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Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love
PlayStation 2
Like Combining Chocolate and Pickled Herring
2.5/5 stars
“Sakura Wars 5: So Long, My Love” (“SLML”) is the final entry in a series of Tactical RPG/Dating Sim hybrids that got its start as an episodic game on the Sega Saturn. This series has never before been released outside of Japan, which has been an annoyance for fans of Japanese games who wanted to see why this series was so popular in its home nation. For a while, it appeared that we were never going to get to experience ‘Sakura Wars’ in English, as “SLML’s” 2005 release came and went with no signs of anything changing. Yet suddenly, in 2010, Sega completely flabbergasted the RPG-loving community by localizing this game a mere 5 years after its initial release. Not being Japanese, and thus not having any experience with Dating Sims, I always imagined that the ‘Sakura Wars’ series seamlessly blended two contrasting genres to create a combination much like chocolate and peanut butter. After playing “SLML,” I came to the conclusion that the combination of TRPG and Dating Sim tastes much more like chocolate and picked herring.
Presentation
The Dating Sim portion of “SLML” doesn’t have any graphical prowess whatsoever. It features mostly static backdrops (which are incredibly blurry and pixilated) against which the people the player is interacting with appear as barely-animated talking heads. These character portraits are un-animated aside from blinking eyes and flapping lips, which vaguely match up with the dialog being spoken (or text being displayed in unvoiced segments). As is so common in RPGs nowadays (which obviously stole the idea from Dating Sims), each character has a handful of portraits representing different emotions, which visibly fade out, then in, when changing emotions. On the few occasions that the player is given free rein to move around the game world, the polygonal environment and character models look decent, but are not particularly praiseworthy.
The only redeeming graphics in the Dating Sim portion of the game are the menus that appear between chapters (which are flashy and well-animated) and the rare fully-animated cutscenes. There are only a handful of these cutscenes scattered throughout the game, which blend seamlessly with the static sections. If there were more animated sequences, or even ambient animations in the backgrounds, the Dating Sim portion of the game could have looked great, as it would have been literally like ‘playing an anime.’ As it is, it’s about as graphically pleasing as a shoebox puppet show with character cutouts glued to popsicle sticks.
The TRPG segments, on the other hand, look a lot better than the Dating Sim segments. Each playable character pilots a unique-looking mecha. These polygonal models and the environments they navigate look sharp, with clean textures and no noticeable jaggies. Unfortunately, the TRPG segments all look incredibly similar, as the number of enemy units is miniscule. These units aren’t even pallet swapped, like so many old RPGs were fond of doing, but are the exact same generic enemies appearing from the beginning of the game to the end.
The audio in “SLML” is just as weak as the graphics. With the exception of decent opening and closing themes, the game’s entire soundtrack consists of a handful of generic, dull MIDI tracks. The lack of an amazing soundtrack is kind of dumbfounding, as ‘Sakura Wars’ in general has a reputation among Japanese Otaku for having incredible music. Color me unimpressed!
The special edition of “SLML” that was released for the PlayStation 2 in North America actually comes with two discs. One disc features the original Japanese voiceacting while the other features an English dub. I played the English disc, with the intention of swapping-in the Japanese disc to compare voiceacting quality across a variety of scenes. Unfortunately, I discovered that the two discs, despite being the ‘same’ game, are not compatible with the same save file, thus my comparison was cut short. From what comparison I was able to complete, however, the Japanese voiceacting is far superior. The English dub features plenty of characters with stupid accents that are done incredibly poorly. The only ‘foreign’ characters in the dub who don’t sound ridiculous are men, which speaks of misplaced priorities in dubbing a game that focuses entirely on an all-female combat troupe.
Finally, the localization of some character names was not handled well. One of the characters owns a horse called ‘Larry,’ which should have been called ‘Rally’ (really, Larry the horse?!), in a typical case of L/R transposition. Another character’s name was changed from ‘Rikaritta’ to ‘Rosarita’ in an attempt to disguise the Japanese ignorance of Mexican names. And in the worst case of poorly done research I’ve seen in quite a while, another character, a black woman, was given the name ‘Sagiitta Weinberg’ in the Japanese release… Weinberg is a Jewish name! To cover this massive faux pas, Sagiitta’s name was bowdlerized to ‘Cheiron Archer’ in the dub (which killed the Zodiac theme of the characters’ names), but the backdrop graphic showing the door to her office still says ‘Sagiitta Weinberg.’
Story
Back in 2006, my interest in the ‘Sakura Wars’ series prompted me to buy and watch the anime adaption of the original game. My dislike of said anime series should have been the first warning sign that ‘Sakura Wars’ was not worth my attention… but I ignored the problems with the TV show based on the fact that it is an adaption of a game, and those never turn out well.
What I hated about ‘Sakura Wars TV’ was the fact that the stereotypical loser hero of the story suddenly found himself thrust into an authority position over a harem of mentally unstable women. Almost everything in the plot revolved around the hero using his disarming loser-ness to force these catty, shrieking harpies to get along with each other. The setting was explained very little, and the villains were pretty much left a mystery.
“SLML’s” story suffers from all of the same pitfalls of the anime series, and is even setup in chapters, like episodes of an anime series, yet manages to delve even further into ridiculousness by being set in New York City. It’s one thing for a Japanese writer to put together an archetypal story that takes place in Tokyo with a Japanese cultural backdrop. When that same writer tries to place a Japanese archetypal story against a backdrop he knows nothing about, terrible things happen and the entire narrative comes off as extremely phony.
“SLML” takes place in the year 1928 in an alternate reality. In this alternate universe, psychic power is real, and manifests in both humans and the environment as a power source called ‘Pneuma.’ By combining Pneuma with the normal technology of the 1920s, the game world has developed into a Steampunk reality in which devices like mecha and computers, which would never work using purely-steam-based technology, get the additional boost they need to function by drawing upon the Pneuma of their operators. In this world, women are much more respected than they were in the real 1920s due to the fact that they have much more powerful Pneuma than men.
The narrative of “SLML” opens with Shinjiro Taiga, the nephew of the hero of the original “Sakura Wars,” reporting for duty in Tokyo after graduating from the military academy. He is told that he will be going to New York City in order to help setup a steam-mecha combat group to defend Manhattan from evil. This combat group is the New York Combat Revue, which, like the Imperial Flower Brigade from the original game and anime, disguises itself as a Broadway theater when not out fighting demons (and yes, they perform musicals). Also like the Imperial Flower Brigade, the New York Combat Revue is populated by a variety of antisocial women who each represent a personified personality flaw and anime stereotype. It is up to Shinjiro to help these ladies work through their issues and become a cohesive team. Unlike the Imperial Flower Brigade, the New York Combat Revue is funded by an eccentric and fruity billionaire/weeaboo named Mr. Sunnyside, whose resources have allowed the group to replace the clunky and primitive Kobu mecha from Japan with Chinese-developed STAR mecha, which can transform into personal jet fighters. Aside from stretching 1920s technology to its breaking point, even with psychic support, Mr. Sunnyside sports a bowl-cut and teeny-tiny glasses that make me want to punch him in the face every time he appears onscreen.
Nonsensically, when the New York Combat Revue is called into action, they unfailingly end up face-to-face with a Japanese demon and a small army of Dark Pneuma-powered mecha. The game’s perfectly logical explanation for fighting Japanese demons in New York City is that Manhattan and Japan are both densely-populated islands sitting directly on large deposits of natural Pneuma, thus attracting demons. My completely illogical explanation for fighting Japanese demons in New York City is that the lowly Japanese intern who was tasked with writing the story for “SLML” didn’t know anything about America (or Western Civilization for that matter), so he just stuck with what he did know.
And it’s not just the villains who seem out of place. Nothing in the narrative feels authentic. The dialog, situations, and attitudes expressed by the characters are all definitively Japanese. From the ham-handed attempts at invoking neighborhood spirit in Harlem to the never ending stream of ‘Friendship Speeches’ and admonitions that ‘you can do anything as long as you don’t give up,’ I couldn’t help but think that there was no effort put into the writing at all and that it was simply a copypasta job from older ‘Sakura Wars’ titles.
According to the promotional materials for the game, “SLML” is supposed to have an incredibly dynamic story that reshapes itself based on the decisions the player makes for Shinjiro. ‘Dynamic’ is a complete overstatement, as the general narrative remains exactly the same regardless of what Shinjiro does. The only things that change slightly are a few dialogs and a few short optional scenes that may or may not be available. Also, despite the fact that Japanese Dating Sims = Hentai in many people’s minds, this game is 100% clean (which should be obvious from the Teen rating). Sadly, there is not any fanservice to be found in any way, shape, or form.
Gameplay
As is so helpfully advertised on the back of the box, “SLML” combines TRPG gameplay with Dating Sim gameplay. While I was expecting the game to be 20% Dating Sim and 80% TRPG, it is, quite unfortunately, the other way around. Almost the entire game is Dating Sim, with a scant 1 or 2 TRPG battles in each of the 8 chapters. The entire game is also very (mercifully) short, taking ~20 hours for a single playthrough. Though the game does feature 7 barely-different endings, it’s possible to save in chapter 7 and manipulate events to get most of those endings without replaying everything from the beginning.
Dating Sims are typically classified as a sub-genre of Adventure games. When I think of Adventure games, I think of point-and-click, logic-and-item based puzzles. “SLML” doesn’t have any logic or puzzles. Instead, the lion’s share of the game plays much more like a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ novel than anything else. At specific points in the dialog, Shinjiro is given a choice of 2-4 things to say that can have either a positive or negative effect on the attitude of the person (usually girl) he’s talking to. These choices are almost always timed by a steam gauge, so waiting too long to decide means Shinjiro just stands there looking stupid. Occasionally, instead of a simple dialog choice, Shinjiro is required to ‘help’ a character perform some action. This help comes in the form of the much-maligned QuickTime Events, except these QTEs only employ the two analogs sticks, requiring taps, quarter circles, half circles, and full twirls. The result of each interaction is noted by a distinctive sound which lets the player know if Shinjiro made the person happy, really happy, or unhappy.
Keeping the female cast happy is very important, and can’t be blown-off as irrelevant by a player who only wants to play the TRPG segments, as happiness directly translates to ‘Motivation,’ the only actual statistic score in the entire game. Each character starts the game ‘Fairly Motivated.’ Saying things they like can max them out at ‘Highly Motivated,’ while saying things they don’t like can drop them to ‘Unmotivated.’ The more motivated a character is, the bigger the boost to their stats, allowing them to move further, hit harder, and take less damage. Annoyingly, though, every character’s Motivation resets to ‘Fairly Motivated’ at the beginning of subsequent chapters.
The question stands, though: Is it worth slogging through pages of cheesy Choose Your Own Adventure text to get to the TRPG battles? Maybe. The TRPG sections of the game are amazing, and some ideas that eventually found their way into Sega’s awe-inspiring “Valkyria Chronicles” first took root in the dry, cracked soil of “SLML.” Yet there are also plenty of incredible ideas that never made it out of this game.
Each character has three gauges, one for Mobility, one for Spirit, and one for Hit Points. The Mobility gauge is much like the AP gauge from “Valkyria Chronicles,” in that it determines how far a character can move during their turn. However, in “SLML” the Mobility gauge only factors in the distance between start-point and end-point, thus allowing a character to move forward (expending Mobility), step around an obstacle, then move back toward their start point on the other side of the obstacle to regain most (if not all) of the spent Mobility. This feature of the Mobility gauge is also very handy to probing a character’s range and setting up attacks. The Mobility gauge is subdivided into segments, with different numbers of Mobility segments required for other actions a character may perform during her turn. Normal attacks each require one segment, and up to five can be chained together into a combo. Charging Spirit takes four segments, defending takes two segments, while healing, super moves, and joint attacks each take one (but also expend a set amount of Spirit). In addition to manually charging the Spirit gauge, characters accumulate Spirit as they deal and receive damage. There are also different combat formations available that either make the entire team more offensive or more defensive and change the amount of Mobility required for certain actions (or block certain actions entirely). Joint attacks are one of the most interesting aspects of the TRPG system, as they allow two characters to deal damage to all enemies situated in a narrow corridor between them. Also, the amount of damage dealt by joint attacks depends on how much the two characters like each other.
However, the mecha-on-foot battles are only half of the TRPG system in “SLML,” and only occur when the characters are cleaning out the peon henchmen of whatever demon is terrorizing Manhattan in any given chapter. The boss battles always involve the STARs transforming into airplane mode and dismantling a multi-part mechanical monstrosity the size of a skyscraper. These airborne battles take the traditionally horizontal TRPG battle and turn it vertical. All of the gameplay mechanics of the battle system remain the same in this mode, but the changes in the positioning system offer a surprisingly fresh twist on the genre.
Overall
“Sakura Wars 5: So Long, My Love” is an uncomfortable mix of genres that specifically targets an incredibly narrow portion of the gaming public. I can only recommend this game to self-proclaimed Otaku who enjoy watching bad anime. While the TRPG system is amazing, there simply isn’t enough of it to justify suffering through the terrible, clichéd story; obnoxious characters; and irredeemable ‘Choose Your Own Adventure with QuickTime Events’ that passes for Dating Sim gameplay.
Presentation: 2/5
Story: 1/5
Gameplay: 0.5/5 Dating Sim; 4.5/5 Tactical RPG
Overall (not an average): 2.5/5
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