I've played Valkyria Chronicles 3 - I know enough Japanese to play it, and in fact play Japanese games on PSP or Vita to brush up on my language skills - so I can satisfy everyone's curiosity a bit.
VC3, like VC2, has a system where the battlefield is split up into different zones, each small enough to be rendered by the PSP, and troops in one zone can't affect troops in another. You capture a camp in Zone 1 that's a pathway to Zone 2, and now you can spend a command point to deploy someone in Zone 2 from your reserves. If someone is near a camp they can retreat to the reserves for free.
Just like VC2, that basically means you can warp soldiers from one camp to another, and you can pull cheesy tricks like having a sniper fire a bullet from the west side of Zone 1, retreat, then re-deploy to fire from the east side of Zone 2, and so on. Basically, all allied camps exist as a single point in space-time. I found the game enjoyable mechanically, but a lot of winning tactics do involve hot-swapping soldiers in nonsensical ways.
Outside of that, the battle system is tightened up quite a bit; simply playing the game well will usually get a high ranking on missions, and there are optional, repeatable missions explicitly set out as such for times when you think you need to grind. However, it's still a game with a lot of missions that take a fair length of time to complete, so needing to do more of them is painful and there's a fair chunk of filler in the mandatory missions.
The premise of VC3 is that there was an off-the-books stealth squadron in the army, made up of malcontents that were too useful to execute but not good enough to treat well. People who were the wrong race, or lost a political fight, or committed crimes get sent to this penal squad that is sent on ludicrously unwise suicide missions. As you can guess, of course, the story is that they keep coming back alive anyway.
So it covers the same time period as the original Valkyria Chronicles, but from a different perspective; this is the OTHER rag-tag squadron of heroes who saved Gallia, but they didn't get a book written about them because officially they never existed. It's actually a pretty clever way of letting the story continue without abandoning the alternate-WW2 setting, and it even retcons a few plot oddities in the previous games by saying that the secret squadron did the work, but they're secret, so the book that was the framing device of Valkyria Chronicles 1 doesn't include anything about them.
I also felt it struck a nice balance between the basically happy-go-lucky nature of the games and the somewhat dark premise - your squad is literally sent to die, on more than one occasion. Your squad is also given the dirty work, such as "test this prototype weapon, don't worry, it's totally not forbidden by the Geneva Convention, by the way we deny all knowledge of your existence."
The characters are still a mix of broad anime stereotypes and broad war-movie stereotypes, and just like VC1, there's an unfortunate - although brief - trip to the beach. I did feel that the characters grew on me over time, particular the main character, Kurt, and by the end of the game when he made an inspiring speech and launched his squadron on a desperate last-minute attack, I wanted to pump my fist and shout "GALLIA, FUCK YEAH!".
Overall, I felt it's a worthy sequel, and yes, better than VC2.
