I stumbled upon this little beautie earlier this week and been playing it since. There arn't many 3rd party efforts i'd go out of my way to recommend but i feel this one deserves a bit of attention. i won't go into many details about it but suffice to say that there is a load of content here from 3 seperate story lines 20 different stages and a load of characters to choose from each with their own weapons and move sets all of them upgradable via an rpg type exp system which is neat.
The characters are customisable plus you can create your own warriors and use them in the other modes besides the story mode like the historical battles , castle secrets or online battle modes. It also has the option of co op story mode in spilt screen and although i havn't had the chance of testing this one its nice to know its there.
The production is decent with quite a bit of cutscens and voice work , although I'm not a fan of the latter. Graphics are good enough but what is impressive is the crap loads of enemies on screen. Music is also good , not memorable but good enough. Gameplay wise its essencially a mission based slash em' up with rpg elements, the enemy AI is on the dumb side with only the main commanders providing a challange but its undertandable seeing the ammount of enemies on screen. Difficulty wise it has 4 modes which i unlocked so far being, easy for very easy, normal for a bit less easy, hard for a challange and chaos mode for absolute insanity.
All in all if you happen to stumble on a copy try it out,rent it or whatever, its not perfect but if you like it there are tons of gameplay hours to be had here. Content wise there are not many 3rd party efforts i can say that about as i feel like I'm just scratching the surface with this one. I will reserve my final judgment on this for now and see for how long it will hold my attention but so far so good.
p.s. from what i gathered it hasn't been released in america yet as i heard it comes out in november over there so keep an eye out for it. In europe its been out for a while now (got the upperhand for once) so here is some gameplay footage;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEEKwz9Zxjw