It does hog the system a bit but I have no problems with my current rig...

i7 930
8gig DDR3 1600mhz ram
HD5770 1gig.

For me TLR was a game that you have to play from start to finish, I have it on PC and xbox but I tend to jump between games, as such i returned to TLR and didnt have a clue what i was doing :-P

It is a very good game though
ran fine on my dual core @3.02
4gig ram and 4870 1 gb

till the gpu started getting ill

It runs on the unreal engine so you can tweak it somewhat on the pc. Once you figure out that you can change tooltips under the CONTROLLER settings, to show keyboard buttons its less of a headache.

Gameplay wise, i've never gotten far before growing bored and uninstalling it.

The combat system is interesting enough, I guess. I just loathed that you'd wander near lifeless "maps", trigger an encounter and then have to wait 10 seconds for the actual fight environment to load. F-ing tedious.

Being a jrpg i was guaranteed thousands of battles, and waiting before every single f-ing one of them I always end up saying f- this and playing something else.

I have not played it, however, no one I know who did and likes JRPGs did not love it.

Metacritic is almost a bad place for reviews of these types of games because the whacked out Japanese style doesn't always sit well with people who dig western style games. Besides an average reviewer can't even get through much of these games, they usually have about 4 days to play them and they'd have to go without sleep to get all the way through, let alone being able to write an article at the end.

for some reason i can't get it to work anymore. it crashes when i try to launch it on windows 7. it worked with xp. anyone knows? running it with a nvidia card (drivers up to date)
,firewall isn't blocking anything.

Might be stupid but... Update drivers?

actually yes, cause i said they are up to date.

This game uses Unreal Engine so it's probably missing some Visual C++ redistributables. Try checking the game folder to see if there are any installation programs in there.

I liked the game's combat. It's a hybrid between squad-based strategy and traditional stand-in-place JRPG combat, leaning more toward stand-in-place. Can add criticals and block attacks with a difficult button reflex scheme, but I found this frustrating and switched to random activation.

I didn't get far in the story. It seemed very by the numbers modern Square style. The character designs were a lot more interesting than the characters.

Didn't like the emphasis on running around herding monsters before entering combat. Camera makes it very difficult to do without getting caught early, yet game strongly encourages doing it. Spent more time monster herding than anything else. This isn't mandatory unless you want the biggest possible battles and bonuses.

Game also encourages a lot of repeat visits to identical dungeons for harvesting ingredients and so on between story missions. Wears thin quickly.

I also meant game patches and windows updates....

Why did you get that idea ?,The Final Fantasy games have high score on Metacritics, same goes for T-JRPG like Disgaea or Ogre, heck even the SMT games have high score on Metacritic and you hardly get more "whacked out Japanese style" than those.

Hm... I remember having a similar problem with Monday Night Combat. It turned out one of the configuration files got corrupted, so any time it tried to autopatch itself before launching, it crashed when it got to a certain file.

So it -might- be a configuration issue. Especially since you mentioned it "worked with XP" on an earlier reply.

There should be a crash or startup log being saved somewhere, possibly in the game's folder. Would you please look for it?

hmm i agree with you that there might be a configuration issue, even if it is in windows itself. though there exist no patch for the last remnant also i "borrowed" the steam version and its giving me the exact same issue.

this is what FaceFxStudioLog gave me. (it is a bit longer, but i cut it to where it goes wrong)
seems an audio thing.

// Name: Unreal Engine 3 Render Widget
// Version: 1.710000
// Supports Offscreen Render Targets: FALSE
// Supports Multiple Cameras: FALSE
// Supports Fixed Aspect Ratio Cameras: FALSE
// Supports Bone Locked Cameras: FALSE
// FaceFX Studio initialized properly.
// Using OpenAL.
// OpenAL Device: Generic Hardware - Spec. Version 1.1
// FxAudioPlayerOpenAL::Initialize -> alGenSources failed!
// Set actor to CC0040_FX_00
// Shutting down FxCG...
// FxCG shutdown successfully.

[edit]
tried facefx studio, which include openal and it wanted to fix the windows 2008 redistributable but didn't work either.

Out of your examples I think Ogre is the only one without a very longstanding tradition. Saying FF is popular is kind of "duh". Take something like Record of Argarest War, I can't even find that on Metacritic (may be there, search isn't coming back though), but if I could it'd be around a 60-70 score.