to assign your workers to. Enemy tribes will not expect a cattle raid outside of fire season, but your harvest will suffer if you take working hands away from caring for the crop in sea season for example. And so you have to get a feeling for the year and work with it instead of against it. Each season there are also small or big things happening in your tribe and you need to make decisions how to proceed. Will you support the wronged man because his wife ran away or is that trickster that brings you cattle really to be trusted? That kind of things. There are even story lines with multiple events depending on how you decide.

The goal of the game is trying to be elected as king of Dragon Pass. In order for that to happen you need to convince the other tribes that you are the best suited: strong against your enemies, generous to your allies and being in harmony with the gods. For that last one there is a very interesting mechanic in this game: heroquests.

These are in principle recreations of stories the bards tell of glorious heroes in the past. By preparing sacrifices and sending one of your tribes members on those quests they try to gain divine knowledge and maybe even bring back some mystical artefacts. But beware, for that veil between our and the gods realms opens both ways during the recreation of the myths and it might happen that a wrong decision during the quest, because you didn't know the full story and went underprepared, might lead to real damage or even death.

So in short: they really nailed that bronze age feeling for me. In addition with the great music, I felt catapulted back 3000 years playing this game. There is a sequel Six Ages and that one has a sequel itself Six Ages 2, but I haven't played them yet. But I have heard good things about them also nailing that feeling of pre-antiquity history of nomad and barbarian tribes.

Lots of people have thrown the term ludonarrative dissonance at certain games, meaning that the story it tries to tell doesn't fit to it's gameplay. Often given example is the Tomb Raider reboot from 2013, which tells the story of a young Lara Croft, scared out of her mind in cutscenes because she is trapped on an island with a bunch of bad guys. Which you as player mow down by the dozen in order to reach the next check point without losing a single thought about them. That destroys the story the developers tried to tell and takes the player out of the immersion.

And it is certainly an important point to critique, since the opposite, ludonarrative harmony, is the one unique technique that no other medium can use to tell stories. Video games as interactive medium have that interactivity that differentiates them from movies or books. But that doesn't only mean the story should fit to the gameplay. Or the usual "you can choose which of two options are going to happen". That is the standard requirement to be called a game. The highest point of harmony in my opinion however is were the mode of interactivity itself tells the story.

A great example of "normal" high harmony of story and gameplay would be Hades from Supergiant Games. In Hades nearly every part of the game mechanic is explained in the in-universe lore, and also included in the story the game tells. You try speed running the game? A certain character will notice and comment. You try to up the difficulty by enabling certain traits that make the game harder? Also noticed by NPCs and commented on. And there is a good explanation why you even do the whole thing in the first place and why you continue after seeing the credits.

But two extraordinary examples of ludonarrative harmony where the way the player interacts with the game itself is used to tell the story are in Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and in Brothers: A Tale of two Sons. So for both endgame spoilers will follow. And by spoiling those moments I will rob you of the possibility of experiencing them yourself, because realising they are happening is the story being told. So I highly recommend at least playing the Brothers game, because it is shorter and the impact on the story telling is better. Also it's just a great game in general (Hellblade is also good, don't misunderstand me).

For Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice the story is about Senua, who has schizophrenia and hears multiple voices in her head and fights through Nordic mythology in order to find the goddess Hel. Hel has Senuas lovers soul and Senua wants to get him back. And so you fight your way through Helheim and in the end you reach He'll herself in her place of power.
And she summons waves of monster for you to fight against, as expected of the final battle against the goddess of Helheim herself. After defeating the waves of normal enemies you start fighting against shadow version of the bosses you fought before. And you defeat them, since you got a lot of training in fighting all of them before. But then the fight isn't over, you don't even get a second of pause to relax or finally fight against the goddess herself, instead new monsters are summoned again and you continue fighting them. And then you think you have made progress, because again rounds against the bosses are coming. And still you fight on. Because this is the endboss. Of course you fight on, that's what this is all about, isn't it? There is the boss summoning minions and here you are slaughtering them in order to proceed. And then another wave of monster gets summoned, then bosses again. And you fight on.
But for what? There seems to be no progress, just fight after fight after fight against the same enemies without getting closer to your goal. And then at one point you feel that this is ridiculous, no matter how hard you fight, you can't progress, so you stop fighting and let Senua get overwhelmed because what else can you do? And that is when the story progresses. Because that emotion of giving up is exactly what the developers wanted to make you feel. That feeling of futility of what you are doing. No other medium could have evoked that emotion in you. No literary description of how despaired Senua was or slow motion shot of the actor falling to her knees would have invoked that moment in you. So in this case it's not so much the interaction but the decision to stop interacting. And then the story goes on and comments about how certain fights are not winnable, or rather that winning them would destroy yourself in the process. That sometimes you need to stop fighting.
Now this game is certainly not the first game that incorporates an unwinnable fight, those are used a lot. But in other games I experienced them more as a way to show that the enemy is too strong for the current player. It's not that you feel futile in fighting on, but rather feeling the overwhelming strength of the opponent, often leading to a fake game over. I haven't experienced it in any other game similar to Hellblade at the end as storytelling device.
The only problem with the approach of having to lose a battle is that we are so accustomed to always winning in games that I read comments where people said they paused the game mid-fight and looked online what to do, because they thought they got softlocked or something. Because the point the game tried to make was not that enemies in Hellblade were too strong to overcome, they were just infinitely respawning and unwinnable through attrition of your and by extension Senuas will.

I myself have experienced the best example however in Brothers: A Tale of two Sons. In this game you play the two titular brothers on a quest to find a cure for their sick father. It is also described as single player co-op game, since you control each brother with one half of your controller: one joystick for the movement of each brother and the shoulder buttons for interacting. So for example if you need to build a bridge somewhere, one brother goes to each end of a plank, you press both brothers interact button and keep it pressed while you navigate the brothers to the correct spot to build the bridge and release the buttons to let the plank fall in the right place.
One common problem is that the smaller brother is scared of water after their mother died in an accident on the sea, shown in the intro.. He refuses to go deeper than kneedeep into any water. So for those moments you need the older brother to carry them both over water while the smaller brother is holding on for dear life. So you swim with the older brothers control button, while the smaller brother just needs to hold on.
Near the end of the game, the older brother dies however and the younger brother has to bury him by himself (great gameplay moment in itself, doing everything yourself certainly makes the whole thing much more personal than if it would have been a cutscene). Afterwards being close to home with the cure he then is confronted with some obstacles he only managed to overcome in the early game because his brother was there: high water. You try and swim through it, but the younger brother is still too scared of the water and refuses to go into it. You try different locations, explore for another way, but there is none. Somehow you have to get through the water.
And then after having tried everything else, you try the buttons of the older brother, which you haven't used in a while, because, you know, him being dead and all. And suddenly the boy starts to swim when you press his older brothers control button. By invoking his dead brother he is able to overcome his fear and push forward, which he couldn't do just by himself. That moment is the best use of a control scheme to tell a story I have ever experienced in a game. It recontextualizes a simple button prompt and elevates it to my personal Olympus of gaming moments.

Honourable mention goes to Indika, but this post is already long enough without needing to explain what this game does. But I definitely recommend it as well).

Those moments are what makes games a special form of art and I hope that more developers are able to create them.

Have you experienced similar great moments where games used the way you interact with them to really make you feel an emotion? Since it is often a spoiler, please first name the game and put the specific moment in spoiler tags (3 double dots, followed by "spoiler", than the visible part of the spoilertext and on the next line the inside part and at the end three double dots again), so people can choose to experience those moments unspoiled.

And no, frustration from hard enemies don't count, that's too common ;)

I noticed that pretty much all games I played in my life have been released after 1990. So now I'm asking those with earlier experience here:
Which games can you recommend from before that time?

But: they should still be fun in their own right and not just interesting to play in an historian sense of trying to understand how genres developed.

Games I played that are older than 1990:

• Tetris (classic for a reason)
• Pacman (interesting but simple)
• Prince of Persia (was too young to understand how to correctly play this game, I should maybe try to play it again)
• The Legend of Zelda (too old school and clunky for my liking)

The Last Remnant was originally released on the Xbox 360 in 2008 and half a year later they released it on PC, but in an upgraded version. I highly recommend playing the PC version, because it has some positive gameplay adjustments and also you can choose between English or Japanese voice acting.

Gameplay

The Last Remnant is a JRPG where you fight with multiple squads of characters, giving the game a bit of a grand strategy atmosphere. In the tutorial it is even shown that you fight with a full army which is represented by those squads. While that is an interesting take on the JRPG formula, it also makes it a bit silly at times, when you run through narrow caves and fight small animals and then remember that this is symbolic for your whole army being there. The developers at Square Enix did get a bit lost now and then and fell back on classical JRPG tropes instead of fully committing to the army theme, but that did not hurt my fun with this game at all. I still enjoyed the vast majority of my 60+ hours or so with this game.

The squad system also played into that feeling of being an army commander in that you didn't give commands to individual characters, but the whole squad and the AI selects the characters own moves, depending on how much mana the group still has and if you ordered: defend, heal or attack with everything you have! In that last order fits one special gimmick of the game: big attacks with special animations from the titular remnants or mage groups working together to do one big spell. And the presentation is great! They often took some rounds to be active, but having your mages do a spell which put the whole battlefield in darkness was great. So a bit similar to the Final Fantasy Summons. I wouldn't say I always liked the "AI chooses the possible commands", as there were certainly moments where I wanted to heal but no squad had a heal command available. But mostly it was fine and again: it fit the theme of you being the commander and it not always working out due to the unpredictability of the battle.

In your squads you can have normal random NPC mercenaries, if you are boring (or play the Xbox version, because there you could only have one special character per squad), or you can fill them with unique characters with their own side quests, ultimate attacks and voice lines. Especially those voice lines were a big plus point for me, because it gave each a distinct personality and with continuing time hearing them was nostalgic instead of annoying.
You can then give each squad a different formation and develop your companions by giving them weapons, which are upgradeable. And this was done in an intelligent way, were you didn't need to do everything by yourself, the characters also asked for certain materials and then crafted themselves the upgrades, if you agreed. One downside was that the formations also have different strength levels, but only the official guide book, sold extra of course, told you, what the requirements for unlocking these levels were. Like "only mages" or "lance carrier as leader and then bows in the back row", so definitely not something you could find out for all of them by yourself. \

Story

The story starts on a bit different note then normally: you are not a helpless little hero. Instead you are together with the head of a smaller nation, trying to navigate the bigger neighbours without upsetting the political landscape so much that others are allying against you. While that sounds unique, it still has roughly 50 % let's say "anime" content and with more play time it gets more to the "kill god" direction and doesn't play it's political side to its full strength. But it is at least a bit different than again starting in Heroes Hometown #26 and fighting against the evil Dark Lord KillThemAll.

And the world had a unique feature: Remnants, magical items of immense power where some can level a complete city by themselves. Logically, the owners of those artefacts are the leaders by virtue of nobody daring to oppose them. So each nation is built around one of these remnants and the bigger ones try to subjugate the smaller remnants/nations in order to be safer against even stronger enemy nations.

Another positive thing was the variety of side quests. Or at least the story side of them. There was so much variety in there, it didn't feel like the classical "kill 10 bears" but sadly gameplay wise it was exactly that. In principal it was always one of three things: go in that region and kill number of certain type of monster, that big monster, or find special resource. That felt so strange, to put that much love and care into the beginning of the quests, but their design themselves lacked a lot.

Music

The music to this game is great! The main menu theme is something I can only call crystalline. Which shouldn't make sense for music, but together with the graphical effects of the menu, crystalline is the only word that comes to my mind. You can listen here. It is an orchestral soundtrack fitting to an epic story told and it highlights the story moments expertly.

Monster Design

I specifically highlight the monster designs because they are so varied and unique. While a few later enemies are recolours of earlier ones, the models are still so different, it is great. Especially the big Remnants really portray the power they confer and feel like an emperors tool to take over the world. They really nailed the feeling of scale in this game.

If you like long JRPGs with a lot of world to explore and some unique game play mechanic, give this one a try.