tl;dr: An impactful story about a relationship that's always painful, but always manages to keep a little bit of hope.

This is a manga that is really emotional and can be both happy and sad, but it isn't an emotional roller coaster at all. It's just persistently both happy and really sad at the same time from beginning to end. It's a sad story, though not in the sense of being despair inducing, but rather something that is continuously making the reader feel heavy hearted. Pretty much of all of this stems from the relationship between Shuji and Chise. There's more to the story than that, both in terms of relationship drama with other characters as well as themes that persist through the story, but I feel the relationship and how painful that is to both of them is what really hits home. It has it's ups and downs, but even when its happy there's an undercurrent of melancholy, and even when it's sad it feels somewhat hopeful, though in a pained way. It wasn't an amazing relationship in and of itself, nor were either of them characters that I particularly liked, but in the context of everything going on making their relationship a wreck but how they forced their way through it despite it being pure torture was certainly impactful, and dare I say powerful even. In terms of the other themes, there are some messages about war being awful and terrible for both soldiers and civilians on both sides, but I didn't feel that those really came through all that well. There were also themes relating to wanting to stay alive and keep going no matter what happens, which did come through pretty well. Calling the ending satisfying wouldn't be right, but really I don't think there would be a way for a manga to ever be satisfying as that's pretty much opposite to the point, but it felt like it fit and felt right in that like the rest of the series it was both happy and sad, so overall I think it was a good ending. The art was okay.