Sunrider: Liberation Day - Captain's Edition

2/5 for the Liberation Day main story; 4/5 for the [RE]Turn afterstory. It's absolutely necessary to play Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius first. The beginning of this game is what should've been the ending of the last one, and the first battle is way too complicated to serve as a tutorial, so the game is completely inaccessible to newcomers. The quick infodump in the first cutscene barely helps. Mask of Arcadius (MoA) is about gaining allies, trust, and combat advantages, and having freedom of choice; Liberation Day is about losing those things. You can import your save from MoA, but it only remembers your story choices, not your upgrade purchases—I spent half the game raising enough money to customize my units like I had them before. To ensure the samey combat remains difficult, units and abilities keep being taken away from the player. Worst of all, you have no say whatsoever in how the story plays out. The main story is all but completely devoid of choices. The characters spiral out of control with jealousy, mistrust, idiocy, romancing the Worst Girl, and other completely avoidable problems. The choices from MoA mostly seem to affect your combat options, offering only a little bit of narrative flavor. It's only at the very end that this game starts to feel like the Sunrider I signed up for. [RE]Turn is what saves the game for me. It's a purely choice-driven story that acknowledges the main game's flaws with a wink and a nod...and gives you the power to rewrite history. Meaningful character interactions; 18 different endings. Fun. 3D art looks fabulous; character art is very polished, though I do prefer a few characters in the old style. Menus are laggy and cumbersome; combat is streamlined but less personal. English voices need to be fixed: Asaga never stops talking, and battle cutscenes interrupt in Japanese. NOTE: The game contains profanity, bloody violence, nudity, and explicit sexual content, and can be fully decensored with the free Denpa Edition patch.

The original Mask of Arcadius was great for a free game. A pretty decent turn based space ship strategy in the flavor of Advance Wars. Special mention to the amazing music that's better than 90% of AAA games. Sadly, this entry was botched. It started point in the wrong direction, and it's terribly obvious it was rushed. The battles and framerates are much worse. They removed the options for battle animations. You're forced to bone the most boring character (yes, that one). Even the choices you do get to make, none of them matter. Out of all the choices in the game, the only things they ever affect is whether or not one character will wear an eye patch, and getting an extra ship added to the store. That's it. Not one single other choice will ever matter. The story is massively botched. Characters are now either crazy or boring, or crazy boring. You get 2 into battles, 3 side missions, and then the game goes STRAIGHT to the final confrontation of the occupied homeworld. It's positively jarring. The ending itself is jaw droppingly bad. You'll lose count of the number of times you say, "Seriously?" A couple things were improved. The weapons are a bit better balanced (no more kinetics ruling everything). The great music is still there. And that's about it. This sequel is so rushed and botched that you would swear that the original was the polished retail product and this game was the rough free release. The only way I would ever recommend it is as a way of giving the developers some money for the excellent Mask of Arcadius. Buy this game, then go play MoA instead.

PSA: the fist part on this series, Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius, IS FREE ! Go play it before this one ! (Your save carries over.) The following applys for both games: This is a really good Tactic RPG, mixed with element of Visual Novel. On the tactical part, the game is a little rough, but really good. Taking place in space, all environments are the same (emptiness), but the missions provide a good variety of situation, avoiding repetition. The combats are highly based on your ability to calculate, focus and spread damage among ennemis. So if you are into figuring out dice roll probability, this game is for you. This is helped (or complexified) by customizable stats for your units. Just be wary of the difficulty, this game is not kind on mistakes. On the Visual Novel part, this goes full Anime. You've got mecha, harem, over the top bad guys, all the tropes, with a touch of crazyness. But, there is nearly no branching story and if you expect mature content, it is there, but extremely sparse (and it is actualy a good thing). Where the game fails, is on the technical part. It has been made with a VN engine that was never supposed to be turned into a T-RPG engine. This lead to a few bugs, crashes, but most importantly, bad performance on some machine. Being a turn based game, it may not be a issue for you (it was not for me), but if you expect a polished game with responsive interface, you may be disapointed. Anyway, play the fist game, if you like it, play this one, if not, you did not lose any money.

Oh boy! What a story! Really good and really locks you on the screen. I only complain is that it is a little confuse. Maybe it was I who didn't pay the deserved attention, but But that scene on Diode where things got explained, confused me much. But anyway, The game sure knows how to make things epic, but it is kinda epic all the time. I believe it was because the game was dubbed, and that got it more expensive to get it long, with good interludes between its epicness and that kinda turn the next epic moments looks really forced, kinda diabolus ex machina, but it is not enough to mess the enjoyment. I mean, each battle looks it will be the last one, I think this is fail of design, but considering what they wanted to do here, it is acceptable. I just think that more things could happen before the liberation day, leaving it as the last battle, but instead it was battle was broken in segments. About gameplay, it has a very large improvement from the past one, and I really suggest the devs to fuse both games under the gameplay of Liberation Day, because the strategic part feels shallow since the game is shorter and has less battles, fusing with the Mask of Arcadius would make things more important, but that would require a serious amount of work. hope they do it someday, even if they want to launch as a separate game, since Mask of Arcadius is free, I would buy it, jsut don't charge the prize of two full games, it won't take that much of work. For the last, I think it may be a bug, or funds ended before the game, but the last part isn't dubbed as the rest. Well, anyway, the game is really recommended if you want an epic story, but as for the strategic part, I wouldn't hold my breath, you will find better games out there.