Toxic chemicals from the mining colony she’s from stunted her growth and, combined with her horrible and traumatic childhood and adolescence, made her completely crazy. One of the first mechs you get, its repair capabilities, disable attack, and deflector shield generation make it invaluable. She’s a forced romance route for story reasons in Liberation Day, which many fans grumble about. Except she’s a loli with crippling self-doubt always hoping for validation from the main character, which makes her pretty obnoxious. She’s supposed to be a brilliant mechanic, and from a gameplay standpoint, this bears out nicely, as she’s the one actually doing the upgrades to your units that you purchase. Chigara’s Asaga’s best friend and one of the first pilots you get. The deflector shield projection is useful, of course, and the shotgun is helpful to finish off any enemies your better combat units have left near dead, but it’s not enough to make me not hate Claude.

Her utility mech has a few nice features, such as the gravity gun, which is good if you can use it to draw an enemy mech between Asaga and Icari. She’s the worst the game has to offer in this regard, unless you’re really into that sort of thing. Now, because this is a waifu game, it’s only fair that I rank the characters from dumpster to Best Girl.Ĭlaude is a trash tier waifu, who’s “UwU command me captain” shtick is old from the moment it shows up. None of the character paths had been set yet, and one character path ends up being fixed for story purposes in Liberation Day. I’ve found a doc with the under-the-hood effect that your choices make, but they don’t appear to have much bearing on how things actually play out story-wise in Mask of Arcadius. While Liberation Day updates the actual gameplay of the battles in a pretty satisfactory way, it makes the VN aspect of Mask of Arcadius something of a shaggy dog story. Unfortunately, Sunrider is an episodic game, and Mask of Arcadius only contains the first two episodes. On the face of it, I actually really like the story, but Sunrider uses post-Eva and 21st century waifu tropes for most its characters I would definitely prefer the “tough dames” of the older real-robot mech genre or at least the mil-sf aesthetic that Power DOLLS went for. The Visual Novel portion of the game is a mixed bag. Still, it’s fun and scratches an itch for turn-based mech space combat. The cutscenes of the attacks get old fast, and it would have been nice to be able to disable them more easily turning on “skip mode” does it, but it can only be toggled in the battle if a character has a line of story dialogue come up during the fight. The later fights often tend to be “pick a flank, try to crush it, sweep up or down on the other side, then deal with reinforcements as they come.” Early missions with fewer mechs and enemy “bosses” may be a bit more interesting and flexible than the later large fleet battles. Variances in the missions are more based on when and where enemy reinforcement come from.

Since all missions are in space, with the exception of a mission where sharing a hex with an asteroid reduces your chance of being hit, there’s no effect of the map on strategies. Each mech has its strengths and weaknesses and utility which will determine how you should use them in your strategy.

Mechanically, it’s ultra-lite compared to a game like Power Dolls, though it uses the similar combination of action points that are used to move and perform attacks. It’s space opera with mechs, except your mech pilots are basically a growing harem.įunnily enough, the wargame portion of Sunrider is brutally hard. It’s an interesting hybrid of Visual Novel waifu game and turn-based tactical. Recently an online friend who knew I enjoyed wargames and weeb shit recommended Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius to me.

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