It's new to me: Sakura Wars (1996)
Before there was Sakura Wars, there was... Sakura Wars.
This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
You might be familiar with the Sega series Sakura Wars nowadays, considering that it got a reboot that released on the Playstation 4 in 2019. Prior to that reboot, though, the long-running series, which began in 1996 on the Sega Saturn, had just one single release outside of Japan: 2005’s So Long My Love, which found itself on both the Playstation 2 and the Wii, and in multiple regional markets. So you’d be forgiven if you didn’t know about Sakura Wars prior to 2019, or hell, if you still don’t know about the series now, even after opening up an article that’s about to talk about it.
While the series has never made much of a splash in North America — not that it was ever given a real chance to do so — it’s a real hit in Japan. Sakura Wars has sold 4.5 million games over the years, with, obviously, most of those sales coming in Japan. There are six main games in the series, as well as a whole bunch of spinoffs, manga adaptations, anime, soundtrack releases, and stage shows — stage shows play a large role in-game, so of course there are actual real-life stage shows based in this universe. And it’s pretty easy to see why it took off, if you’ve actually managed to play one of these games. They’re tactical role-playing games where you pilot mechs and fight demons, and in order to be powerful enough to defeat these demons, you need to successfully navigate a dating sim.
No, really, that’s how Sakura Wars works. The box describes the game’s genre as a “Dramatic Adventure,” according to Hardcore Gaming 101, and that’s probably the most efficient description of what’s going on that you’ll find. In the original game, you don’t level up your characters in combat, equip armor or weapons, or even gain experience: you build relationships in between missions with this specialized fighting force, all of which besides the main character are women, and so long as you don’t screw it up by saying the wrong things or making it so that everyone is mad at you or by being a blatant hornball mess of a human being, then you can improve the performance of these characters in battle.
They’ll get boosts to their attack, their defense, etc., so long as they’re happy and motivated. And sometimes it’s not as easy as saying what looks like the obviously right thing to ensure that these folks stay happy, either: the game will force you to decide which of two currently feuding women are correct, for instance, making you choose sides or express opinions that are guaranteed to anger at least one character, forcing you to adjust your battle strategy to compensate. That’s because, just like improving relationships can benefit you in battle, damaging them can make fighting more difficult.
Your reward for successfully making your way through the dating sim portion of things with an actual committed partner at your side is a special combination attack that is otherwise unavailable, and it is the kind of boost that becomes very necessary in the game’s later stages. Your mechs will get a storyline upgrade, and there are a couple of opportunities for you to tweak (through dialogue choices) what certain mechs are better at doing, but otherwise, all of the improvements to the performance of these mechs comes from you managing to not piss off everyone around you.
Most retro reviews you find out in the wild of Sakura Wars are from importers or those who can understand the original Japanese text in the game, but there has been a semi-recent spike in these retro reviews, too, thanks to a fan translation of the first game in the series, released in 2019. Sakura Wars, as a series, is not new to me — I purchased and played So Long, My Love when it released on the Wii over a decade ago — but the fan translation of the original made it possible for me to experience the series’ origins for the first time.* Like all but the newest game in the franchise, the original was developed by Red Company (now known as Red Entertainment). You might know Red Entertainment from some non-Sakura Wars games, like the classic Turbografx shoot-em-ups Gate of Thunder and Lords of Thunder, or maybe from Nintendo’s handheld series, Fossil Fighters. Or maybe you know them from another dating sim RPG series that they co-developed with Idea Factory and Compile Heart, Record of Agarest War.
*You would think that the release of the rebooted Sakura Wars was what made me go looking for a fan translation of the original after buying a Saturn and setting it up to play imports, but no. It was because a number of Sakura Wars characters feature prominently in Bandai Namco’s Nintendo 3DS game, Project X Zone 2, developed by Monolith and starring protagonists, antagonists, and scenery from not just Namco and Sega, but Capcom and Nintendo, as well. A circuitous route, but it got me there.
Sega didn’t localize the game and release it worldwide (though, there were some scattered localizations and releases years after the fact, such as the Russian version) in part because they didn’t think the west would be into this genre mashup enough to justify the work that would go into it. It was a hit in Japan, though, as mentioned, giving the Saturn the kind of game it needed more of to compete with the Playstation and just-released Nintendo 64, while eventually developing into one of Sega’s longest-running and most successful franchises, to boot.
Things start out basic enough, at least comparatively. You play as Ichiro Ogami, a recent military academy graduate and the newest recruit for an imperial assault team, except he has no idea what he’s getting into, or that this imperial assault force is a secret group no one actually knows exists. In fact, it hides in plain sight, inside of a theater… and the performers working at that theater are also the members of this elite fighting force. The Imperial Combat Revue has a day job, basically, and even though Ogami is the leader of this group and the one who decides their tactical movements out in the field, when not on a mission, he sells tickets at the front gate to audiences who want to see some theater.
The Imperial Combat Revue is a secret, in part, because of who it is they combat. They ride around in special armored mechs, called Koubu, battling supernatural forces of evil that threaten this alternate reality version of 1920s imperial Japan: one where, thanks to steam power, the game’s world is on par with or ahead of technology in the year it released in. Spiritual power and religion also play a significant role: it is not an accident that you are fighting a guy literally named Satan in the first mission of Sakura Wars, and all of those who pilot the Koubu have a level of spiritual power that allows them to do so.
You’ll be slowly introduced to new characters throughout the game’s early chapters, allowing you to familiarize yourself with their differences both in combat and in personality. You have plenty of time to devote yourself fully to even the latest introductions, however, so don’t worry about switching from one favorite to another as new characters to interact with and woo are introduced. Just know that Sakura is going to be mad at you all the time, even if she’s your favorite. Hey, the game is named after her, she’s allowed to be angry at you for looking elsewhere.
The game’s narrative has enough twists and turns, and the characters are fun enough to interact with, that the extremely simple combat missions of the early game are easy to forgive. Things will ramp up in a real hurry on that front, anyway, as missions will include more bad guys, more difficult bosses, and move from the basic robots you’re taking on early to ancient evil creatures called Kouma that your original mechs will barely be able to damage. And as said, you’ll definitely want to have an obvious favorite and potential partner lined up eventually, or else you’ll regret not having the combination attack that can take big chunks out of even a boss’ health bar.
Sakura Wars is fascinating, too, as kind of a mishmash of genres, because it doesn’t necessarily excel at any of them. There are better visual novels, there are better dating sims, and there are better tactical RPGs, but this has all three of those things in one! And all three of them are done in a way where they tie together well, and make you care about the story, the characters, and the combat. This isn’t a case of just throwing things against the wall and seeing if they stick, or putting way too much into one game because you can — go check out some reviews for the Record of Agarest War games if you want to see something that is the opposite of Sakura Wars’ balance and relative accessibility. Sakura Wars is not super long — the pacing is good, too, in all three of its components, and you’ll feel compelled to investigate every room in the theater for potential conversations and interactions whenever you’re given the opportunity rather than just push things along to the next mission. A real more than the sum of its parts experience, and that’s a good thing.
I didn’t get a chance to play this game until it had been (1) localized by fans and (2) I had a Sega Saturn, but it was still a lot of fun to play, 25 years later. Enough so that now I’m now waiting for the fan translations of the next three games in the series that released on the Saturn and Dreamcast in Japan.
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