One of the biggest surprises of the year for me. The weirdo RTS meets auto battler gameplay is so fun, and I had an absolute blast constantly tweaking unit compositions and orders and equipment loadouts. The game has absolutely fantastic visuals and music. The battle maps just being sections of the regular map is so neat and really endears the world to you. A lot of the writing for the character relationships is fun. The overatching story is basically nonexistent, but that kind of works as it allows the game to focus on smaller stories in each region. Or is just entirely ignorable if you want that.

I should have reviewed this earlier, as I know I had some minor grievances but at the moment I can't think of many. I did find that the game does a bad job of having satisfying story choices. There's one character in particular who commits awful acts and is sent away unpunished in an incredibly unsatisfying end to their story. I wish there had been some more QoL options when building units. It's got a really dumb name.

I didn't end up finishing it, but I felt I had pretty much experienced every major system the game had to offer. Given that the main story didn't feel compelling, I don't mind leaving it unfinished. I may pick it back up later, I may not.