An excellent game, made nearly inaccessible to all but hardcore gamers by a truly intimidating learning curve.
When most people think of strategy titles, it's no surprise that Advance Wars is the first title that pops into the mind of the general public. Generation of Chaos offers many elements of Advance Wars, but instead offers a fantasy theme, and about a hundred more levels of depth and complexity. While the main game is focused on Gena's campaign, Generation of Chaos actually offers a multitude of campaigns that span many different stories, and have a different hero and storyline for each.
The gameplay for Generation of Chaos is divided into chapters, and are centered around huge, "board game"-like maps, in which you can move your units around, engage in combat, and execute all kinds of micro-managment to build upon your army strength and economy. If that basic premise sounds like Advance Wars, that's because that's essencially what it is, but that's also where the similarities end.
As said before, this game goes a lot more in depth. Instead of sending in one to five units in a pre-set battle that will conclude a victor based on "rock, paper scissors"-esque strategy, Generation of Chaos sends you into battle with 30 player units against 30 enemy units that rush into battle in a real-time sequence, and allows your own skill to dictate the outcome of the battle. Usually, there will be a definite advantage that a unit type has against other unit types, but since Generation of Chaos is, in fact, not a "rock, paper scissors"-esque strategy game like Advance Wars, there's a lot more control here.
In combat, you start off by choosing a basic formation for them to go to battle in. The most useful ones seem to be KMI(Kamikaze), or AGR(Aggresive), even still, a lot of the others are useful for defensive tactics, taking on foes with ranged attacks, and preserving your leader in the event you bite off more than you can chew. From there, you can order either your units, or their commander to move wherever you want them to go, as well as interrupt the battle to use whatever items and techniques you have equipped to your character. The archive of techniques is simply huge, and can do anything from dealing out massive damage to crippling your opponents stats, however, every technique consumes from a small amount of each character's allotted SP, so this must be conserved and used strategically. For even more strategic measures, commanders who get a lot of kills in combat can build up their power gauge to unleash powerful special techniques that are often accompanied by neat anime sequences, but to build up for these usually requires putting your commander out where he/she can become the unguarded target of an entire unit's attacks.
Effectively used, these combat options would allow you to go into battle completely at a disadvantage, but use your own navigation skills and timing to emerge victorious.
The object of winning in single combats are to overcome the enemy commander and take his/her hit points down to zero, and the object of completing a chapter is to overcome the boss commander and take over their nation. Along the way, however, you will also encounter many monsters who have allegiance to no nation, and are just defending the area they reside in.
Each commander you defeat, allegiance or none, will be captured as a prisoner. From hereon, you can execute, release, or negotiate with them. While executing them is the quickest solution, it will increase the rate in which you encounter monsters(especially undeads). Releasing them is the alternative option to this, but there's no guarantee that they won't come right back and end up fighting you again. Since both of those options are iffy, there's the totally safe and beneficial option to negotiate.
If you have units with high charm, or perhaps a story-based relation to the character you want to negotiate with, there's a whole world of "trial & error" opened up now for you to take a shot at negotiating with your prisoners. If successful, they will pledge allegiance to you and fight alongside your army, but there's generally a low negotiation success rate with a lot of characters, so it takes quite a bit of patience. Enemies that belong to a nation are far more open to negotiation if they see that you've overcome their nation's main commander, and commanders can also be bribed out of their position with offerings, if you prefer underhanded tactics. There's also the option to build offices where you can obtain more commanders, if the negotiation gets to be too much.
In the world of micro-management, there's a ton more levels of depth added here. In every town, there are shops you can use to buy spells and equipment for your commanders that range from weapons to armor to all kinds of accessories. While you can capture areas to gain more income per turn, to truly start raking in cash, you must fortify the areas you have under your control. This will not only rise the area's defense against enemy attacks, but done properly, can result in airships which simply do wonders for transportation.
In addition to modifying the areas under your control, you can also modify the terrain to gain the terrain advantage in combat, or gain access to areas that were initially impossible to navigate through, and explore unowned areas to gain anything from items to income resources to secret party members.
If all of this sounds hard to learn, that's because it is... which brings us to the major backdraw of Generation of Chaos: the learning curve. The game is excellent, but the steep learning curve can range anywhere from 12 hours to an effective 24 hours. There are tons of acronyms and functions with no tutorial to help learn the game, and by time the manual begins to make sense, you'll likely have already given in to just doing some trial & error and will know how to play already. It's definitely worth it, but will be mind boggling to the casual strategy gamer who's idea of a deep and complex strategy title goes no deeper than Advance Wars or Final Fantasy Tactics.
All the campaigns of Generation of Chaos are presented with full Japanese and English voice acting, and concluded in a neat "anime episode" fashion, and a lot of the storylines go into a lot of detail, while introducing the characters in a cinematic fashion.
Generation of Chaos is a very solid and nicely done title, but is simply so mind-boggling for a first timer that very few aside from the hardcore gamers will ever see it's genius.