Valonad

Finally finished the game on 24 hours. Sheesh the final 2 fights are hard. I ended up having to use cheat engine to beat the final boss just because it's ridiculous how much time it would take to beat her properly, in addition to the fact that to get to her in the first place you need to win another fight that isn't easy by itself and you could easily lose to it even with your absolute best units. Shout outs to my man Junpei who's a randomly generated character at the start of the game who happened to have good ranged stats and a really good healing skill. Spoilers for what the last 2 bosses are below, but this was my experience with them. Overall I think the biggest fault with this game is the balance of characters and the vagueness of information given to you. So many characters have overly balanced, expensive skills or ones that are straight up useless. Which makes playing them feel bad. Something is wrong when Wriggle dweebbug has one of the best skills in the game. There is also no way of knowing what enemy skills or stats do other than intuiting the numbers they take or deal. The buff and debuff system does not give you a single amount of info about what buff or debuff is applied to the characters in battle other than an arrow on their portrait. I think the counter system is really good as a resource managing system during battle, but some skills just have way too high of a cost or are too inconsistent (or both) to be useful. Eiki's is the worst example of this. Another annoying thing is that named characters that you don't automatically get imprisoned you just have to get lucky to encounter them in some other army and have to get lucky to get them. A lot of the time they just withdraw from that army and then you have to wait for them to join another one if you want a chance at them again. That said i did get a lot of them naturally by playing, it's just that if you want a specific character that the story doesnt give you, then get ready for a LOT of savescumming. (I wasted like an hour trying to get komachi but i dont regret it). The stat distribution of characters is handled mostly well, with only a few misses. like Sakuya having some of the most middling stats in the game, compared to other characters in the same level-area as her, and a pretty niche skill that doesn't save it, though atleast she has high research. Despite all these flaws i think this game is still really really good. Definitely one of my favourite indie games of all time unironically. The gameplay loop is fun enough and the game has a balanced difficulty throughout the game, though with difficulty spikes and holes throughout. The fact that characters you get from the start of the game can still be useful at the end is really good. Characters only really fall off in the final final arc of the game, where you have to really fire your weakest performing characters for good ones to have a chance, but still fun. As i also said in earlier comments the quality of writing in this game is amazing and really develops the characters well imo. Oh and the soundtrack remixes are nice.

Close to the end now. After Alice the game gets kinda easy due to how many powerful units the game gives you, except for the absolute powerhouse that is The writing throughout is still really really good. The biggest shame is honestly the 25 members cap. You can't fit all the named characters in there so you'll have to make a few sacrifices, which is a shame when some characters can have surprise unique dialogue when brought to certain battles, and so many characters have really good stats or skills that it's really hard to pick which ones to keep. Maybe I'm just weird about feeling bad about firing videogame characters from my army, even when they do have bad skills and clearly don't have further story content after recruiting them. (looking at you letty, who this game made into one of my favourite characters ever) Wish there was a way to just put characters on reserve or bring them back to prison for this purpose alone.

This game has no business being this good. I just beat Alice but i love the writing so far. The gameplay is fun but it is pretty difficult. Savescumming is basically required if you don't want to screw yourself over. My only complaint is that the artstyles for the different characters are all over the place. It is really jarring to see Reimu and Marissa drawn in different styles when they are together for so many story scenes. But I did get used to this oddity after a while. The story is pretty good. I love the characterization of the different characters and their interactions with each other.