Banner of the Maid

Easily one of the better SRPGs around, only held back by subpar voice acting (which can be muted) and some sluggish animations (which can be sped up with CE).
People complaining about 'sudden/unexpected reinforcements' clearly can’t grasp tooltips written in plain English, so their reviews can be safely ignored.
The later chapters are best enjoyed on General difficulty for maximum masochism, as the combat difficulty ramps up sharply and managing your (very) limited resources becomes the most crucial part of the game.
More than worth the price it’s being sold for.

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

It's a fun little pseudo-historical turn-based strategy game, with some cute french waifus. The gameplay is the main draw, it's very similar to Fire Emblem but more forgiving with no-perma-death and free opportunities to level grind. It's simple to understand but there is a lot of depth with the skills you can learn.

The music is fine, the story is fine. It suffers from some not-so-great Chinese to English translation errors, but it does the job of getting you to the next fight.

The girls are cute, the boys are not annoying, there are a lot of missable collectibles if you're going for all achievements, it's just a neat little game that will keep you engaged for a good amount of hours.

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.

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

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

Absolute hidden gem. Quite a solid story with large likeable cast. But more than anything, engaging and intricate gameplay that is challenging enough to be rewarding but not unfair. Highly recommend