Sakura Taisen is a blend between Tactical RPG and Dating Sim.

The Dating Sim aspect is your typical visual novel, Ogami (the MC) got harem, he has to pick certain dialog options to win the heart of one of the girls.
Unlike your typical visual novel though, there are no elaborate routes for each girl. No matter who you romance, the ending (apart from 1 cutscene and the final battle) remains the same, each girl will get development and screen time, even one you don’t care about.
There’s one girl that I find annoying because the game shoves her to you, even going so far as making Ogami love her, even though I, as the player, don't want to.

The story is fine, it’s mostly fluff while also fighting an evil organization. There will be your usual sealed thing finally awakened again after being sealed for a certain amount of time, and you have to defeat it. The fluff is cute, if it’s with the girl you like, but meh if it’s not.

Now the worst part of this game is the combat. It is an insult to RPG to call it Tactical RPG (wiki says it). There’s almost no RPG element in the combat. No level up, no class/job, no elements. The only thing you can do to increase a character's stat (temporarily) is by picking the right option in the visual novel part before the combat.

Each character only has 2 attacks, a basic attack and a special attack. Each has different range and power, it is obvious who will be the front liner and who will be on the back.
Each special attack is also unique, Sakura attacks every enemy on a straight line, Kana attacks an enemy adjacent to her but with a very big damage, Iris heals everyone around her, etc.
Special attack consumes a special gauge which can be recharged by attacking, getting attacked, or using Rest command.

There is also Heal command (limited to 2x per character), Defend, and Cover (unique to Ogami).
The many options of the command does create a bit of a strategy, but the game is very easy and you will most likely end up with the same strategy over and over.
Not to mention that the movement and animation in combat is really slow. The attack and special animation, while fun to watch at first, gets old very quickly and you can’t skip them.

I hope that the rest of the series fixes this combat problem.

With the amount of hype and mystery I’ve heard about this game from various youtubers, there’s absolutely no way that it will live up to the hype that I’ve built myself (my fault).
However, even if It’s not the masterpiece I think it is, it’s still a great game with plenty of surprises that delighted me (justifying the reason why most youtuber will just suggest you to play the game instead of listening to them ramble and possibly spoiler you).

Another thing, I’ve grown to hate roguelikes over the years, it was one of my favorite genres back then. But with the oversaturation of indie roguelikes (both bad and good), I got bored, hated it, then just blocked the entire genre on Steam. So if you’re like me but are curious about this game, you should try it.

I didn’t find the roguelike elements as annoying as in many others(Hades, Dead Cell, Binding of Isaac, Slay the Spire, etc). It’s also relatively easy so I managed to pull through with a minimal amount of replay.