A pretty fun, but sadly short, action strategy RPG.
The whole game is basically a visual novel, but an extremely linear one at that. A LINEAR Visual Novel. It's like, I don't know, getting only one path in a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. Not to mention it's fairly lighthearted, so the short length of the game will really annoy you.
Fortunately, the game is also built around the combat engine, which as I mentioned above is a realtime party-vs-party thing. What you do is select which characters to use in a fight, place them accordingly on the battlefield, then start the battle. Melee characters will close in, casters will cast spells, all the good stuff.
The CONCEPT is awesome; who ever heard of Visual Novels with properly developed battle systems? It's like you're playing a RTS-RPG hybrid, with a stable of characters to develop. The problem lies in the EXECUTION - true to the genre, any depth the game has quickly runs out of steam.
Sure, the characters have stats and equipment and classes and skills, just like in regular RPGs. Awesome!; except that you don't really control anything, when levelups happen the stats are increased automatically, and gear is what you'd expect of regular JRPGs: extremely linear wood --> stone --> metal --> gold type of equipment progression, although there are one or two items which you may change depending on what kind of enemies you'll be facing (not that this kind of choice is anything other than rare...).
Non-story characters are hireable, and can change classes! Woot? Wait, any time you change a character's class, it will drop back to level 1. So what's the point? You keep any skills learned. There's a gender division in class availability though, ugh, but at least any male/female character can eventually learn all skills available to classes that gender can take.
Casual players probably won't fight enough to care about class changing, but at least the option is there for us crazy grinders. Given that any character can eventually learn all skills available to their gender-classes, doesn't that take away from their uniqueness and make them more like faceless stats-on-legs? To a certain extent, true, but the game is short enough that it doesn't feel that bad (you'll be done with the game before you can get that bored), plus having all skills means adaptable characters, which is good.
There's not too much depth, ultimately, in the game - the story is especially annoying, who the hell releases one-path-only Visual Novels? argh - but it's short enough to allow full exploration of the combat, while remaining easy enough for casual players who'd just prefer to blitz through the fighting.
The game should be dirt cheap by now though - get it if you're both a fan of VNs and want to see how one with a non-mindless combat engine plays. It's actually pretty decent - but it feels like a quick job. Any self-respecting role playing pro can easily imagine fleshing out the combat, and the game would've been even more attractive for that; heck, I'd bet people would actually buy it for the gameplay and ignore the lacklustre story side.