Banner of the Maid

Chinese Fire Emblem game with a French Revolution setting. Surprisingly good actually.

French Fire Emblem with idiosyncratic (you like that?) translations (Crash them!), a very fun, alternate history take on the French Revolution and a tiny bit of magic. Interesting tactics, characters, and mechanics along with some unlockable character hijinx made for a very fun playthrough, though one I probably won't repeat.
This game definitely was designed for the male gaze; if fan service is a deal breaker then go ahead and ignore, if you can atleast look past it, though I know its more likely you're here for it, play to your heart's content

If I already played Fire Emblem then Banner of Main is definitely worth a try with few tweaks. If not just emulate those, then given Reverse Collapse a try and only after that return here. Only if you are a frankophile go straight for this.

Gameplay

Gameplay wise it's a classic SRPG with rock-paper-scissor combat sprinkled with some VN elements for story telling. Still the environments are quite nice, varied (not to mention they fit the story) and often quite well balanced. It's nothing groundbreaking but good enough to stand on it's own. To your disposal are mostly weapons (with little variety), extremely limited number of active skills and then some passives you can pick and unlock. Special mechanics in levels are rare, even though some concepts - like player choices affecting whether citizens will help you or not were quite refreshing. Unfortunately they usually went nowhere.

My main gripe with how the game plays is the abysmal speed things happen at. I would say installing Cheat Engine and making the game much faster is almost a necessity. Even in early stages I was constantly reloading saves and the waiting got quite tiring. Sure you can save yourself some reloads by grinding the character levels, but that requires to play certain stages over and over again where the slow speed comes into effect again. The devs really missed a mark here and I doubt it was ever playtested by a people who weren't the devs and already knew how to finish each stages effectively.

Also if the game forces player to use external cheat tools it's kinda straining their resolve not to start changing other variables - like idk money, exp, and so on.
Setting up players on this slippery slope is a failure of the devs.


Story

Story is essentially a retelling of early days of the French Revolutions with some arbitrary shadowy villans showed in. It's nothing special and don't expect some amazing plot twists - especially as general sequence of events copies our history so we all kinda know how things go. Still even for seeing a story with all these historical figures, most of them immortalized in European collective consciousness was nice. The devs clearly went beyond skimming a wikipedia article.

Presentation

Story is presented as a visual novel, which is quite ok for me, especially as the translations while not perfect is usable. Still I would have appreciated few more backdgrounds. As for game stages the devs went for classic pixelart + isometric view and it generally works well enough. At few spots It can be hard to judge how far player is from something on the grid due to tall grass or something, but given it's a turn based game it doesn't matter that much.

What is largely lacking is the audio experience. The game has very few music tracks, which is a shame. Vanguard Sounds have made some really nice BGMs and I would have liked to see more of their work here. Also the voice acting is essentially useless. Each character has only few lines they repeat to no end be it in gameplay or sometimes in VN sequences.

Conclusion

Overall if you are already a fan of the genre and have played most of the classics give this a try. However I strongly recommend to speeding up the game from the start, without it by the 8 hour I was so tired of it I put the game on pause for half a year.

I'd say for the price, the game is "fine". Nothing special, just...fine.
It does scratch that Fire Emblem itch and the setting is refreshing (and comically absurd because of the Chinese voices, but I kinda like it), but the gameplay itself feels kinda bland. It has everything one could want from a game like this, but it doesn't really "click" for me.
For a game that relies heavily on its story to keep you going, the mediocre translation is a disappointment. I also find that the entire pacing isn't great, especially at the beginning. The tutorial felt like it missed a lot of core elements, but maybe that's just me.
If you find the game on sale, give it a try.

Game is alright but feels like they rushed to finish it and has alot of smaller problems but I would still recommend it for the low price.
The biggest issue in gameplay is that almost every map has enemy reinforcements that often spawn behind you and sometimes can move as soon as they spawn. While the game doesnt feature perma death, losing two units already costs you more money than you make in a mission forcing you to reset in trial and error.
The balance is another issue. Game and challenge missions are harder early on and than get easier for the most part. Unit balancing is atrocious, you get two heal/support units but one is faster, has a good personal skill and higher movement range. Artillery units are useless because they not only have the lowest movement and speed but also only a mediocre attack stat and predominantly pointless skills. Light infantry are by far the best class in the game, one subclass is a close range immortal dodge tank that basically cant be killed by infantry and can solo every single unit 1 on 1 without losing health, the other one has high speed, attack, range, defense against guns, can have the same maximum attack distance as artillery and gets to act again after using a heroic attack which can be chained (maybe even indefinitely with the right build).
Music and Character art are great but the soundtrack is rather short.
The setting takes place during the french revolution with your brother being Napoleon. Sometimes you fight in the civil war, sometimes british or austrian forces and sometimes assassins or bandits. The story is fictional with Maids being involved in battles (basically girls with superpowers). But the story is set up way too big to only have 5mins of text between chapters and it constantly jumps between places and fast forwards in time leaving you disconnected from all of it.
Game feels like it is rushed, most units dont get multiple promotion options, about half the missions dont have a mission challenge (especially later on), later missions sometimes throw you into battle without any storyline, grindable missions are a repeat of the same two maps but with higher level enemies and more.
YOU WILL ALSO NEED A WALKTHROUGH IF YOU DONT WANT TO MISS OUT ON SIDE MISSIONS, CHARACTERS OR BETTER WEAPONS FOR THE DLC CHARACTER!!!

Nice game, worth buying but dont expect fire emblem level quality. The music is great tho.

"Banner of the Maid" is a very good turn-based strategy game. Its art and sound design are also very good, so if you're a fan of Fire Emblem you'll appreciate what this game has to offer.