I'm about halfway through, maybe 40 hours in or so. Scarlet Seeker's criticism of the localization is on point. The faux-flowery bullshit and the modern anachronisms peppered throughout the script are really aggravating.
Combat is an exact match of Ogre Battle - March of the Black Queen. If you liked that (I loved it), you'll like this. All the more so for its rarity (the only other game I know that uses a deterministic party-based autobattle system is Symphony of War). The graphics for combat are excellent, Vanillaware nailed it. I have two main gripes - it's too easy to just smash your way through most fights, and the preview system is 100% accurate, meaning that unless you're caught by surprise (which can only happen if you're not paying attention), you'll always know exactly what the outcome of each battle will be. Thankfully there's an arena system that lets you go through a series of offline fights, where the outcome of each fight is hidden until you engage it. This is much more in keeping with the spirit of Ogre Battle, and I appreciated getting raped repeatedly trying to figure out how to win against various arena teams. There's also an online arena, where you can set up a team that will autobattle other players' teams. I haven't tried it yet because I know I wouldn't get anywhere until I've got most characters and maxed them out, but it seems cool (see
@Boontaker's post above).
The strategic layer is fine. You wander around a big world, fighting battles to liberate cities and paint the map. Cities give you fetch quests for various materials that can be harvested throughout the worldmap at nodes. Once you've done 1-3 fetch quests for a city, you get to station a guard there. The guard collects taxes and gathers from nearby resource nodes (assuming they're refreshed) after every battle you fight. Once you've taken over your first full nation and stationed guards at every city, you'll be rolling in money and extra resources in no time. There are also little map traversal quests, and treasure hunts. Unfortunately both are painfully easy and leave nothing to the imagination (finding a treasure map gives you a screenshot of the treasure's location, for instance). There's a little mining minigame that can be played in each nation for treasure maps, it's decent fun and doesn't outstay its welcome.
You can also customize your army setup, creating your squads, expanding your total number of fielded squads (up to 10) and the max size of each squad (up to 6 people, locked behind your Renown rating). You'll spend most of the game with a full 10 squad slots with a max size of 4 each. It's serviceable and allows for decent customization. Once you get to 5-6 man squads you can create some stupidly OP setups. Soldiers of varying types, at varying starting levels, can be hired at forts scattered around the world. You also pick up an enormous cast of characters automatically. Most of them are a simple carbon copy of whatever class they are (Fighter, Knight etc), with a unique graphic. The effect is that you'll very rarely feel any need to hire soldiers from forts (I did end up hiring several Wizards and Witches, because you only get one of those each, at least so far). I am very happy to report that I was wrong in thinking there'd be no change in character graphics on promotion. Both standard classes and story characters get new graphics on promotion. My main gripe here is that squad development and customization feels much more restrictive and flat than Ogre Battle. In that game all squads have six human-sized slots off the bat, no need to "buy" your way up from 2 slots to 6. But some monsters would take up more than one slot - Dragons and Octopi, for instance, took up 2 slots each. It made for some interesting considerations in party composition. Not so here. Every fighter takes exactly one slot in your party. Ogre Battle also had several opportunities to gain "hidden" classes as well - Liches, Princesses, Tiamats, different development paths for the base Mage class, Werewolves, Vampires... it was a lot of fun discovering new classes in that game. You won't see that here (or at least, I haven't yet. Maybe Boontaker could comment). It's still fun putting together your pieces, it just doesn't have the depth of discovery of its predecessor.
Character development is a pretty good copy of Ogre Battle. There are a ton of classes, each with their own abilities and uses in battle. Each class can promote to an advanced version that gives access to more skills, and improves stat growth. Each character also has several slots available for equipment, with a huge variety of items available, each with stats and some giving access to useable skills. It's very fiddly and encourages munchkinism, which I wholeheartedly endorse.
The story itself (leaving aside the localization issues) is pretty forgettable but not offensive, which is a big plus in my book. You're the son of a queen slain by an evil general who's resurrecting an ancient empire. Go kill shit and liberate the people. The end.
Finally I want to empasize that this game is, at least so far, very easy. I'm playing on Tactician mode (the equivalent of Hard, out of a possible Nightmare), and I haven't faced any significant challenge so far accept in arena matches. Partially it's because it's very easy to bloat yourself with levels and stat boosts - my main character is basically a demigod at this point, for instance - but partially it's because of the aforementioned battle preview system. Moving your squad to fight an enemy party tells you exactly how many hp (out of the sum of each squads' members) will be lost. You'll always know far in advance whether you can win or lose a fight, and can immediately change squad configuration to ensure a win. Compare to the original Ogre Battle, where sometimes you could lose an entire map if you weren't paying careful attention to enemy squad composition. Combine that with the ability to get ridiculously powerful, inadvertently even (as in my case), and it's a cakewalk for the most part. I plan to up the difficulty to the Nightmare equivalent (I can't remember what it's called), but I don't hold out much hope. We'll see, I guess.
Overall I'm still having a great time, I'll definitely finish the game and will at least consider replaying immediately.
