Alright, I'm probably going to come off a bit more critical of the story here than other commenters, but I also likely have a much different perspective on war media than most others, so take my observations with a grain of salt.
Before we get there though, I want to touch on some of the other rating criteria first.
Implementation of Theme:
Yeah, I think this meets all the requirements. The way the legends are associated so closely with the main characters feels a little thin, and that's part of a bigger worldbuilding issue that I'll get to later, but a very clear effort was made to establish your own folklore for the setting and weave it into the narrative, and that's enough for full credit here in my opinion.
Presentation:
Oh my goodness.
This was a big team with a lot of experience attached to it, and boy did you all deliver a commensurate product. The default sprites looked good, there were some impressive CGs, and every bit of the UI was spectacular. I really, really liked the attention to detail on the backgrounds for the text boxes that corresponded to each character. I don't know if I can recall seeing that in anything else, at least not in a jam, and that level of effort is seriously appreciated.
Music all seemed to fit as well, and I thought the tracks were all well-made and fit the tone, with the exception of the sex scene, but I'll have more to say on that in a bit. There was also another moment where I felt like there should have been a BGM shift when we go from Ulfor's fakeout death to the village, but the same track kept playing. This felt like such a natural break point I feel like someone just forgot to add an audio cue there.
There are some other minor things I could bring up, like maybe having some more sprite variation (especially for when Aella is injured) and a few proofreading errors throughout, but nothing that could really justify taking off any points in this category. Excellent work all around.
Story:
Alright, so, there's a fairly famous old quote that "there's no such thing as an anti-war film." Essentially, the argument is that even if you intend to present a film (or VN, for the sake of this discussion) as anti-war, the nature of the medium will still inherently glorify it anyway. Now, I don't strictly agree with the premise here and I think it's a bit hyperbolic, but there is something to it. Especially if you're only engaging with war as a high-level concept, it's easy for certain themes to slip through and have a significance that wasn't intended.
Reading this VN, we're meant to see war as an inherently bad thing; Raf essentially makes this point explicitly in the camp before the final battle, and that scene tries to depict the situation as futile, with no one even knowing why they're fighting anymore. We also get a lot of emphasis on each of the characters' personal trauma before the war, showing the mental and physical scars they carry with them, which they hope to overcome by living on for themselves and each other after the battle.
But then let's compare that to a scene that follows shortly after: we pan across the battlefield to find Ulfor, and Raf and Aella dash to his side, thankful that the amount of gore on him must belong to all the enemies he slew. This emphasizes the same traits a more "traditionally" heroic war tale would: stoic self-sacrifice, bravery in the face of overwhelming odds, having the courage (and physical prowess) to defend your loved ones, etc.
What it does not emphasize is the fact that Ulfor just killed like 15 people. 15 sons, brothers, fathers, or lovers, all with their own hopes, dreams, fears, goals, and traumas that will never get to go home, and that will never get to experience the things they hoped for in their camp before the battle. If anything, the enemy is actively dehumanized in the previous scene when a wounded soldier lunges at Raf and is swiftly executed by Aella for what feels like shock value. I don't think the toll of these actions is ever really addressed either; it is just as, if not more, traumatic to take someone's life as it is to risk your own.
I'm not arguing that Ulfor killing those people wasn't justified; he's a soldier and that's what he's there to do. But I am pointing out the disconnect of you asking me to care so deeply about these three characters' motivations and feelings while willfully ignoring everyone else's.
On a similar vein, I get that sometimes you just want to have a happy ending, but "happily ever after" feels just a bit too trite for the themes you're ostensibly trying to present. To be frank, someone probably should've died. As currently written, Ulfor, though you could have changed the scene around and had it been Aella, I don't think it really makes a huge difference. You can have the two survivors be happy while still having that happiness be bittersweet, living with their own scars as well as the empty space left by the third lover. Yeah you don't get your throuple in the end, but I think that's more impactful.
This kind of builds into a bigger point as well that there are a lot of concepts being thrown around here, like war, racism, class divides, but they all feel more like they're tailored to the characters rather than the characters actually living in this world, which cheapens the impact of all those issues.
Like looking at the war, we get practically no information about what this war actually is. Who started it? What's the goal? You might argue that's not important and the only thing that's really material is that there is a war, but I disagree. Wars don't just materialize out of thin air; the reasons can be selfish, evil, or stupid, but there is an impetus for the conflict. It's easy to write "rich officer bad", but that whole calculus changes if those officers are responsible for repelling an invasion to ensure the safety of their country's civilians. Since Raf joined the army to help people, it matters a lot if he's helping a defensive action or an unprovoked war of aggression. I know it's a jam and you need to limit your scope, but there are real opportunities here to add depth to your characters and setting. To that end, and subject to the same limitations, I do wish we got to see these characters interact with someone else outside their bubble as well.
Two more points here that I think are worth mentioning, but I will try to be brief because holy fuck this is long enough already:
- Be careful with leaning too much into shock value. It can be effective, but taking it too far can have the opposite effect and break the tension. Ulfor's backstory feels way too contrived. The barons' plans make no sense (why would you kill your villagers? Just retreat them with the main army. You need the farmers and miners to make money if you win. Also, even if they killed the mercs, you didn't accomplish your objective of securing the mine or subjugating the main enemy force, so what's the point? They can just hire new mercs. I could go on about this but you get the idea) and I feel like that whole scene is there just so we're shocked and appalled at the dead civilians. If you feel like you really need a tragic backstory for Ulfor (and I would contend that you don't and that the horrors of war should be enough on their own), you could just have Ulfor's unit be wiped out in regular combat and have him drift from job to job not knowing what else to do until he wound up in the current formation. You don't need to overcomplicate it.
- The sex scene felt tonally way out of place for me. Like, I don't have a problem with the characters having sex, and you can even use that as a point of levity, but I would have skewed the scene more towards the "awkward beakjob" mentioned in a comment below than "extra spicy Eiffel Tower threeway". It just felt too porn-y for this particular story.
Writing:
I'm going to keep this to a minimum as well, mostly because, my issues with the story aside, the prose itself is quite good. There are a few sticking points here, like there's some "therapy talk" especially in some early scenes. I didn't actually have a problem with this in Cygnus Leapt, but it did feel more out of place in this setting. There were also some moments, especially in Aella's and Ulfor's first meeting, where they seemed to be trying to exposition the world's race issues at each other more than arguing like actual people, but none of this felt particularly ubiquitous or overly bothersome anyway. I think this is a really solid category for this project as well.
Creativity:
Bit of a mixed bag here for me. The presentation is extremely creative, as discussed above, but the core story of people bonding and falling in love during war, or any other stressful situation really, isn't really breaking new ground. There are some attempts at creating your own universe for this story to take place in, but a lot of the pieces of that universe feel superficial and could've been fleshed out more to make a greater impact.
You can say that none of this is really that deep and, sure, maybe it's not, but I did feel strongly about this, and do about war media in general, and if I'm going to take a stance opposite to the consensus I felt the need to explain that. Like I said, different perspective.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk anyway.
Final score of 1700 words out of 1 very sleepy opossum.