A linear turn based strategy game about children that end up using an ancient giant tank to drive an invading army out of their homeland. Breaks in the combat sections allow you to upgrade parts of your tank, cook to temporarily increase stats, explore dungeons, and have the characters talk to become better partners in battle and to access three story scenes between each of the 12 characters. A powerful weapon, the soul cannon, can be used to instantly destroy boss enemies by sacrificing one of the children.
Beautiful art, illustrations, and expressive character animations when walking around the tank and good though limited variety of music.
A fun and interesting battle system that has you constantly swapping characters and teams and positions to make use of the type of weapon they use as well as character abilities and team attacks against a wide variety of enemies. Each character fires a cannon, grenade launcher, or machine guns with different speeds, damage values, critical hit chance, and skills. Enemies can be knocked back down the turn order list if they are hit by certain types of weapons. Some enemies are faster and are harder to hit with the stronger cannons or grenade launchers. Machine guns can break armor off defensive enemies to weaken them with their users skills. You can have three characters actively preparing to attack at a time on your top, middle, and bottom guns, with each of those three supported by another character and swap out characters every three turns (even using this as a way to move them around to get slower characters their turn faster). Each child has their own support skills that might increase damage, heal the tank, recover SP, allow for faster recovery, prevent injuries or fear effects, etc and if the pair has improved their relationship they can charge a powerful link attack over time that you can use right away or save all the way to the chapter boss. Each child also has a hero mode they can activate if the desire they had on a checklist was fulfilled (eating a type of food, performing an activity, talking to someone, upgrading something, etc) putting them in a powerful mode for five turns where they can do things like heal for twice as much, double the power of skills, gain another turn as long as skills are used, normal attacks fire twice, break all of an enemy armor and delay them, etc. Even with so many characters using the same type of weapons and some skills being shared their stats, unique skills, and unique abilities make each one of them useful and different.
While the battle system and art are great, the game is lacking in almost everything else. The story is fairly uninteresting. The three possible scenes between the characters are short and of varied interest but you will be spending so much of your downtime doing other things that raising your relationships to the levels to see a lot of scenes isn't practical on your first playthrough. An issue with the battle system is that every combat gives you a ranking and high ranks increase your XP and character relationships by as much as an additional 1.5 multiplier, meaning it punishes doing poorly and really punishes doing poorly early on as you learn the game. Like a lot of games with temporary ability increases, one of the cooking options gives you more XP and relationship points during the entire section you are in until your next rest point, meaning you should obviously always cook that dish. The game can further punish failure with almost everything you do in the down time having a percentage chance of failure, so it's great when you waste 1/4-1/3 of your time failing 80%-90% upgrade chances where you could have been getting to know the characters more. The dungeon exploration elements it adds to the game are extremely dull, you just pick three kids to walk around an area that might have simple obvious traps or enemies where you pick up items until you find a key to open a chest that will have a larger cache of those items.
Each chapter has about three breaks in it where you do the side activities. You get a break, travel through spaces fighting battles, picking up items and materials, and driving over health an SP recovery crates. You do that again, and then after your next break you get a large health and SP pick up and fight a boss. This is linear and automatically driven with you being able to see a few sections in your path ahead for what is going to happen and you will get route splits of safe, normal, or dangerous routes. Dangerous routes giving you enemies worth more XP (even if you were to rank lower) and better quality items. I chose the dangerous route every time, this was fairly difficult in a few early chapters but then the entire game became very easy (even with my conservative playstyle of saving almost every link attack for the boss and never using any of the healing or special ammo items ever, you know, because I might need them later) and bosses were pitiful. I imagine going the other routes would make everything easy in normal gameplay and the bosses maybe almost slightly threatening.
Like a lot of games with permanent death features, in this game's case through the use of the Soul Cannon, it is a pointless feature that takes away from the game. To begin with, there is just no practical reason to ever use it at all, so other than being a minor narrative feature it serves no purpose. If you did use it you are only going to be losing out on unique characters. By having something like this it would also mean that the game would have to be designed so that anyone could be dead at any point which means that many sections are just filled with generic style of dialogue that can be filled by a character at random instead of a more meaningful story or character moment. Though the times that there is more focus on a particular character I would be interested to see how events play out differently (like if you don't have Sheena when you get Britz) but I'm not going to replay the game in a more boring fashion to see that. Even the paired endings with sibling characters just give you no text if you were to kill one of the siblings, giving you no unique illustration or ending for the surviving character.
Recommended to turn based fans for fun main gameplay, art, and good music, though would be a stronger recommendation if the balance, story, and side activities were improved on.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1463636996610351106
Beautiful art, illustrations, and expressive character animations when walking around the tank and good though limited variety of music.
A fun and interesting battle system that has you constantly swapping characters and teams and positions to make use of the type of weapon they use as well as character abilities and team attacks against a wide variety of enemies. Each character fires a cannon, grenade launcher, or machine guns with different speeds, damage values, critical hit chance, and skills. Enemies can be knocked back down the turn order list if they are hit by certain types of weapons. Some enemies are faster and are harder to hit with the stronger cannons or grenade launchers. Machine guns can break armor off defensive enemies to weaken them with their users skills. You can have three characters actively preparing to attack at a time on your top, middle, and bottom guns, with each of those three supported by another character and swap out characters every three turns (even using this as a way to move them around to get slower characters their turn faster). Each child has their own support skills that might increase damage, heal the tank, recover SP, allow for faster recovery, prevent injuries or fear effects, etc and if the pair has improved their relationship they can charge a powerful link attack over time that you can use right away or save all the way to the chapter boss. Each child also has a hero mode they can activate if the desire they had on a checklist was fulfilled (eating a type of food, performing an activity, talking to someone, upgrading something, etc) putting them in a powerful mode for five turns where they can do things like heal for twice as much, double the power of skills, gain another turn as long as skills are used, normal attacks fire twice, break all of an enemy armor and delay them, etc. Even with so many characters using the same type of weapons and some skills being shared their stats, unique skills, and unique abilities make each one of them useful and different.
While the battle system and art are great, the game is lacking in almost everything else. The story is fairly uninteresting. The three possible scenes between the characters are short and of varied interest but you will be spending so much of your downtime doing other things that raising your relationships to the levels to see a lot of scenes isn't practical on your first playthrough. An issue with the battle system is that every combat gives you a ranking and high ranks increase your XP and character relationships by as much as an additional 1.5 multiplier, meaning it punishes doing poorly and really punishes doing poorly early on as you learn the game. Like a lot of games with temporary ability increases, one of the cooking options gives you more XP and relationship points during the entire section you are in until your next rest point, meaning you should obviously always cook that dish. The game can further punish failure with almost everything you do in the down time having a percentage chance of failure, so it's great when you waste 1/4-1/3 of your time failing 80%-90% upgrade chances where you could have been getting to know the characters more. The dungeon exploration elements it adds to the game are extremely dull, you just pick three kids to walk around an area that might have simple obvious traps or enemies where you pick up items until you find a key to open a chest that will have a larger cache of those items.
Each chapter has about three breaks in it where you do the side activities. You get a break, travel through spaces fighting battles, picking up items and materials, and driving over health an SP recovery crates. You do that again, and then after your next break you get a large health and SP pick up and fight a boss. This is linear and automatically driven with you being able to see a few sections in your path ahead for what is going to happen and you will get route splits of safe, normal, or dangerous routes. Dangerous routes giving you enemies worth more XP (even if you were to rank lower) and better quality items. I chose the dangerous route every time, this was fairly difficult in a few early chapters but then the entire game became very easy (even with my conservative playstyle of saving almost every link attack for the boss and never using any of the healing or special ammo items ever, you know, because I might need them later) and bosses were pitiful. I imagine going the other routes would make everything easy in normal gameplay and the bosses maybe almost slightly threatening.
Like a lot of games with permanent death features, in this game's case through the use of the Soul Cannon, it is a pointless feature that takes away from the game. To begin with, there is just no practical reason to ever use it at all, so other than being a minor narrative feature it serves no purpose. If you did use it you are only going to be losing out on unique characters. By having something like this it would also mean that the game would have to be designed so that anyone could be dead at any point which means that many sections are just filled with generic style of dialogue that can be filled by a character at random instead of a more meaningful story or character moment. Though the times that there is more focus on a particular character I would be interested to see how events play out differently (like if you don't have Sheena when you get Britz) but I'm not going to replay the game in a more boring fashion to see that. Even the paired endings with sibling characters just give you no text if you were to kill one of the siblings, giving you no unique illustration or ending for the surviving character.
Recommended to turn based fans for fun main gameplay, art, and good music, though would be a stronger recommendation if the balance, story, and side activities were improved on.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1463636996610351106