Another stellar short rpg I will have trouble convincing people to play. Fuga is my 1st dive into the Little Tail Bronx games that isn't me looking at old silent let's plays of Tail Concerto and Solatorobo. Never found the 2 latter games anywhere in the wild and I was convinced they didn't exist. All this preamble to say that this is a very new experience for me. Now what I do know about and like are rpgs with time management. Fuga wants you to be balancing the needs and wants of 12 kids, which sounds daunting, but the children are unrealistically easily pleased and usually want something simple. The kids always want something you could feasibly do like making a meal you have all the ingredients for or upgrading a weapon with all of it's components ready. Really the AP requirements in the Intermissions feel more like a restriction on you so you don't get horribly overpowered early on. Most of the game is spent looking at the map and planning which route to use based on how well you're doing. The "war is hell" message is actually taught through the necessity to extinguish life by destroying as many and/or the biggest war machines throughout the map (jokes). These kids need a lot of xp to get cool new skills to deal with the baddest machines the Berman Empire throws at them. So the strategy outside of battle is to take what the game will call the "Dangerous Path" in every fork in the road. Yes you could take "normal" or "safe" but that's not advised unless you are really going to die if you fight a bigger encounter. One thing to note is that danger paths also usually give you consumables to replenish your HP and SP if it went REALLY poorly as well as better upgrade parts. Actual battles are pretty tough if you do the advised danger path spam, requiring a lot of resource stat management as well as figuring out what skills, enemies, and when you should use each. Sometimes it's worth having half your hp off if you need to conserve your sp and there's only an hp heal node coming up in the map. Now usually I hate timeline based rpg combat but I have absolutely no complaints with it in this game. It only makes sense that your machine guns are the fastest in the timeline and your cannons the slowest. All the kids control their own type of weapon with a buddy to passively support them and you can swap out any of your kids every timeline reset. It's really cool to just tag out all your party members at once to say set up your grenadiers to stat effect a boss before swapping to all cannons to get in obscene damage, then swapping back out to delay the boss on the timeline and start it all over again. Unfortunately there is a combo a little too good. The characters Chick and Socks synergize way too well by Chick reducing enemies' stat resistance and Socks following up stunning whatever you need. All grenadiers have lots of debuffs to give to enemies so you always end up having them in your party regardless, it makes cannons feel a little weak. I gotta say though that stunning the chapter 5 and 9 bosses into having ZERO turns did scratch the SMT part of my brain. With the story I feel a little weird with this game. The story is very light early on and told in a past tense 3rd party narrator way, which fine I guess it's more about the kids being friends right? I didn't get as much as I'd hoped as the affinity events are shorter than Fire Emblem's. The events are about as intense as kids passing through the hallway between periods at school. "Hey man can you please teach me how to talk to girls later? Move it tubby you're in my way you are so uncool fatso." And only at level 10 affinity do you really get anything. Honestly it feels more like the Taranis tank itself is the protagonist. We see it through it's long journey through Gasco and we want to see it and the kids by extension get stronger to liberate the whole country. Even when one child has a particular story arc it's in service to the Taranis because the Taranis is linked with the kids and all the kids are sad. The last 3rd of the story is very good with the finale having crazy biblical sized events happening throughout the country. I just want to say that I don't hate any of the children or find them all really boring or anything, it's just that the way they're telling the story isn't telling me what I would find interesting about them. I am anticipating playing the sequel to see what sort of improvements they make, and if I really like that I'll be hyped to the moon for the 3rd entry.