This was a fun game overall. I played a lot, and I do mean A LOT, of strategy games during my time so I knew that I was going to enjoy this one too. Though to be honest this is nowhere near as complex as I would have preferred it, it was still an enjoyable title and a nice break from the usual visual novels that I consume.
This game is basically an anime version of Risk. You have the world map that is littered with cities that you have to conquer. Each turn you get a few actions available to you, at first 2 and then by the end of the game you have 4. With these actions you can either attack a city or do a "quest".
The combat is quite simplistic and it's something similar to what you would probably find in a mobile game. Actually this is exactly what you would find in a mobile game because there was a mobile game which was based off of this one which is now closed together with the development studio. On the one hand I'm sad that the company went broke because I like this game, but on the other hand it looks like it was heading towards the direction of mobile trash so it's probably for the best that it went under. Good fucking riddance.
As I said the combat is fairly simplistic. It takes place on a 6x3 grid. On the left half of the screen you can place up to a maximum of 6 heroines. Each girl heroine has her own attack type, stats, and abilities that she can use, though not all are unique and there are some that are shared amongst them. After you level her up she will eventually unlock her ultimate which can range from useless to OP to somewhat useful depending on your strategy. Using abilities requires a resource called "brave" which is generated during the battles as you fight. The catch is that you get more brave the more damage you receive so sometimes losing a heroine will generate the amount of brave that you need to fire up that one ability that will win you the battle in one fell swoop.
Again the game isn't really all that complex but it's nice that it let's you figure out many different strategies thanks to the large number of waifus avaiable (more on that later). The game is fairly easy for the most part on the normal difficulty, though there will be occasional difficulty spikes here and there especially towards the campaign. For the most part you should be able to easily win every battle with little to no planning, but like I said there will be a few battles which will require a bit of planning before hand, and even a bit of grinding.
Speaking of which, every turn you earn gold (the only resource) from you conquered territories which you will use to replenish your troops after a battle as well as upgrading them, which means that your heroines will have more troops under their command which means they have more "HP" and can deal more damage; you get the idea.
There are also items that you can find during your playthrough. Many of them are boring and not that amazing +1 to a stat type of items, but there are some which are EXTREMELY powerful such as those which generate brave points every turn or ones that allow you to shrug off damage.
That's pretty much does it for the strategy half. Not super-duper indepth, but it gets the job done. The game also comes with a visual novel element too. There are many segments of story that you have to go through in between the battles. Just like the strategy part, the story isn't all that incredible but I had fun with it. It's structured in a very typical anime fashion where it gradually unravels the REAL bad guy behind the whole thing.
You play as a guy called Chihaya which is a gay ass name, so the devs in their unlimited kindness allow you to name him to something more hetero so I named him Chad. So Chad comes down from the sky just as the other main character named Himiko, a shrine maiden, is getting beat up by a bunch of bandits. She had a vision about a great evil that is plaguing the world and also a hero that will come from the sky who will unite the entire globe in order to defeat the said evil. So yeah it's like an isekai but not quite an isekai.
Anyway the MC is really generic and boring. If you thought you were getting anything close to Rance you could not have been any more wrong. He's yet another one of these bland nice guy types that I can never self insert with. During the course of the game you will add many, many, MANY waifus to your harem. How many exactly? I think I counted close to 80 of them! The catch is that all are gender bent caricatures of famous men in history. Ever wanted to have a threesome with female Kubilai Khan and Marco Polo, well now you can do that and more!
Seeing how the harem is so huge it should come to no surprise that not all waifus are equal. Some are more well developed (in more ways than one...) than others. Every now and again you are presented with the option of going on a "quest" with a waifu at the end of which you her affection to you will increase by a point. The more points you have with her the more abilities she unlocks, culminating at her getting her ultimate when she completely falls in love for you. And yes, this also means banging her, however be aware that not all waifus get an H scene. Some of them, mainly the Japanese ones, will get a few, others will only get one, and others will get none.
Now I really liked the art style. It's very vibrant and imaginative and every single one of the girls looks unique, however I have one huge problem with it and that is that HALF of them are damn lolis! Now I understand that it is legally mandated in Japan to have lolis in your anime, but come on! There are just way too many of them and most of them have H scenes too. You mean to tell me that boadcious babes like Lu Bu and Ashoka have none, while Lancelot gets THREE WHOLE FUCKING SCENES FUCK THIS SHIT JAPAN FUCK YOU!!! I was legitimately cringing during some of these scenes and I CTRL quickly through them because I got so uncomfortable watching. Another bad aspect to note is that, because there are so many waifus to cover, the CG's have very few variants; most of them will have none actually. Other than that, like I said the game looks gorgeous.
Speaking of gorgeous I want to take a minute to talk about the UI design in this game which is almost flawless. I am an old PC game who grew up with games from the 90's and I remember that interfaces back then were so beautifully designed and had such artistic flair to them and they managed to immerse you so well inside the game world. They weren't always all that ergonomic but they were a treat to look at. Nowadays game interfaces are more user friendly, but on the flip side look like they're copy pasted from MS Office. Eiyuu Senki manages to mix the best of both worlds. It is both easy to use as well as pretty look at. Hats off to these devs.
The music is surprisingly decent. I like that each zone has its own specific theme for it. I'm not going to listen to any of the tracks outside of the game though. The VA is also great for the most part, although for some characters it quickly got on my nerves (I hate Lancelot).
Overall this was a very good game. The combat is simplistic, but the fact that it mixes in visual novel segments means that the it doesn't overstay its welcome. Not a very good strategy game, mind you, but a very good genre mix that kept my interest for a couple of months. It has a lot of content to keep you busy for quite a while. Finishing it took me almost 60 hours, although you might get more or less than depending on how you set up the combat animation sliders. After you beat the game you unlock a newgame+ mode where you start again from 0 but you get to keep all the items from your previous run. I haven't played it in this mode yet so I can't really say anything about it.
I wanted to give this 5 stars since this is waaaaaaay better than 99% of the crap that you usually find on this website, but the excessive ammount of lolis as well as the simplicity of the combat system made me give it 4 stars: an excellent addition to any tactically-minded coomer's collection.