The Last Remnant Previews
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Your battle strategy will actually begin long before you happen across a monster. It begins with the Union Board. This is where you will manage the party in hopes of setting up a winning team, a process that can be equally as important as what you do in the fight itself. The Last Remnant battles work on a system where individual units are grouped into unions. These unions share everything from hit points to attack commands, so it's important that you group characters that will work well together. You can have up to five units in each union which, after you consider multiple unions in battle at once, makes for quite a large battle. Of course, at the beginning of the game you'll be limited as to how many people you can take into battle.
But back to the Union Board. As you recruit new characters, you'll want to get them prepared for the fight. From the board, you can decide who is going in each union and what formation they should take. New formations are learned as you progress through the game and they allow you to do things like place heavy hitters at the front lines to protect your spellcasters in the back. Which formation you go with will directly affect your stats, adding another wrinkle to the pre-planning. You can even take it a step further, and you'll want to, by changing equipment and styles. This will affect which combat arts you can use in battle.
And an excerpt from Eurogamer's article:
There are a few atypical things about The Last Remnant. The character design is less airbrushed than usual - characters have jaw-lines, and facial expressions, and less improbable hair. There are no random battles - instead of running around the world hoping not to trigger a fight, you run up to an enemy and push a button to initiate combat, or skirt around them at will. And the actual fights themselves are completely unlike anything in the genre - they play more like a strategy-game battle, and look more like the fight scenes from a large-scale action game.
This last element, particularly, makes a big difference. Instead of putting up with the battle system for the sake of the story, the role-playing genre's less forgiving followers can bask in genuine spectacle, and there's depth to the battles too. It's not possible to hit a button fifteen times and then watch them play out; like Lost Odyssey's battles, they incorporate sparing Quick-Time Events to add to their action-game feel, and instead of individual characters you command units of three or four members of the main character's army at a time. It really is very different.
