Part of my birthday giveaway.

The Last Remnant is, in my opinion, a very underrated game. Most JRPG fans are used to simple, straight forward gameplay, which is why TLR tends to scare them off with a complex and often hard to understand combat mode. A new player will undoubtedly have trouble understanding why he can't select the heal command when he most needs it, or how exactly the first real boss fight in the game killed all his characters in just a few turns. It doesn't help that the game itself does almost nothing to explain these things to the player, leaving the only choices to either try and figure it out yourself or look for online help (there's a great wiki for this game, fortunately). Once you get past that initial hurdle though, you find a game that is not only fun and challenging to play, but which feels very free and open compared to similar games, with sidequests, exploration, and recruiting optional characters providing a lot more than the (pretty unremarkable) main story offers at first.