Mask of Arcadius Characters: Kryska, Cosette, and...
Kryska Stares
Kryska is the most intriguing of the cast, because she doesn't look like any Stock Romanceable Option to me, and in fact as far as I've seen the game makes no effort to suggest she's an option at all. Instead, her entire thing is that she's a consummate soldier, which leads to her clashing with Icari because Icari is much more of a lone wolf sort of individual, not to mention was originally outright a mercenary. She's also one of the funnier characters in the game, surprisingly, in that her behavior and lines border into the ridiculous with no sense of self-awareness on her part: her voiced/combat dialogue involves a lot of stuff like saying 'weaponized diplomacy was successful' when she lands a shot, and while her non-combat dialogue tends to be less overtly weird she still sticks stringently to Proper Military Behavior Ten-Hut Sir! Which is a fairly stark contrast with everyone else; even Ava tends to be somewhat informal in how she executes her job and all, let alone the wackiness of Asaga, Claude, etc.
Her actual plot contribution is, uh, nearly nonexistent. She gets assigned to your crew, you're allowed to be suspicious of her as a spy for the foreign military that provided her, Ava goes digging and determines her service record is probably falsified and concludes that she's some elite commando, and when you catch her in the act of trying to steal technical information on the Sunrider it's time to either throw her into the brig or say you trust her... and then this gets interrupted by an attack and if, as I did, you went with 'throw her in the brig' it doesn't end up mattering. She launches for the fight and the player character automatically decides to extend trust to her afterward with zero input from the player.
And that's it. She doesn't act as your connection with the Solar Alliance or anything, her part in the plot is over and it's just time for her to be one of your Ryder pilots.
... okay, that's not strictly true, in that she acts as your escort in a later sequence and gets captured with you and blah blah blah, but she could've been literally any random Solar Alliance officer and it wouldn't change anything.
This is a bit of a recurring issue with the Ryder pilots, that they tend to get their join-up arc and then drop away in relevancy after that, with even attempts by the plot to bring them back into prominence tending to do so in a manner that doesn't matter. When Asaga gets kidnapped, you might expect this to mean you do a rescue mission where you lack the Blackjack, but nope: the rescue happens entirely in visual novel form and then you get a mission for the escape with Asaga ready to participate.
I said earlier that Ava is the only character I straightforwardly like in the game: I like what Kryska seems to be, it's just we don't see enough of her for it to gel into something concrete. If the game lasted longer and did more with Kryska, I'd probably rate her as my second-favorite character for Good Writing. In particular, her interactions with Icari are both consistently enjoyable in their own right and in particular are unequivocally Icari's best-written moments, and so Icari becomes much less irritating to have around once Kryska enters the story. It's especially nice to see two characters having significant interactions with each other instead of everything being about the player character, which is otherwise a bit lacking in the game, contributing to my overall impression that the game is intended to be an 'audience surrogate gets to enjoy wooing girls etc' sort of experience; Ava in her capacity as your first officer is, for a good chunk of the game, the only character you interact with in a manner other than 'private 1v1 conversation' more than very occasionally.
One curious bit I honestly can't parse is that Icari keeps calling Kryska 'soldier-boy'. If the two were male I'd assume this was Icari getting on Kryska's case about her obsession with proper military decorum and nothing more, but since they're both girls it ends up leaving me wondering if there's meant to be a crack about Kryska's lack of femininity to it or if that implication was simply overlooked. It's sufficiently murky in its handling I'm not even entirely sure it's not 'Icari thinks Kryska actually is male', even though that seems fairly ridiculous on the face of it.
Cosette Cosmos
Cosetta is uuuuh a thing. I spent a while certain she was going to join your team eventually, or at least optionally, but it didn't happen and digging around shows that in the next game it's possible to recruit her.. sort of... not in actual gameplay terms. I still suspect that her joining is the eventual intent of the game's overall design, but as of this writing no game in the series works that way.
Nonetheless, I'm talking about her because she has like an actual personality and something resembling a storyline -by contrast I'm not going to be talking about the 'real villain' of the game because honestly there's nothing there. He's a bad guy who does bad things in bad guy ways because bad guy tropes blah blah blah I don't care.
Cosette, meanwhile, is a 'pirate queen' who looks like she's maybe twelve years old... and this is an actual plotpoint! Turns out she comes from a miserable world filled with like 40 billion people that's basically one giant slum that people are extracting
This whole thing with the Ongessite and all is incidentally probably the most significant/extreme example of the game trying to be Dark And Serious, and even though I actually like bits and pieces of the execution it's very out of place with the rest of the game. It's also got wonkiness, in that it really looks like it's intended as a blatant allegory for criticizing eg America messing with the Middle East over oil but then it makes Ongessite a crucial military resource with mutational effects and the comparison breaks down/goes weird places. I'm not sure why they didn't just make Ongessite a particularly effective spaceship fuel thing, so the comparison was reasonably direct and didn't lead to weird thoughts like 'are the creators trying to suggest Middle Easterners are all crazy mutants because oil is mutagenic??' Or, alternatively, drop the painfully obvious allegory and embrace the 'it's mutational and useful to science' angle, go full-on Space Pirates harvesting Phazon to make supersoldiers. That would actually work quite handily and be a lot more interesting and a lot less cringe-y, not to mention giving some more options for later plot hooks. (eg maybe Cosette would be revealed in a later game to have been actively experimented on, rather than mutated by Ongessite fumes or whatever is supposed to have happened here)
But broadly speaking Cosette is set up as a kind of mundane evil, contrasting against the larger-than-life evil of the Pact forces and their supervillain boss, and while the game has some wonky execution here -Cosette has a Berserker Button about being called little or short, which is handled so poorly I just wince every time it comes up- she's overall the most solid antagonist in the game... so it's unfortunate we don't see her much, and that there's a bizarre breakdown where she decides to ally with Pact forces against Solar Alliance forces because some Pact general offered exactly what she cynically refused to believe was a genuine offer when the Solar Alliance offered it. Like, if she thinks all outsiders will never honor their word because they're just here to exploit Ongessite, why does she randomly side with the villains instead of mistrusting them as well?
Honestly, I'm pretty sure the devs just wanted to have you fight both of their villain groups at once and didn't have a real reason in mind. Alas.
Regardless, Cosette is mostly well-done as a believable Utter Crazy Psychopath, and if the game's tonal issues weren't so tremendous in general I think I'd be reasonably okay with how she's handled.
Kayto Shields
This is the guy you're supposed to be playing as. He looks doofy beyond belief, and it's frankly a bit of a relief we almost never see actual graphics of him. The real reason for that is most likely that Sunrider imagines itself to be the kind of story that's designed for the audience to insert themselves in, rather than the main character being a strong character in their own right... except when it doesn't behave that way at all...
... but I'll take what I can get in this case.
Kayto's personality is kind of all over the place, and not the kind of 'all over the place' that results from an audience surrogate being made carefully limited in personality so any number of choices are valid, but rather the kind of 'all over the place' that shows the writers really don't know what they want him to be at all. In fact, there's an odd element of Kayto's personality seeming to be defined more as something for a given character to play off of than anything else: when you're facing down scumbag villains, Kayto is righteously standing for justice and goodness and No (Wo)Man Left Behind. When you're talking to Chigara, Kayto is endlessly patient and kind for her benefit. When you're talking to Ava, Kayto is mostly-professional but has just enough of a playful trickster to him to get on Ava's nerves and show she has more to her personality than just 'is professional'. When you're talking to Claude, Kayto is legit oblivious enough to let her play out her creepster behavior unhindered, though later on he seems to switch more to pretending to be oblivious while deliberately deflecting her so that's something. When you're talking to Sola, Kayto is all about patience and peptalks, careful to not upset her yet still trying to help her be happy. Only Kryska and Icari don't seem to provoke this from Kayto, and that's in no small part because past their introductory plotlines Kayto largely doesn't interact with them -you tend to just watch them play off of others- and when he does it tends to be in the professional capacity of a military officer interacting with a subordinate. You occasionally get the option to side with Kryska or Icari over a dispute?
Anyway.
Certainly, people behave differently around different people, in different circumstances, but Kayto comes across less like a complex and interesting person wearing slightly different faces for different people and more like he's got no particular personality and is just a vessel for the writers to illustrate whatever they like in regard to other things.
Concrete example: our first scene of the entire game is seeing him meeting Ava and the story establishing that back when they were both in high school together, Ava was the serious go-getter student council president, while Kayto was the goofy prankster. I assumed the intent here was to illustrate that Kayto is a lovable rogue sort of character (And groaned to myself), but then the game doesn't do anything with this supposed quality of Kayto's; Kayto doesn't try to slyly mess with his superiors, or his subordinates, or his enemies, or anyone other than Ava. Instead, it's used to illustrate Ava's personality as a calm and serious professional who dislikes goofing off but doesn't let it get to her particularly generally speaking, and that is an actual quality that carries forward through the entire game.
The end result is pretty odd and almost backwards of the game's apparent intentions. I have difficulty imagining identifying with Kayto enough to get into the game and try to eg chase whichever girl appeals to me; Kayto's personality is too intrusive to act as a real audience surrogate, and yet it's so inconsistent that I can't step back and admire or like the man because he's not a person, he's an evershifting morass of 'whatever the story wants right now'. However, I can easily see eg someone who readily identifies with Chigara pursuing the romance with Chigara because the end result is that they get to enjoy a fantasy in which a wonderful man is endlessly patient with their own shyness and whatnot, which turns Kayto's metamorphic personality into a feature from the opposite angle. Just as the Chigaras of the world can be happy with Kayto's interactions with Chigara fulfilling a particular kind of wish of theirs, so too can the Claudes of the world enjoy a fantasy of aggressively pursuing a relationship with a man wherein he doesn't instantly find this off-putting or confusing or try to turn things into him as the initiator/aggressor, and so on. (Well, up until Kayto starts refusing to play along with Claude, anyway)
It would actually be really fascinating if it was more consistent: Kayto's interactions with Ava don't really come across like an Ava-archetype-wish-fulfillment thing, because the primary thing that defines their personal relationship is that Ava finds Kayto endlessly frustrating. (I dunno, maybe there are women who want Irritating Man To Romance Simulator 9000, and I've just never heard of them?) And of course sequences like Kayto personally zipping in to rescue Asaga come across as much more straightforwardly a stock masculine fantasy. Same with Kayto standing down the villains because he's a Man Of Convictions etc.
Regardless, the overall result is just... strange. And makes it difficult to care about, let alone like, Kayto.
It doesn't help that his voice actor is terrible and listening to him issue the order to fire the Vanguard Cannon sounds exactly like a sixteen-year-old boy trying to imitate a deeper man's voice, failing, and also trying to imitate a vaguely military manner of speaking he saw on TV one time, and failing at that too. There's some iffy voice acting on the other characters -Icari and to a lesser extent Kryska both have lines that sound like they're shooting for and missing a male voice, probably in an attempt to sound military- but Kayto is just plain the worst, and the only voice acting I'd potentially consider as even worse is lines from generic Solar Alliance Cruisers.
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So yeah. Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius is... a weird mess that has some really solid ideas, but doesn't really know what it wants to be, and so all the individual ideas suffer.
It's a Taisen-esque tactics game with a varied cast and strategic depth and a surprisingly decent tactics game!
Except the game is a little too short for the strategic depth to actually hit and the gameplay was clearly given less attention than the visual novel end of things so even the tactical depth is shaky in actual implementation.
It's a wacky comedy where anything goes and it's all okay and family-friendly!
Except when suddenly everything has dark and bloody consequences, or NSFW imagery pops up with no warning whatsoever, or both.
It's a space opera sort of dealy with larger-than-life figures taking on an empire that spans much of a galaxy! There's ancient basically-magical civilizations! Legacy artifacts of untold power! History! Myth!
But then a lot of this is largely tangential and what isn't is crushingly generic and unsatisfying.
I got a surprising amount of fun out of it, but I also had hours of grinding frustration over badly-designed missions, and largely found myself impatiently rushing through the story stuff because it was only rarely worth slogging through but I had to. You can skip through stuff you've already seen once, but not new stuff. I appreciate the skip function existing, but I wasn't exactly wanting to sink time into reading boring generic missing-the-point dialogue that only occasionally had a decent-to-great-moment.
If you can look past the NSFW out of nowhere elements and don't mind a flawed experience, it's certainly an interesting game with enough cool ideas to be thought-provoking about game design, and there's enough enjoyable moments in the story to potentially justify sinking some time in it on that level, but it's also got fairly significant flaws all-around that can be pretty off-putting.
Still, I am interested in seeing what the sequel actually does.
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