as far as ps1 to ps2 sequels for semi-obscure games go this is one of the better ones. which unfortunately isn't saying much. story is good, everything else is awful. It feels like someone wrote a pretty good story script but the devs really failed in transfering that into an actual game. most of it is walking through empty corridors and the edge is really toned down which doesn't fit with the even darker setting and story. essentially: no exploding heads or blood in this game.
I still somewhat enjoyed it, I love galerians and shou tajima

This game is basically the bush iraq war but you play on the side of the good guys instead.
It is incredibly difficult but I believe one step at a time I will be able to do the first loop...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=CYz-95JZruk

edit: 1cc complete, aiming for omote next

This is gonna be a long post but I want to talk about the more unique aspects of this game that aren't the game mechanics like the emotion system it has, how unique and impressive the AI is and so on that I've already seen people talk about. Most people into "strange" PS1-era video games have heard of this one before. It is a bit of an infamous title due to still being the only video game ever to win the Seiun Sci-fi award and at the time it was just made by a bunch of random staff that somehow made a mecha-focused game leagues above any of its competitors such as Front Mission, SRW, Sakura Wars and so on. It is also sometimes mentioned in relation to Muv-Luv and 13 Sentinels. The former has basically the same alternate-history concept and the way it handles a certain SF trope is very similar but otherwise they are quite different. With the latter, it is probably the primary influence (alongside Please Save My Earth and Megazone 23) which is pretty hilarious as one of the most common complaints with 13S is that it "doesn't do anything original" despite the fact that 90% of the people who say that don't even know what those three series are.
The influence of GPM on 13S isn't a simple plot point or anything like that though and much deeper than you would expect. Take 13S and remove the mystery files and imagine if every story in the story section was totally randomized. Not only that, but imagine the gameplay of 13S except it's not piss easy and it's incredibly complicated. But enough about other games, GPM has had a pretty legendary status as a long untranslated game. I have played through the game four times including the tutorial playthrough and it has been nearly a year.

First off, similar to 13S and Persona 3 the game is split into two sections being the social sections and the battle system. A good 90% of the game takes place in the school section while the rest of it is "SRPG" stuff. This may not sound like anything special but, if you ever wanted the social sections to tie into the battles in those previously mentioned games this is what you are looking for. Pretty much everything you do in the social sections matter, and each playthrough will be a different experience. The games social-link equivalent does not give you simple stat boosts or anything like that, almost every single classmate you have gives you entire game mechanics. Ranging from being able to see into peoples hearts and seeing who likes who to being able to use the Shining Finger from G Gundam, to being able to increase your social status and forcing your classmates to listen to you. Not only that, but there is perma-death. This isn't some FE style perma-death though. When a classmate dies, they hold an entire funeral for him and the way all the other characters act changes. Every single death matters. If you liked the aspect of not being able to control your classmates in Persona 3's battle section well, this is like that but a million times more complicated. The more someone likes you, the more likelier they are to help you during battle. This isn't all however, there are as many negative aspects as there are positive aspects to it. So if you are thinking of trying to be best friends with literally everyone, I learned the hard way that this is not a viable strategy. Most of the cast has beef with each other so you have to experience and choose who you want to get close to. For example, Katou is very useful and charming but getting close to her makes Kariya hate you because he feels jealous of your character. Kariya is disabled and on a wheelchair who needs help a lot of the time. Helping him up the stairs and stuff would normally make others sympathize with you more and see you as a helpful person, but if he hates you you lose this ability. On the other hand, getting close to a psychopath like Akane puts a rift between you and the rest of the cast. Moreover, the game is filled with beginners traps. If you get close to Mai Shibamura, the "main heroine" of the game you lose access to pretty much everyone else as they all hate her. The tradeoff is that Mai is easily the best character in the game and simply better than everyone else, despite this fact though if you get close to her it also locks you into one of the few scripted battles that a beginner has next to no chance of winning. There's something like this with every single character which is what makes it stand out so much to me. You have next to no control over how the world develops in the game, and you have to manually learn who likes who and vice versa by talking to them.

However, the more you play through the game the more you acquire this "knowledge" which leads you to be able to control the world more. This in turn is a requirement for the true ending in game. Once you fullfill the true ending requirements and "learn about the truth of the world", you start being referred to as a god and all your classmates start being afraid of you. This is another very unique aspect of the game, counting things like scripted bad endings there are around a dozen endings in the game. There are six normal endings depending on how you perform as a soldier, however besides the true ending most of the endings are the same besides the boosters they give for your next playthrough. The true ending though, is anything but simple. Pretty much the entire dialogue in the game changes once you fulfill the requirements for it. The requirements for it are harsh as well, you have to kill over 300 Genjuu (the beta/kaiju/alien equivalent of the game) and make sure no one among the 23 characters in the cast (yes, including your teachers) dies.
Oh yeah, the story. If you dislike long stretches of plot infodumps that RPGs tend to have, this is your game. Possibly the epitome of show don't tell. There is an overarching story but it takes a background to the point of the game, which is that the way you connect the strange happenings of the game is the "real story". Essentially, your experience while playing it matters more than the explanation to things. That isn't to say they don't explain anything but without spoiling much this game is unpredictable to say the least. Even with game mechanics, I've never seen any other mecha SRPG have war-time tax on simple items in the store. You have to pay fucking tax in this game. Simply put, this isn't a game that revolves around twists. The amount of stuff you can do is virtually limitless, if you want to become the commander of your platoon you can do it. If you think the battle system is bad, you can take a job that doesn't involve piloting such as being an engineer and sit out and skip all of the battles. Hell, if you want you can NEET it out too, not working at all and being lazy is an option as well. Planning an assassination against government officials, working for the black market, learning the origin behind the robots you pilot, "siding with the aliens", getting real close to the cat that suspiciously has god-tier stats, cursing your classmates and setting them up to die, working out like crazy and punching aliens while wearing your piloting suit and so on. All this stuff I mentioned isn't even half of it, I recommend not looking up many guides as learning that every single action has a consequence is one of the things I liked about the game. Oh yeah, there is an "Illusion" meter in the game that is basically a schizophrenia stat. You should absolutely grind that to see some wild shit.
So in the end how does all of this come together? Well, barely. The music is very underwhelming. The visuals of the games besides the battles are in the negatives. A lot of the character scenarios feel unfinished, and it doesn't help that for some reason all the social link equivalents are in randomized order for the most part. I would say the game is complete as it is but, if you go into it expecting a set beginning and an end you will be disappointed. A lot of stuff was cut as well, going into minor spoiler territory here there are 5+1(the tutorial chara) playable characters. Originally, every single character was meant to be playable. You can still play as every character through a cheat code but all of their scenarios are unfinished and insanely glitchy. Moreover, all the ED cutscenes have a bunch of CGs that you don't see in game: all content that was cut and reproduced as an audio drama. Said audio drama is largely unavailable, I had to physically buy most of the discs and uploaded what I have on YT but I'm still missing the last two.
There's a ton of stuff about the game that I haven't mentioned due to spoilers. Some crucial game mechanics, the meta element that the entire game revolves around, etc. One final note is that if you're the type that lacks reading comprehension and whines about Muv-Luv and similar games being fascist then steer clear of this game because it makes ML nationalism seem like a joke.
Gunparade March lived up to the hype for me and I still think about it every day but, I feel like a lot of people won't really like it much. It really is a lightning in a bottle tier game. I'm hoping LOOP8 will be good but it isn't looking that great and the other sequels are not great. Still, if you like any of the aforementioned games or if anything I said about it sounds interesting it is absolutely worth checking out in the case that it gets translated. Just know that whatever the game seems like to you, it's probably nothing like that in reality.

I gave this game three tries across separate months in this year and could never get past the tutorial on each try. This is gonna be a long ass post because I wanna drop my thoughts on this game that no one cares about somewhere. This game is incredibly fascinating because "blatantly inaccessible" does not even begin to describe it. Every single aspect of this game is a filter on some level.
For the first filter, there is no real overarching story. The base concept is that that you play as a human from the real world possessing an android fighting for a military rebel organization in the 23rd century in underwater Mars. Your goal is to achieve universal peace in three years (there's a calendar system like in gunpa- I mean persona) or else every planet ever nukes each other and existence is over. Sounds like fifty SF story ideas put together but this isn't even the beginning of it. One would expect more of a story but there isn't one. The entire game is 80+ hours of talking to the 36 NPCs (some you have to unlock) on your battleship. The cast is equally as strange, it ranges from a dolphin in a cyborg suit to a giant octopus that's named "Ika" to a seven foot tall early 20th century Italian mafia named "Iron Sovereign". The strangest of them all however is this one kid who is just, a normal boy from our universe and that's his entire thing.
The second filter is that pretty much everything that's normal in other games is way overly detailed and has something stuck to it. What I mean by this is that, this game is tied to "realism" like no other. Aboard the battleship, whenever you want to use the elevator you have to actually wait for it and a lot of the times other NPCs are using it. I've never seen a game where you have to painstakingly wait at least a full minute or two for an elevator just like you would in real life. Some aspects are cool, for example you cannot offer the one Arab character alcohol because Muslims don't drink. Same thing with the underage members of the ship (you start being able to drink with them once they grow older). There's no fast travel or anything like that either, you have to walk across this gigantic submarine every time you want to go somewhere. Another thing is that, with Gunparade March I remember thinking that the AI in it felt incredibly realistic. Now I am glad that they did not feel TOO real because goddamnit this game goes way too hard. The AI in Kenran Butousai act just like real people, in that you can't even talk to them when you want. Aboard the battleship, pretty much everyone is busy with something and they all have their individual moods that you have to pay attention to. This doesn't sound all that special but consider this, if let's say an NPC is busy most of the time they will straight up not even respond to you. Not only that, there is a really detailed memory system where if you say you will go do maintenance for your mecha, the other NPCs remember that and go "Weren't you going to do maintenance? Stop being lazy and get to work." It gets really overwhelming especially with so many people on board, there's also like a dozen dialogue options for every single one of them and they always give some sort of new answer just like in Gunparade.
Oh yeah, the mecha. That's the third filter, besides the social aspects which are 95% of the game there's parts where you fight your enemies in your robot called the "Round Buckler". I can't even begin to describe the battle system, just skim through this clip here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NzKHCxP5V6M&t=535s .
Lastly, this game is a direct sequel to Gunparade March and there's a ton of returning characters. This being said, you won't even recognize any of them unless you know a lot about the overarching lore in the franchise and half of them aren't even actually the same people but alternate universe versions of them. In general, the game is so strange to me because it's like they saw everything people liked about Gunparade and decided to do the exact opposite. There's like a billion things I'm not going that into, such as the fact that the calendar system is actually tied to your real time too. Every time you save, dates pass by in the calendar. For example, if you save on August 7th and return to the game on August 14th three weeks pass in game. Not only that, but the game also counts your real hour play time too and that decides which ending you get. IIRC for the best ending you need to have over 50 hours in the game. All in all, I think this game is very cool and it's kind of lame that it's so unknown because I feel like some people would love it. But, I can't really score it and I never even got past the tutorial because I do not find it fun. If you love blatantly inaccessible games that are meant to be as overly complicated as possible this is your game. Either that, or this game is meant for people actually from the 24th century like in game. Oh and also, there's zero voice acting and this game has more menus you constantly have to read than probably any game ever AND there's a bunch of ship announcements that are in real time that you have to keep track of so... grinding a ton of Japanese is a must.