Those who know me already know what I'm going to post here.
The Last Remnant.
(PC)
I didn't have high hopes for this game, characters looked weird, battle system looked weird, some composer I never heard of, spiritual successor to the SaGA series that I'm still not familiar with...
But it completely blew me away, and not only is it my favorite RPG of the last generation, but TLR is my favorite game of the generation regardless of genre, and might be my favorite Square (soft/enix) game, period. Not trying to exaggerate here. First I'll start out with what I didn't like about the game to ground my last statement a bit: most of the main characters are quite weak, unrelatable, and did not gain my sympathy. The narrative itself is passable and uninsulting, with a generic villain character doing generic villain things. There are a few stand out characters though, namely in David Nassau, who is basically the deuteragonist on the game, and Emma Honeywell.
Where the game shined for me was battle and progression systems. There's nothing else out there quite like it. While the game doesn't do a good job explaining several of the mechanics of the game, especially skill and stat progression, if you can get the hang of that - you have a lot of control over how you build you unions and how to proceed in battle. Essentially, without getting into the details, the player can form multiple parties (up to five) of unique characters and use the parties in larger scale battles where both inter and intra-party formations are important to balance. Ultimately you can have 18 characters in your army, but there are more than 30+ you can use. The game lends itself very well to replays, first: there are many more characters than you can effectively use in a single playthrough, and second: there are a variety of skills to tinker with in your builds. The characters will request accessories, weapons and items, as well as ask what type of abilities they should focus on. So not only are there many many cool characters to use, they can be set up pretty differently depending how you respond to their requests. The main character can be built however you want him to, dual wielding, magic, utility, whatever. I have done a playthrough focusing on melee skills, one focusing on magic skills, a balanced playthrough, and most recently I learned how effective morale and trap type skills can be (especially against the dragons!) I fell in love with the battle system, the progression (skills and weapons), the sidequests, the exploration, the amount of customization and amount of control you have in your battle strategy, the variety of locales: some quite wide open, some maze like, and the music variety. Oh the music! Sekito has become a favorite of mine from this soundtrack alone, from upbeat or tense battle tracks to catchy and unique town themes to beautiful 'dungeon' themes, the soundtrack is simply great all around.
What I enjoyed most about the game other than the sheer amount of customization you have in forming your party and strategy are the sheer number of optional quests and areas you can undertake. The main game can probably be beaten in 30/40 hours or so. If you go out and complete the quest log and explore all the areas, completing guild tasks and taking on rare monsters and optional bosses, you'll easily end up over 100. (I'm not arguing that a longer game is necessarily good, just that there is a lot of freedom given to the player in this regard). Other than that , the difficulty of the game is definitely something I also appreciated a lot. There are many challenging battles, boss fights and large scale war-like encounters. I love boss fights, and in my mind, no game does them better than TLR. The sense of satisfaction achieved when you finally see that "Terminated" show up the screen is unmatched.