I have my fair share of problems with Ciconia so far but thankfully my expectations were tempered from the start due to the setting and scale. The abnormally large and varied cast is handled fairly well and they have good interactions. The non-wartime parts are entertaining and do a good job of endearing you to the characters while building up the world. The wartime parts end up feeling very repetitive with a lot of redundant dialogue regarding the WALLS OF PEACE and DONT KILL DONT DIE and generally uninteresting action scenes. It feels like every other scene features ryukishi using the game as a mouthpiece to tell the reader how bad humanity is and how much war sucks and it ends up detracting from the story. The themes are meaningful and interesting but the lack of subtlety makes it feel very tiring after a while. Often I was subjected to scenes where everyone would be all buddy buddy and spend 5 minutes talking about how much they'll support peace which is annoying when anyone with more than a couple brain cells knows from the start that they will end up killing each other. Presentation is upgraded from the other WTC games but it doesn't really get a lot of chances to shine given how few legitimate fights there are. Music is good as usual but not really as memorable as umineko's or as impactful as higurashi's. Despite my problems, the ending was great and I'm interested to see where the story is going to go from here now that they've built everything up.