Probably overthinking a goofy anime game franchise but I find it interesting that they'd choose to combine Germany and Russia into one aggressor nation for their WWII facsimile 
I can't really call it liberal anti-communist brainworms though since the East Europan Imperial Alliance is more reminiscent of Imperial Germany than anything and I think the devs were consciously avoiding depicting anything even close to fascism or communism because Sega didn't want their wholesome anime WWII game to be political
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That didn't stop them from writing in a distrusted and hated minority that was sort of a stand-in for Jews though
I was looking for PSP games to check out and remembered Valkyria Chronicles went PSP exclusive after the first game. I played the first Valkyria Chronicles when it was released on PC a while back and while I enjoyed the turn-based tactical gameplay I sort of hated the game's aesthetics. I'm sorry, but I can't take your story about the horrors of war seriously when it's depicted in bright pastel colours and when everyone involved looks like a Pokemon trainer. Plucky child soldiers is also one of my most hated anime tropes
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.
If it is Orientalism directed towards Europe, would that be Occidentalism? ๐ค
It's good to note that the parts of Europe being otherized here are not Belgium or England. They are on the east. Which had always been subject to Orientalism in the first place. Everything from the accusations of slavic byzantinism to the allegations of turkification levied against cultures of the balkans was part and parcel of how Europe (western europe) sees the world: a series of imagined others which exists only as a contrast to itself.
That european identity expands and contracts at will. There are moments when the spanish and the portuguese are regard as too mixed and too arabized to be European. There are moments when Ukrainian-Russians are regarded as western while Russian-Ukrainians are part of the mongol hordes.
It was more of a joke, but yes, you're absolutely right, Eastern Europe has always been othered when it is convenient for western Europe to do so. It's almost like all these racist terms are all completely arbitrary or something!
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: