The long dormant series of Sakura Wars finds itself a reboot, marking a brand new start to the series and an apt entry for newcomers.
Sakura Wars is labelled as a cross-genre action RPG/dating sim/visual novel and it blends these categories together in a coherent way. The gameplay is distinctly split into two different modes. This open world mode where you spend most of your time, walking around, talking to people, and making dialogue choices in conversations. The other mode is combat, where you and your team have taken control of mech suits for battle.
While this may seem like a strange convergence of gameplay styles, it’s actually paced quite nicely and your choices in dialogue not only affect the story in minor ways, it also affects the performance of your teammates in combat.
Let’s look at this game for the entire package. The story (avoiding major spoilers), the flow of conversation, the combat, and the dating.
The story starts by putting us in the shoes of the main character, Seijurou Kamiyama. We find ourselves in a world of pseudo-industrial-revolution era where many things run on steam and demons occasionally attack. We also find ourselves as the newly appointed captain in the Flower Division of the Imperial Combat Revue. A group whose job is to use mechs, known as spiricle strikers, to defend Tokyo from the occasional demon attacks. They also run a theater. Yes, a special task force of trained combatants are also responsible for establishing themselves as actors and putting on plays on a stage. Despite the lack of practicality, that’s just how the combat revues are in this world. They fight demons, and they run some other commercial facility.
As captain, it’s your duty to ensure that your team grows as both actors and combatants. As it turns out, the Flower Division has not been doing a very good job of putting on plays and are all feeling pretty down on themselves. As it also turns out, the entire Flower Division are all girls around your age. And they’re all just a little bit trope-y. There’s the childhood friend, the bookworm, the tomboy, the elegant one, and the small cute one, but she’s also a ninja. However, what’s great is that all of the main characters are pleasantly not one dimensional. Everyone has a reasonable amount of that human element. They all have their personalities that you’ll quickly come to know at first, but as the story progresses, Sakura Wars does an excellent job with everyone’s character development. None of them just come out with the same attitude in every circumstance. Context of the situation and the character’s current mood about what’s going on is always taken into account. At the same time, they never do anything wildly uncharacteristic.
This is important when it comes to making your choices in conversation. Very often when you’re talking with someone, a prompt will come up for you to choose something to say next. These prompts are timed and force you to say something quickly. Most of the time, you can say something the others will like to hear, something they won’t like, and something that doesn’t have much impact. This also occurs in conversations with multiple people and can appeal to or disappoint each separately. If you’re trying to get on people’s good side, you’ll need to be paying attention to understand the characters, the immediate context, as well as the overall context. As long as you have a good grasp on everything, you should have a good idea of what you should say. The timer isn’t too strict, but does add a layer of tension because, like in real conversations, you know what you say can have an impact to the people that hear it. If you’re too slow to decide, you’ll say nothing, which on rare occasion, can be the right thing to do, but is usually an underwhelming way to respond.
The options you’re given are short phrases that convey the general intent of what you want to say. After your choice, Seijuro will expound the full context. The vast majority of the time, the full context carried the intent I expected. There were only a few rare cases where Seijuro said something that I did not mean for him to say, which is a pretty great track record considering some visual novels can frequently be too vague with their options and cause you to say something you didn’t expect. Sakura Wars did very well with giving sensible choices. It also did well with my expectations of how a character would respond to my choices. I didn’t have a perfect run, but everyone’s responses made sense with the context given.
Depending on how you respond, you can raise and lower your trust with the other characters. You’ll know if you’ve gone up or down based on some audible chimes that come after the full statement. While the chimes do a fair job of informing you how much they liked what you said, some visual cues like up or down arrows on screen would have been a much welcome addition. With no visual cue, you’ll just have to rely on your ears… and of course the characters’ reactions, but that alone won’t clue you in to how much you’ve gone up. Also sometimes instead of being given three choices, you’ll have one thing to say but you have to raise or lower a bar to set the intensity of how you say it. It’s a neat feature, but can sometimes be difficult to gauge. Although it’s something you can get used to after a while. It’s not that bad and it doesn’t show up very often, but it does have an impact.
So all of this talking and choice making is sort of the main substance of this game. Lots of running around and talking to people. Usually someone will give you a main objective to advance the story, but there are plenty of events and side quests to be held in addition to that. A lot of running and a lot of talking to people if you want a greater scope of the world and more options to raise and lower trust. Some of it is just silly moments that don’t matter very much, but you might get a chuckle if you’re into that goofy sense of humor. Some of these quests are timed, too. Either you’ll need to find something or figure something out before time is up. The clock doesn’t stop for anything, even talking to people, which seems a little unfair, but they’re also not that difficult. These timed quests are few and far between which makes them seem like they may have been an afterthought. They do at least add a sense of urgency to the situation.
If you’re wondering what trust does, that’s where combat comes in. It won’t affect the story a whole lot, other than seeing the different ways conversations can go, as it does have a general overall arc, but enough trust at certain points will give you additional options for conversation, usually in a somewhat romantic manner, but we’ll get into that later. Outside of all the conversations, more trust with each person will raise their attack and defense while in battle. Your team members will be at one of four levels before battle which can be checked before starting the fight.
Combat occurs as the story progresses naturally. After completing enough main objectives in the open world, something will happen and it’ll be time to fight. The gameplay of combat mode in general is fairly easy. Especially if you’ve done your due diligence and raised the trust of your team during conversations. You control Seijuro in this mode, but you’re also always paired up with one of the girls as your main partner, depending on the level. You can freely swap between Seijuro and your partner during combat. Every character has their own moveset and abilities to take advantage of the situation. If you fall in battle, you automatically swap to the other character. As long as both characters don’t fall, you can recover after a short period of time. Combat mode controls well. Attacks tend to automatically steer towards an enemy you’ve engaged with so strikes don’t often end up flying at nothing. This type of auto targeting is sometimes detrimental if you want to change targets, but that isn’t the case here. Moving around and aiming your attacks is tight and feels deliberate.
Even though the combat is easy, it’s not exactly mindless. You do at the very least need to be mindful of what you’re doing so that neither you nor your partner fall in battle. Fights can feel samey, but boss fights do help to break it up with specific methods required to beat each of them. There’s often some tougher enemies thrown in that can beat you down if you’re not careful, but saving up a special attack can make short work of any enemy. The gauge for your special attack builds up as you hit enemies. Defeated demons will also drop spirit crystals that you can pick up to fill up your gauge faster.
Levels themselves break up the monotony with unique challenges as well. There’s really nothing crazy or particularly inventive in terms of these challenges, but they’re still fun. For those that enjoy casual hack and slash gameplay, Sakura Wars does a pretty great job in delivering that. Some will also find challenge in getting an S rank in all of the combat levels. This isn’t required in any way, but the higher your rank, the closer you come to your partner.
The relative ease of victory is a welcome design here in that Sakura Wars is a visual novel first. Combat only takes a fraction of the total time spent playing and makes for a seamless transition between walking around talking to people and fighting hordes of demons. It strikes a nice balance to give the player a level of immersion to be right in the fray with everyone, especially while dialogue is still happening amidst the fighting. Also, don’t worry about finishing a fight too soon and missing out on some lines of dialogue. The game is nice enough to put the world in stasis while the conversation wraps up.
Beyond all that, trust has one other perk in giving you the option for some alone time with the girls. If a girl likes you enough, she may want you to see her in private at specific points of the story. These extra interactions are indicated by a heart above their face on the map. These moments get vaguely romantic without ever going too far. They’ll have a conversation that’s relevant to the current situation which then ends up with you two getting somewhat lost in each other. You can touch their face and hair, and comment on their eyes and such. It’s mostly a bit of fan service but does also raise trust even further if you choose to go through with it. Also is it odd that the captain is romancing his team members? Or maybe he’s the one being romanced? But… it’s also odd that they’re a combat revue that also runs a theater. You’d think this would violate some protocol, but whatever- it’s not important.
As far as how the actual story is, it does a fair job at being compelling. Without saying too much… The Imperial Combat Revue wants to not only up their stage plays for the theater, but they also want to make it to the World Games, which is the big competition where combat revues from around the world compete in their spiricle striker mechs. As far as story-telling goes, it’s pretty standard anime fair. It’s certainly a fun ride with plenty of light hearted humor, some heavy hearted drama, and rising up against adversity. It’s not completely rock solid, but still makes for a very entertaining and memorable adventure. If you think you’re interested, give this one a shot.
The characters are fun and likable. There’s tons of dialogue if you’re looking for it and almost all of it is entertaining in some way. There’s a lot of points around the world to look at and get some info, though not all of it is interesting. There’s few environments, but they look very nice as do the characters. It does a fantastic job at keeping a consistent style between the game and the animated cutscenes. Some of the cutscenes feature conversations without spoken voice acting which can be a bit jarring, especially since the body acting and mouth movements are still there. However, voice acting is in place when appropriate most of the time. It’s difficult to tell if this was a design choice or if the budget ran short. These voiceless scenes are likely to be less bothersome to those that don’t understand Japanese as all spoken words are in Japanese and you’ll be reading the subtitles anyway.
Despite minor nitpicks, Sakura Wars is a great time overall. It’s consistently fun with only a few hiccups. It makes for a unique experience blending the lax nature of a visual novel with an open world atmosphere, adding a slight sense of urgency with timed dialogue options that also help keep the story moving, and the more fast paced nature of a hack and slash without feeling out of place. It puts all these things together coherently with some awesome characters and an enjoyable story.
