A unique game and one that fits into any collection.
The gameplay was somewhat interesting. Having a history of playing Real-Time Strategy games on the PC, I found the gameplay extremely easy. In fact, the player can stick to one strategy for about 3/4 of the game. The units are well differentiated, although there aren't many of them. Each unit for the different factions are unique. Having the ghost type units adds another layer of depth and strategy to this game. The actual gameplay is somewhat repetitive. Halfway into the game, every level play just like all the others. There is perhaps one exception to this in the later levels. The ease of acquiring some of the best units makes the lower level ones useless. The player will eventually get access to all factions in the game, and that should provide another layer of depth. However, they would most likely just use the same repetitive strategy and ignore the other factions. The constant pausing gets to be an annoyance later in the game.
The graphics are excellent. Not quite as good as the other Vanillaware (hint) game, but still gorgeous. The animations don't look as smooth as they could be. Also, there seems to be only one type of background and foreground tile during the entire game. Incredibly, having around 60+ monsters attacking each other on screen does not slow the game down one bit. That's probably due to the lower quality animations.
The sound is nice. The voice acting is pretty good as well as the background music. The music slowly becomes annoying over time, but so is most music in games. However, the variety of music is lacking. Playing through the game, and later going through the soundtrack, the vast majority of them are high strung pieces.
The value is very good. The $40 tag is a decent price for this novelty game. It also comes with 25 bonus missions once you've finished the story line. Unfortunately, no New Game+ option makes the replay value...nonexistent.
I added a lot of tilt to this game because I thoroughly enjoyed playing it. Although the game is very easy for someone who has even a shred of experience with RTS games on the computer, it was still an enjoyable experience. The game itself was most likely made to introduce the RTS genre to a Japanese audience not familiar with them. Hopefully we'll see more of these games on console systems as developers study and improve upon games like this.