Sakura Wars Review

It's hard to tell if I'm just culturally biased or if I really did play an objectively terrible piece of crap since apparently Sakura Wars is a very successful series in Japan. While Sakura Wars did do a few things right, it still manages to mix tedium with poor pacing and the worst approach to leveling up since Final Fantasy II.

For one thing, each fight is successively harder yet there is absolutely no means of grinding in between bosses. Instead you have a limited amount of time to talk to travel around a city hoping that you encounter a party member at each stop you make and then selecting the correct dialog option to get their approval up and not end up decreasing it. The player doesn't make choices between good and evil, the player makes choices between right and wrong with consequences for gameplay rather than story that don't increase the challence from enemies but instead cause the player to level down. It's still an original design, which I guess has some merit. Then again, it's original because it's simply poor design.

Sakura Wars also suffers from very bland one-dimensional characters. The only character who has any real depth is Chairon (who's name is pronounced Karen) and yet her nuance is what makes her unlikable given the idealized purity of other protagonists .

Then there's the protagonist. Shinjiro Taiga, who is quite honestly a total loser. He's not very intelligent, comes across as an utter moron even when he makes the correct decisions, is frequently clumsy, and most importantly, strikes me as unbearably creepy.

What I mean by creepy is that this is a game that's often described as a dating sim, where all five of your NPC party members are datable. And yes, one of them is a prepubescent girl who I was intentionally rude to simply to prevent this story from having any sort of disgusting pedophiliac undertones. Not to mention that when he's tasked with rebuilding the New York Combat Revue, he only seems to recruit women, all of which he shows a romantic interest in despite being their superior. I'm not sure why he didn't bring a man into the fold. Maybe because he's scared of competition. Or maybe he's simply homophobic and is so insecure with his sexuality that he doesn't see why he should have a man do a job when he could have an attractive woman do it since he's too afraid of potentially being attracted to another man to want to hire one. This hypothesis is further rammed home by the fact that the final boss is Nobunaga, who is stated by all but the most homophobic of historians to have lived his life as a gay man.

Let's review Shinjiro's personality again. He makes sexual advances towards his subordinates, one of which is a young girl. He's insecure enough to refuse to work with other men. And he's also clumsy and often incompetent. Simply playing Sakrua Wars made me feel so incredibly creepy and stupid that I couldn't wait to beat it just so it would end. While the setting may be glittery and optimistic, there's a thinly veiled layer of cynicism that permeates through everything that just rubs me the wrong way.

I'm not against dating sims. Hell, Bioware is my favorite developer. I'm simply against a game where a creepy sex perv who may or may not be interested in a girl who isn't even old enough to have a pair of tits yet is treated as my point of view. Yes, Commander Shepard does also date subordinates but I didn't feel like he was taking advantage of them the same way that Shinjiro does since he spends more time hitting on his team and scouring the city to stalk them for level ups than he does actually fighting alongside them. Now if only Shinjiro decided to use his free time fighting evil instead of showing up at the library since he knows that a woman that he likes goes there, New York may very well have avoided many of the giant robots that threatened it over the course of the story.

And while it's only implied that Shinjiro is a really insecure homophobe, at least one of the writers was. The depiction of Mori Ranmaru is so utterly homophobic that I'd normally say that it makes me want to vomit. I say normally since I already emptied the contents of my innards after seeing that there was an underage kid in a dating sim. The real life Mori Ranmaru was - much like in Sakura Wars - the lover of Nobunaga. However, he was not an effeminate drag queen who plays to the stereotype that all gay men are effeminate and girly. The real life Mori Ranmaru was not just Nobunaga's lover but also his bodyguard and a total badass samurai. Just when I thought that GLBT characters in gaming had been gaining more acceptance, I get slapped in the face with a homophobic depiction of a real life gay man that I spent most of the game mistaking for a woman.

For all of Sakura Wars' Flaws, it still did have some good points. The actual combat is fun even though there isn't enough of it in-game. While shallow and with no customization, Sakura Wars' battle system does succeed in being engaging, being a much more casual-friendly counterpart to the hardcore Front Mission series' approach to tactical mech combat. All the the myriad flaws of this game would have been far less noticeable if only there were more actual combat and less pointless running around in the hope that you stalk the girls well enough before time runs out.

Unfortunately, there's one battle towards that end that is literally mathematically impossible to win unless you make the correct choices as you need to rely on team attacks to take out multiple enemies at once. This is not only annoying but it prevents players who have spent hours progressing through the game from enjoying the ending without needing to replay Sakura Wars from the very beginning. I enjoy time delayed consequences but I do not enjoy making a game de facto unwinnable due to players making the wrong decisions. It's poor conceptual design and should have been spotted back when the game was being tested on paper during preproduction.

So even in its strengths, Sakura Wars still manages to fail. While it does have potential, the developers dropped the ball during the conceptual stage and never bothered to correct their errors. It's a shame since tactical RPGs no longer receive the type of love that they deserve.

4/10