Sakura Wars (2019)

Playtime: 21.9 Hours

Finished 21 February 2025.

Played on PS5, though I don't think anything changes (framerate or otherwise). I went through Sakura's route, which only makes minor changes to the game - she's your partner in the final fight, and each character has their own epilogue. The replayability or "completion" mostly comes in the form of collectible bromides from events or scattered randomly around the game world, but there really isn't much to it so it's not worth spending the time to complete the library.

This is another one of those games which ended up being more fun than the sum of its components. Individually, I think pretty much everything is pretty aggressively mediocre, or even bad. It's a PS4 game that was never upgraded for the PS5, so it runs at 30FPS which feels more than a little choppy to me - this was kind of inevitable, given that I'm pretty sure this was developed on a tighter budget as an AA title. To its credit, the game actually does look quite good though! Despite all the other issues, which I'll get into below, I ended up enjoying it a fair bit - even though I'd never consider this particularly good.

Keeping in mind that I have no previous exposure to the Sakura Wars franchise, the overall gameplay format of this game is strange. It's a combination of an "adventure" game with numerous hack-and-slash "musou" combat stages scattered throughout the chapters, though you probably spend twice as much time walking around talking to people as you do beating up demons. There isn't much to the adventuring portion of the game, which is basically a dating sim VN except you have to walk around manually - you get to choose how you develop relationships with your theater troupe (that also moonlights as mech pilots). They trademarked a fancy backronym - LIPS - for what are essentially timed dialogue options, which is pretty funny.

There isn't really too much to say about the combat either, which is pretty standard musou fare. You have basic light and heavy attack combos, and an extremely overpowered dodge that gives you invincibility and time dilation for like 10 seconds if you time it right. There is no gear customization or upgrading, and your teammates are fixed in many of the stages. Each character has different combos and powers, but the fights are so easy and the stages so basic that it never really comes into mind as something that you really need to pay attention to. For all intents and purposes, while it's not bad, it definitely felt kind of shoehorned in just to give you an excuse to really mash some buttons between long bouts of talking and listening. I'm not really sure why they made this change for this game, given that the original series all had more of an SRPG-style gameplay segment.

The characters in this game are extremely boilerplate for any anime or manga series targeted at young teenagers, defined almost entirely by the tropes they are meant to represent. Sakura's the optimistic childhood friend, Hakuho's the hothead, Claris is the anxious introvert, Azami is the weird quiet girl, and Anastasia is the prim and refined lady. That basically explains 90%+ of their personalities. That's not to say they're poorly executed - I quite like the first 3 - but it does kind of define the way the game was written, with characters designed to cater to player tastes before the needs of the story. Funnily enough, the different character "romance" arcs are also extremely brief and quite underdeveloped as well. Side characters and villains are even more obvious and basic, even below the level of typical "monsters of the week".

All of these elements come together under this game's awkward plot. The basic premise is that the cast of all the previous games in the franchise (I believe this is game number 5 or 6?) are basically lost in a mission to seal a demon, which was an excuse to introduce a new cast of characters. For obvious reasons, this was not received well by series fans. Anyway, you play as a random dude in the Imperial Navy who for some reason is assigned to a position in the Imperial Theater as the new captain of the Imperial Combat Revue, a group of mech pilots, which is kind of on its last legs because of its decimation in the prior war. Over the course of the story, a conspiracy to bring back the demons is revealed, and you end up fighting several other groups in a seemingly-unrelated tournament. It feels like it was conceived by a twelve-year-old; the amateurish dialogue reinforces that thought. Ye olde power of friendship ultimately saves the day, etc. etc. Not much going on here.

It should be kind of obvious why this game did pretty poorly. The most nonsensical move was to completely alienate the loyal fans of the series to begin with, which should have been the primary market for it. Furthermore, the heavy emphasis on relatively poorly-implemented relationship building in the game's flow and lack of interesting musou elements to keep people coming back to replay stages makes it difficult to recommend to fans of either genre. Somehow, against all odds, I still found my playthrough quite enjoyable as a second monitor game. I personally wouldn't play any more of this though.