Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius

I'm not the fan of VN genre but i actually enjoyed this game

It's free so I figured I'd give it a shot. Even free it's not worth the money. The combat completely lacks any strategy. There is no manuevering, no flanking, no pincer attacks, no kiting, nothing. Early on you discover that the only 'strategy' is to stay grouped up as all your defensive passives affect nearby allies. Any character that dares venture out will quickly be swarmed by every enemy from everywhere on the map. They seldom miss and even if they do there are so many that you are overwhelmed and destroyed. The game quickly starts to outnumber you 2:1, then 3:1 and reinforcements show up constantly. There are no AoE attacks so you have to destroy multiple enemies each turn. You can't move because moving and attacking both use the same energy. If you move you attack less, If you attack less you destroy fewer enemies. If you destroy fewer enemies you get overwhelmed faster. There have been multiple stages where my flagship gets focus fired and destroyed on turn 2. I tried lowering the difficulty, but that only worked for 1 stage and then I got ovewhelmed in the next battle. Maybe if there was an option to farm money for upgrades, but you have very few options for it and very limited funds. You are always outnumbered, outgunned and underfunded. I wish I could recommend the story, but chances are you've seen it before. To start, it's a harem game. You play as your standard plainboy protagonist that gets surrounded by girl tropes. There's the spunky energetic girl, the shy smart girl, the athletic girl, the quiet mysterious girl... they're all there. The game tries for some for some depth, but once you know the tropes you know that story. The general story is another 'war is hell' story. It's ok, but the characters are so dull it's hard to get inolved. The bland character designs don't help. Not much else to say about it.

I'm sorry, but I just don't understand these rave reviews that this game has been getting. The story is a bit of fun, but there's really not much more to it than simply: "the protaganist gets involved in a fight he wasn't expecting, against an army that knows no bounds, whilst those who might help to save the galaxy are too busy fighting amongst themselves and/or engaged in politics leaving the fate of the universe up to a lone ship that has to fight against all odds to unite the 'good' forces, meanwhile finding a number of other people to join his crew each with their own reason for fighting (all of whom, funnily enough, just happen to be women)". Enjoyable, but nothing really special. The characters are a bit of fun (at least the girls), but again, pretty one dimensional without much substance. Not to mention a very strange 'medical examination' scene that just seemed out of place, as if the writers needed to remind you that the only reason you're playing this game is because of the possibility of a sex scene somewhere in the future. What really leads me to give this game a bad review, however, is that the game mechanics are broken. I like the scene, I like the turn based tactics, and I like the different abilities of each of the ryders. However, I should not have to drop this game down to 'casual' difficulty just to get through the early missions. Sure, there are perhaps better ways to invest your money and resources in upgrading your ship and ryders (not that that's really an option until you've gone through a few missions, by which time you've probably let a ship of children die because it's just too damn hard to defend them from the onslaught whilst taking out enemy units and protecting yourself). But there's no real explanation of how the different elements are supposed to work or which upgrades to invest in, and once you've spent the money, you can only get a portion of that back if you remove them again. There's a lot of money to be gained through missions, but you'll spend all of that in between missions in the hope that somehow you might be better equipped to take out enemies flanking you 10 to 1. By the time you get to later missions, even at the next to lowest difficulty (the one that isn't just a gimme to allow you to go through the story without worrying about the actual gameplay), the enemies become far too overpowered. Not only do they have infinite rockets and missiles compared to the one or two that your units have (which mightn't be such a problem if rockets didn't do such high damage, whilst yours always get taken down by flak or consistently miss when the expected hit rate is 70%), they seem to be able to hit you from wherever they are on the map whilst you can barely hit something two hexes away from you. To make matters worse, their units just keep respawning every turn, either through carriers (to which you can't get close enough to hit hard enough) or random warp signatures that bring on an extra five units or so, not to mention the number of their units that just spam debuffs on you so that you don't even have energy left to do anything on the next turn. It does not make a game challenging to lower your stats and abilities whilst increasing the number of enemies and improving their stats. It just makes it annoying and incredibly frustrating. Perhaps the intention is to make better use of your 'command' abilities, but when you can only use one per turn, you then have to decide between defence, offence, healing your command ship, or reviving one of your fallen, which doesn't leave you with a lot of options. All in all, the storyline is pretty much what you'd expect from a game like this: enough to keep you entertained, but nothing that's really gonna stick in your memory for any length of time. This wouldn't normally be enough to turn me away from a game like this. I've become engaged with it now, and will probably try to push it through to the end, even if I have to drop the difficulty further to the simple visual novel (I even went and bought the other two in the series before getting far too frustrated with this one, leading me to write this review). But it seems to me the dev's have just gone "hey, we're giving you b**bs, so we won't put any effort into designing the combat system, you work it out for yourselves". Feels like a big f*** you to anyone unlucky enough to have actually paid money for this game. Long and the short of it is that there are plenty of other far better turn-based strategy/tactics out there, and, unless you really want to find out what happens with your waifu, I'd recommend giving it a miss.

Bugs first. Did you know that in the skirmish mode, you can upgrade your fleet to insane levels? And I really do mean "insane". It's obvious that the devs never expected anyone to be able to afford certain upgrades, so they never tested anything with them. That means that using my laser actually costs -1 points (which gets interpreted as 1 point anyway) and I can one-shot most things with it. And then I exited skirmish mode and, look at that, the same insane upgrades remain on my fleet in a real battle. Buggy much? You can also sell some of the absurdly-priced upgrades to have an effectively infinite amount of money. And then the Blackjack and Liberty ryders disappeared from all the battles. Which would be fine, except for the game-ending bug around Mission 10 where the Blackjack needs to be removed from the fleet and ... is not there. Oops. The pilot's still there, all the lines are still there, but the actual ryder is missing. The characters are one-dimensional stereotypes of one-dimensional stereotypes, but maybe that's to be expected. Nobody has a serious backstory and there are plot holes that you could drive the Titanic through. So there's this 2000-year-old repository of Amazing Lost Technology that everyone knows about, but you're somehow the first one to go there? Uh-huh. Sounds legit. The dialogue tree doesn't exist in any real way, and the dialogue doesn't keep track of what you've already asked. The conversations often don't matter and are sometimes buggy (for example, I didn't choose the "become a pirate" option, and then I find my character asking whether my pirate gear is ready ... what?). In frustration, I made the mistake at looking at the code. Let's just say that I now understand why the game is buggy and forgets things. Frankly, it's a miracle that the whole thing works at all...

Well, free is a good price. If I wasn't so bent on finishing a game after I start it, I'd give up after a battle or two. The story is naive, the visuals consist mostly of anime girls (clothed except for one screen ;-)), the battles are repetitive and boring and the whole premise is kinda ridiculous. The story choices don't matter much and are rare. Overall - I'm not tempted to try any other part from the series.