Mostly finished with this (am partway through MALICE) and really enjoyed it. I still have a ton of interpersonal events to go read, and a few characters' personal relationship events, like huntress girl's, who I skipped specifically because of how she talks.
I didn't really care to mess around with the combat too much before cheating in god weapons that do 99999 damage every 10 frames, but I still messed with it for more than I would for most games, and in any case that wasn't the reason I picked it up to begin with. I didn't really bother with "properly" progressing through the tech tree either, though I liked all the description changes of your country in the top tab changing as you progress.
The story and stuff was really good, and very funny when it wanted to be. Before I got too far into this, I took a quick look at the previous games' store pages to decide if I should play those first, but decided to skip them for relatively superficial reasons, which I kind of regret now that I've basically finished this. I'm definitely going to go back and play those now.
e: by the way, am I dumb as hell, or is there no way to play the audio from the current line without going to the next line and then checking the backlog? (since the backlog having more than just a couple lines pushes the current line out of view, and it can't be scrolled to)
