Alienating main story with no player agency + Compelling DLC content with traditional VN storytelling and romance + Good quality of voice acting and sound design + Still solid and challenging strategy game mechanics

With all its flaws, I still wholeheartedly recommend playing it, especially if you’re into sci-fi or the space-opera formula. But it was also, thanks to its DLC and fun game mechanics, an ultimately positive experience and decent point of closure for the Sunrider franchise. It also contained some absolutely awful pieces of contrived, depressing storytelling, leading the main campaign’s plot into that awful place of “baiting for a sequel you never want to see”. It’s a strange example of a misguided attempt at boosting the appeal of an OELVN not by offering something unique, but through clunky mimicry of Japanese games, which in the end only proved counter-productive. In the end, Sunrider: Liberation Day felt like a step backwards from the original, initially offering much less variety and weaker immersion, and only later somewhat making up for its shortcomings. Against all odds, it let me leave this game with purely positive feelings. It was even written well enough to make the characters I previously completely didn’t care about somewhat amusing – the cast, of course, remained pretty flat and generic, but I’ve warmed up towards even the most annoying members of it after finishing their respective routes (although the first officer, Ava, is still the only character I really ever cared about in this game). While I was sorely disappointed with the main story of Liberation Day, I was positively surprised with the quality of this “bonus” content, especially because it directly answered to my disgust with original conclusion, making averting it both mine and protagonist’s main motivation to go forward.

This content, now available for free with every purchase of the game, not only opens a way towards a more satisfying conclusion, but also provides the player with an opportunity to pursue romance s with the girls other than the one from the main plot (along with h-scenes unlockable with a free patch).

However, the authors most likely understood their mistake and released a DLC which at least partially mitigated this blunder – an alternate timeline scenario, focused purely on VN-style storytelling and sending the protagonist back in time to fix his failures. This would be an absolute deal-breaker for me – and probably was for many people playing the game at its release.

Sunrider liberation day forced