Alright, technically, I DO recommend this game to a very select group of people; people who like strategy games, but don't care about the strategy aspect all that much. I personally don't always care for strategy games because I find alot of them too finicky; move one guy one square to the left, and he'll get killed and the whole battle goes downhill, that kind of thing. But even I find this game to be a cakewalk--the only challenge is usually late-game enemies with spells that obliterate half your army at once, but even those end up not mattering because your hero characters become god-like beings capable of shrugging that off with a simple heal spell. So ultimately, the only joy is that of getting stronger, becoming OP, and beating your opponents into the dirt, which gets boring fairly quickly.

What about other elements? Story and characters and all of that is paper-thin, so basically irrelevant flavor text. There's not a ton of depth to equipment and skills and what units to hire, so long as you're not completely brainless about it--generally, as long as you equip stuff that makes numbers go up or hire units with bigger numbers, you're golden. I played the game for a while as a time-waster, the way folks used to play Farmville, and that's about all it's good for. Outside of nostalgic fans, I think the game would most appeal to boys not quite old enough to feel bored with the simple combat, but old enough to appreciate the, ahem, "artwork."

It's a game that expects you to replay the entire campaign for every branching decision you can make in order to make a different decision and unlock a different ending (of which there are 6... for each campaign. Coupled with the extremely clunky Mercenary system, and I just cannot give Langrisser enough of my time to unlock the endings the intended way. Just watch the story online.