Build the academy. Bring them home.
You are the director of an independent military academy above the Shigure reservoir. The ministry pays the grant and decides where your cadets are sent. It will only ever learn the number. You will learn the names.
Spend the week with them on campus: drills, meals, card games and long talks under the lamps. Then pick your squad, take a contract and lead them into the field against the flesh demons pressing on the region. Whoever you leave behind does not come back.
Every cadet is a real character, not a generated one. Each has a painted portrait, their own first words, a personal story told across four chapters, and likes and dislikes you learn over time.
Over 7,000 lines of written dialogue. Walk up and talk on campus, follow six storylines across the years, and choose how you answer.
Bonds that matter. Rapport grows from Acquaintance to Friendly, Close and Confidant through time, gifts and birthdays. Optional romance exists between adult peers.
Every campaign is different. Who enrols, and when, changes each time. Lose someone and they are gone for good.
A week at the academy
Three orders a week. From Monday morning to Friday dusk, then a free Saturday night and lights out.
Things to do together: fish the old pier for 24 species (and something older), cook 18 dishes for the night shift, play MEKA CIRCUIT, the 24-card table game, run the Sync Drill simulator, tend the hydroponics, explore the abandoned works, and join the Radio, Engineering, Kendo and Garden clubs.
There are lantern festivals, an inter-academy exhibition, the Year in Review, and Graduation Day, when your cadets take their postings and a new intake arrives.
Turn-based tactics where every turn costs something
Grid tactics with no hidden dice. Deploy 8 to 10 units. Each takes two actions, and every damage forecast is exact.
Frames and soldiers. Pilots take the four frames (Rainbird, Bulwark, Longbow and Kestrel) into battle beside Vanguard, Medic and Marksman sections.
Read the field. Cover protects from one side only, high ground gives an edge, and you can inspect what every demon intends to do next. Dormant packs wake on contact.
Six battlefields, each with its own threat: a night freight train through the Kasane yard, floodgates at the Shigure sluice, unstable ruins, wildfire in the cedar pass, an avalanche chute on the snow line, and live cables in the abandoned works.
Eight kinds of mission, from rescues, evacuations and convoy escorts to extractions and the hunt for a pack's alpha.
A boss every season: The Matriarch of Kasane, The Drowned Colossus, The Cedar Warden and The Pale Colossus.
Losses are permanent
A downed cadet can still be carried out, if you reach them within a few enemy rounds. Leave them, and they are gone. After every battle, the report reads the names: who returned, who was evacuated, who was lost. The injured spend weeks in the infirmary, and the memorial wall keeps the rest. Play on Ironman, and the ministry can close the academy for good.
Run the academy
Upgrade six facilities, and balance funding, alloy, morale and renown.
Hold the line on the Front, a map of six regions under pressure.
Fit gear and paint your frames in the workshop, and grow each cadet's skills and talents.
No premium currency, no loot boxes, no daily-login pressure.