Valkyria Chronicles is reverse orientalism. It blends together cultures and historical events in a way that doesn't make any sense, it completely disregards how the cultures view and treat their own history, it basically just picks out whatever parts the devs thought looked cool or that they could use to tell their own story they had in mind. It's less that they had some really confusing take on WWII and more that they were ignorant and lazy and didn't really care about getting the details right or about the cultural significance of how we talk about those events.

Trying to figure out what Valkyria Chronicles is saying about WWII is like trying to figure out what Disney's Aladdin is saying about... whatever country it's supposed to be set in.

There's also the Darcsens, who are the stand-in for the Jews and probably also Roma as the minority that everyone hates and distrusts. In the past they destroyed the world with dark magic or evil science or something. There's a forced labour camp level later

I know they love this sort of thing in Japan but when I'm playing these games I'm just grimacing whenever a cutscene happens. It's even worse in the sequel since it's set in a military academy for child soldiers so it piles on those tropes on top of the dodgy WWII allegory

Edit: I also love that there's no communism in this fantasy early 20th century Europe. It's just the evil Russian/German empire, the alliance of presumed generic liberal democracies and our good little neutral monarchy in the middle. In the second game there's a revolutionary movement trying to overthrow the monarchy but they're just motivated by racism and basically stooges for the rooskie krauts

In the fourth one the American/Anglos faction is portrayed as being evil enough to kill a child in order to nuke FakeMoscow, essentially making the entire game a suicide run

Cutscene skippers stay winning

Wait until you play the trails series, cold steel will give you a aneurysm from how krauty it is