Sakura Wars (Saturn) has been a very pleasant game to play on the side as a counterweight for difficulty modded FF8. Presentation wise it's delightful - soulful 90s anime with an actual budget and with voice actors who clearly had fun with their performances. It's divided into episodes with save screens assuming the role of the bits before and after "ad breaks" , if it was an actual show. It does the same thing I liked about Persona 5 where doing well in the character interactions (which are the bread and butter of the game) also benefits you in combat in the form of stat boosts. Consequently, Sakura herself is the most useless member of the cast but she might also be saved for last in the character development front and the following increased usefulness in combat - which might actually work out better than the typical way one might expect the story to go, where the main character gets the most front loaded exposition. This way, the pacing is smoother.
Combat itself is bog standard tile based strategy with no major flaws or strengths. You have up to seven mechas on the field and they have different standard and special attacks. Some do heavy single target melee damage with both while others might do a long katana stab or horizontal firearm spray as a standard attack, and a cross pattern fire beam or long straight energy slash as the special. The special attack animations are great and not too long (looking at you, FF8 summons) - that said, unit movement is sloooow and you have to manually press a button each time to speed it up. A lot of the time is also spent simply traversing empty terrain to reach the boss who might not act until you reach it.
The game is definitely easy and I think they could have made it a fair bit harder, but I wouldn't say this game needs genuinely difficult combat. Having its focus and pacing revolve around the VN bits was the correct choice for the devs to make as that aspect is its strength.
I looked into the rest of the games and I am certainly intrigued, but 2-4 haven't been translated and even if they were to receive fan translations (no idea about the team's plans) it would still take years for the entire series to be translated. That said, the fan translation is very good. I haven't come across anything cringeworthy or parts that I didn't understand. They opted not to use honorifics and translated all the military ranks as well, which helps with the flow. No TL's notes needed.
In FF8, I've reached disc 4, or the final dungeon. Technically, disc 4 starts with the last boss of the second-to-last dungeon. The dungeon was short but filled with hard bosses. Raijin & Fujin must have taken me ten attempts until I got a stable start and got Rinoa's limit break rolling. With the mod, she becomes uncontrollable and casts random spells from a list at 4x power as opposed to using her actual spells. That's possibly the mod's biggest weakness - fights easily become front-heavy as you pray to the RNG gods to give you a good ATB gauge at start and hope the wrong members don't get hit until you've rolled out all the buffs. This is kind of the opposite of how it worked in 12 where bosses were bottom-heavy and the last 20% could take as long as the initial 80%.
The mod does a fine job of working within the confines of the final dungeon's gimmicks. The gist is, you lose everything except melee attacks and junctions and must beat bosses to regain the ability to use magic, items, summons, resurrection, saves(!) etc by beating bosses. You might expect a boss where you can only do standard attacks to be easy and simple, and in vanilla this is indeed the case - the boss has 10k hp and can be 2-3 shot. With the mod, he has 40-50k hp and only casts magic, so I give Squall auto reflect and go to town. Except, he uses drain which goes through reflect and I cannot heal via leech since the boss is mechanical. Thus I give Squall zombie status junction, have him hit himself to inflict it, and the boss can no longer directly damage me. He summons adds with physical attacks though, so I inlict zombie on them and when the boss casts full-life on Squall for an attempted instant kill, it gets reflected to the zombified adds instead and they die. That's a surprising amount of thinking outside the box required for a supposed tank and spank boss.
