I actually enjoyed the game's aesthetics on the basis that I saw it as reverse Orientalist. Let's just mash WWI and WWII together, ignore how they're each historically regarded and use a tone that is completely off, and just pick and choose whatever aesthetics we think look cool and plop whatever story we feel like into it. I genuinely don't think there's any deeper meaning to the bad guys being geographically Russian because that would require closer attention and faithfulness to the setting than anything else about the game indicates.

If you wanna say that Orientalism is still bad when directed towards Europe, that's totally valid and fair, and my take is probably bad from an objective standpoint, however, I just personally enjoyed seeing a perspective capable of treating it that way. The concept of "WWI but with the tone of Fire Emblem" is just so alien that my curiosity overrides my sense of it being inappropriate.

also what about the troops that you get that are so racist that they cant concentrate in combat when they're next to a teammate with a different race lol

Agreed, and I'll expand game universes with the legend of heroes series and its darling treatment towards the not German empire of Erebonia.

Absolutely great time period to world build in with the industrial revolution just beginning and the transformation and transition of the Political economy from a decenteralized feudal agrarian mode of production towards proto-industrial despotism with bourgeoise elements slowly emerging to supplant the prior order - all of that is great lore writing combined with the lived-in feeling you get faffing about with NPCs living their daily lives. Like I get there really aren't that many countries that you can use as examples to sorta base your fictional industrializing countries on - and fuck the British and all that, get out of the lime light limey slimeys - but still, the fucking Germans? I guess you could say they've tried to balance it out with including a look into a post-revolutionary republican France with their newest releases. But this kinda just becomes a complaint about the germanify everything trope the Japanese love using if I keep ranting on about jt.

4 involves you trying to nuke not-st. Petersburg.

However the OG game is amazing.

Also the character stories are all really good and for an XCOM style RPG the combat is cool.

Alicia and Selveria are cool as hell too

I enjoyed this game. Maybe I played it with my brain off? I actually never really took it for ww2.

It's funny how often Japanese developers end up defaulting to just doing Europe when they're trying to come up with a fantasy world, like here's the (I think now slightly outdated) world map for the Ys series: https://www.digitalemelas.com/images/map_4.jpg