![]() That thing, and that giant supporting fleet.Īva is defeated, hiding her sadness behind her mask of professionalism. Just one little ship, against… that thing. We… we’re probably the last free Cerans left. This wasn’t an ordered retreat, this was a mad dash for safety.Īnd just like that, everything we’ve known and relied upon all our lives has been blasted away. We jump to… somewhere, a random spot in space. It’s tense, but the Sunrider manages to spool up the warp drives just before coming under major fire. But my planet’s entire capital city has just been vaporized in the blink of an eye. This ridiculously massive dreadnought is no Death Star still. The screen cuts to an image of the Sunrider, firing the missiles… Little percentages appear over the enemy ships, telling me my missiles have 90% accuracy in this situation. Can’t I just blast the shit out of these enemy boats?Īs it turns out, I can. This is a lot of rapid learning for a high-stakes combat situation. There’s also four two-letter stats, that… maybe FK is flak? SD could be shield, AR is armor, and EV is… I dunno, Effort Values? I assume the red and blue bars are health and energy, respectively. Missiles and rockets have long range and high power, but they’re a limited resource and they’re vulnerable to enemy flak.Īnd in the bottom right of the screen, I see more stats still. ![]() Assault guns fire multiple shots, but are extra weak against armor. Lasers are long-range, but weak, while kinetics are short-range, but strong. Mousing over the weapons themselves provides even more. How can I ignore that straight a recommendation?Ĭrikey, that’s a lot of information. The Standard level of difficulty is ‘the way Sunrider is meant to be played’. There is a ‘visual novel’ level of difficulty that apparently trivializes the combat, but come on. ![]() I was half-expecting the combat to be a time-wasting minigame, a la Flower Shop’s farming, but it’s looking like I may have been wrong in that assumption. The fact that Sunrider even has these options is already intriguing enough to me, but a cursory glance at them shows that this game is actually expecting me to take its combat seriously. Mostly related to battle difficulty settings. On the other hand, Sunrider has ‘Combat’ options. It’s the exact same framework Sakura Spirit and Flower Shop used. On the one hand, the ‘Visual Novel’ set of options is literally exactly what I’ve come to expect the last two week: text speed, skipping options, ‘auto forward speed’, whatever the hell that still means. Sunrider’s strange dichotomy continues in its Options screens. Accompanied by a woman’s voice singing what I assume to be Japanese lyrics and bombastic musical overtones, I’m bombarded with… Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius (‘Sunrider’ from here on out) opens with the most anime intro I’ve seen maybe all year. ( Spoiler levels: Narrative, low to medium. Oh, and it’s also entirely free on Steam.Ī free visual novel, made by the same guys who made an expensive visual novel I disliked? But which is also a turn-based tactics game? Compute, this does not. Seriously, a significant number of the Steam screenshots for it are taken up by hex grids in space and exploding star cruisers. But then it also seems to promise tactical turn-based battle gameplay featuring spaceships and giant robots. It confused me, because… it seems to have all the trappings of a visual novel game, what with the talking heads and the dialogue flow controls and the many multi-coloured anime ladies. While thus trawling the possibility space, I ran across a game called Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius. Were they all going to be glorified cutscenes with half-naked fox girls? Sakura Spirit made such an… impression on me, I just had to see what other games this studio has under their wing. Hot on the heels of last week’s adventures into linear storytelling and boobs, I found myself browsing Sekai Project‘s website for games.
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