A innovative strategy RPG for people who don't love Japanese strategy RPGs. And it has a decent story to boot.
The first thing to note is that the meat of the gameplay are the battles, which makes sense, but they are long and time consuming and fairly addictive for the most part. I wont detail the system since gamespot does it in their review better than I do but it feels natural and is a fairly clever way of mixing third person mechanics with a JRPG element.
The story does a good job of developing the main characters (albeit, like all anime, a bit melodramatic) and more importantly gives you context and drive to completing the many battles. I've found myself about 15 hours into the game still intrigued by the story: so far so good.
When you're not battling you'll be spending your time at HQ, levelling up units, gaining access to new orders (attack orders or stat increases for units in battle), buying reports (supplemental chapters to either watch or play through) or developing new equipment with the experience and money you earn in battle. In case you ever feel behind on either of those two fronts, the game has a selection of skirmish battles to play to gain extra XP and money since you can't play through the operations in the main quest more than once.
The graphics are gorgeous and integrate the 2D style anime visuals with 3D visuals quite well.
I found the challenge to be pretty variable. Some missions are a breeze and result in good rankings without breaking a sweat, other battles have seemed near impossible and had to be attempted four or five times before finding a strategy that worked.
One thing is I found the reports (the extra side chapters) that are displayed to be bought tend to be fairly random, so far one report that I know should have shown up by now hasn't yet and since reports help increase the amount of status perks for your main characters, this is a bit concerning. It's not a major detraction from the game, but it's a shame this bug wasn't hammered out before release.
Other asides is that there's no Trophy support for it, but I'm not really one to give a care about stuff like that, but if it's something you keep dear to your heart maybe you should avoid playing it.
Overall, it's a great game, I've been very pleasantly surprised by it thus far. If you're interested in the game and are a bit iffy on Japanese Strategy RPGs give this one a look. Though, if you already hate Japanese RPGs this one isn't going to be one to sway you.