Probably overthinking a goofy anime game franchise but I find it interesting that they'd choose to combine Germany and Russia into one aggressor nation for their WWII facsimile 
I can't really call it liberal anti-communist brainworms though since the East Europan Imperial Alliance is more reminiscent of Imperial Germany than anything and I think the devs were consciously avoiding depicting anything even close to fascism or communism because Sega didn't want their wholesome anime WWII game to be political
spoiler
That didn't stop them from writing in a distrusted and hated minority that was sort of a stand-in for Jews though
I was looking for PSP games to check out and remembered Valkyria Chronicles went PSP exclusive after the first game. I played the first Valkyria Chronicles when it was released on PC a while back and while I enjoyed the turn-based tactical gameplay I sort of hated the game's aesthetics. I'm sorry, but I can't take your story about the horrors of war seriously when it's depicted in bright pastel colours and when everyone involved looks like a Pokemon trainer. Plucky child soldiers is also one of my most hated anime tropes
However the OG game is amazing.
Also the character stories are all really good and for an XCOM style RPG the combat is cool.
Alicia and Selveria are cool as hell too
I like the game but holy hell does it have major major issues. There's a few maps from mid to late game that I had to redo on my first play just because of mid battle events that happen after one of your guys crosses some invisible map line that activates reinforcements or some plot weapon or whatever and makes it hard to use your scouts as scouts. Almost a really great game that is just a good game due to some minor stuff that adds up. Also has a bit of the fire emblem problem where some unit types are just better.
makes it hard to use your scouts as scouts
If I recall correctly scouts were absurdly overpowered because flanking is absurdly powerful so just having tonnes of scouts and rushing the fuck out of everything worked amazingly.
I did like the game but I couldn't get fully invested into the story and characters
I actually enjoyed the game's aesthetics on the basis that I saw it as reverse Orientalist. Let's just mash WWI and WWII together, ignore how they're each historically regarded and use a tone that is completely off, and just pick and choose whatever aesthetics we think look cool and plop whatever story we feel like into it. I genuinely don't think there's any deeper meaning to the bad guys being geographically Russian because that would require closer attention and faithfulness to the setting than anything else about the game indicates.
If you wanna say that Orientalism is still bad when directed towards Europe, that's totally valid and fair, and my take is probably bad from an objective standpoint, however, I just personally enjoyed seeing a perspective capable of treating it that way. The concept of "WWI but with the tone of Fire Emblem" is just so alien that my curiosity overrides my sense of it being inappropriate.
If it is Orientalism directed towards Europe, would that be Occidentalism? 🤔
It's good to note that the parts of Europe being otherized here are not Belgium or England. They are on the east. Which had always been subject to Orientalism in the first place. Everything from the accusations of slavic byzantinism to the allegations of turkification levied against cultures of the balkans was part and parcel of how Europe (western europe) sees the world: a series of imagined others which exists only as a contrast to itself.
That european identity expands and contracts at will. There are moments when the spanish and the portuguese are regard as too mixed and too arabized to be European. There are moments when Ukrainian-Russians are regarded as western while Russian-Ukrainians are part of the mongol hordes.
It was more of a joke, but yes, you're absolutely right, Eastern Europe has always been othered when it is convenient for western Europe to do so. It's almost like all these racist terms are all completely arbitrary or something!
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
also what about the troops that you get that are so racist that they cant concentrate in combat when they're next to a teammate with a different race lol
Otoh the game proves that bi people make superior soldiers because they get accuracy bonuses from trying to impress everybody.
Show
I enjoyed this game. Maybe I played it with my brain off? I actually never really took it for ww2.
Agreed, and I'll expand game universes with the legend of heroes series and its darling treatment towards the not German empire of Erebonia.
Absolutely great time period to world build in with the industrial revolution just beginning and the transformation and transition of the Political economy from a decenteralized feudal agrarian mode of production towards proto-industrial despotism with bourgeoise elements slowly emerging to supplant the prior order - all of that is great lore writing combined with the lived-in feeling you get faffing about with NPCs living their daily lives. Like I get there really aren't that many countries that you can use as examples to sorta base your fictional industrializing countries on - and fuck the British and all that, get out of the lime light limey slimeys - but still, the fucking Germans? I guess you could say they've tried to balance it out with including a look into a post-revolutionary republican France with their newest releases. But this kinda just becomes a complaint about the germanify everything trope the Japanese love using if I keep ranting on about jt.
There was a fourth one? I thought there was the first game, then two PSP sequels, the second of which they did not even bother to release outside of Japan
It's funny how often Japanese developers end up defaulting to just doing Europe when they're trying to come up with a fantasy world, like here's the (I think now slightly outdated) world map for the Ys series: https://www.digitalemelas.com/images/map_4.jpg
It's either that or small blobs of land with a single settlement on each like in classic JRPGs
Yeah my brain was off I guess 
