Let’s talk about a gem.

By the way, space battles never actually happen.

So back in 1996, when the Sega Saturn was still the new hotness, Red Entertainment released the first Sakura Taisen game which then proceeded to sell out within hours. Sakura Taisen had become a new fad and a game that people were literally buying the Sega Saturn just to play, making it a tremendous success. Then when the sequel, Sakura Taisen 2 came out it went on to sell over half a million copies on its first week, making it the second best selling “dating sim” game of all time. Famitsu also had a poll to decide the 100 best games of all time, and the first 4 Sakura Taisen games all made it in.

What I’m trying to say is that Sakura Taisen was a huge thing in Japan, and even though its time is over, it’s still considered a classic and retains a decent fan following. Characters from the game appear in both Project X Zone games, but a real Sakura Taisen game hasn’t been made since 2005.

Sakura Taisen takes place during an alternate 1920s Tokyo, and follows the story of Ogami Ichirou, a newly graduated Imperial Navy Ensign who gets assigned as the squad leader of a secret task force known as the Imperial Assault Revue “Hanagumi”, an all-female team commanded by General Ikki Yoneda, who usually pose as a theater troupe stationed in Ginza’s Imperial Theater, but secretly pilot special suits of armor called “Koubu” to fight evil and defend the capital.

It’s presented in an episodic format, with each chapter having development for the characters and story followed by a big battle, or sometimes a couple more of them.

I actually played the PS2 remake of the first game, which came out in 2003. I had been reading the original 1996 version before that, but halfway through the game I switched to the remake so I could compare the two. The main differences are that the PS2 version had more voices, was two chapters longer than the original, had updated designs for every Koubu, and used Sakura Taisen 3’s battle system instead of the original. It’s a complete upgrade over the original and the version you should try out if you’re interested.

The use of the PS2 also helped improve the scenes with the characters riding their Koubu, since they could show a lot more action using the PS2 instead of the Saturn. The music is mostly the same though, there weren’t really any improvements in that regard, not that it’s a bad thing since the original game still had pretty nice music.

As I said above, the story is about the adventures of the Imperial Assault Revue as they defend Tokyo from an evil group called “The Hive of Darkness” who aim to destroy it. For the most part a pretty lighthearted story that had just as much seriousness as it had comedy, it really felt like going back to watch an anime from the 90s.

It’s a very simple story, which each chapter focusing on one of the girls from the Revue and one of the villain’s plans to destroy Tokyo during the first half of the story. It isn’t until halfway through, after every girl gets their development, that things change up a bit and really start getting good.

Still, the overall simplicity of the plot is not a bad thing in any way. It may sound a bit too plain, but the story still gets you hooked, and just about everything about Sakura Taisen is just so incredibly charming that I couldn’t help but love it since Sakura Taisen is a visual novel that doesn’t take itself too seriously but also doesn’t get too silly. It knows how to set the mood and use it perfectly. Ogami dealing with his new workplace and trying to get along with the girls, as well as trying to fix problems between the girls who don’t get along to unite the whole team is all very well written and entertaining. The character interactions are really fun to read, and I honestly wouldn’t have minded if the game had been like ten hours longer with nothing but more SoL scenes. Not to mention that the final chapter alone is a really crazy ride.

The visual presentation is overall really good. Even with updated art, the remake retains the beautiful 90s style of the original and improves on it. Unlike how VNs usually do it, everything in Sakura Taisen is drawn the same way it would be presented in an anime, an aspect of the game which is supported by its animated cutscenes as well as the previously mentioned eyecatches/previews. The characters all have a nice number of different potraits, very nicely drawn and capable of displaying the characters in various ways, from emotive sprites to goofy ones, giving the characters more ways to express visually.

The attack animations used in battle as well as the 3D Koubu scenes were also very well done, and the latter ones really shine during the second half of the story, when action scenes start getting much better.

The character designs themelves were also very appealing. They’re simple but very good. None of the characters have exaggerated designs or look out of place, and even their battle uniforms look decently practical. Kosuke Fujishima, famous for his work in Ah My Goddess! and the Tales series, really did a fantastic job when designing everything in Sakura Taisen, creating a beautiful cast of characters with simple yet very memorable designs.

The music was pretty nice too. Especially insert songs and the opening/ending themes. The opening theme in particular is one I completely fell in love with. It’s beautiful, upbeat and exciting, a perfect fit for Sakura Taisen and a great way to set expectations for what kind of ride this is going to be. It’s an incredibly memorable song that inmediately became Sakura Taisen’s official seal. This is the reason most of the games in the franchise all have variations of the song as opening themes, as well as more variations for ports and remakes of the games.”Geki! Teikoku Kagekidan”, along with all its variations, is definitely one of the best visual novel openings ever made, in my opinion.

Sakura Taisen had a very colorful and entertaining cast of characters. The girls of the Hanagumi, their commanding officers, as well as the other girls working at the Imperial Theater were all great fun and full of charm. Definitely Sakura Taisen’s strongest point. A cast of characters you can easily get attached to and care about. Even old man Yoneda turned out to be a great and endearing character, acting as a sort of mentor to Ogami who also sees the girls of the Hanagumi as his daughters.

Ogami himself was also a pretty cool protagonist. Being a military officer, he does show great dedication and professionalism to his duty of protecting the city, but isn’t such a hardass that he doesn’t know how to have fun and mess with others. He also shows a proactive attitude when it comes to the girls since he makes his own advances and isn’t afraid to flirt or just act like a dumbass.

The weakest characters were actually the villains, who I didn’t really care much for. There’s a sort of twist with the villains which can kinda be seen miles away and another one which they clearly show to you but is never actually addressed by the characters in the story simply because two of the characters in question never meet face to face.

Basically you read this for the protagonists.

The girls were all fantastic. I said the game had an amazing cast of characters, so of course this applies to the heroines as well. None of them were annoying or boring, they’re all interesting and endearing, each with their own quirks or special traits. Every girl is quite different to the others, none of them feel samey and none of them are simply “cute” or whatever, they all have their own unique personalities and backstories, making them easy characters to like and care about. It is also because they’re all so different that they come at odds with each other at points in the story, but seeing them solve their problems together and unite more as a team is what makes them so great.

A very well-rounded group of heroines where there are no wrong choices to be made when the player needs to decide which girl’s ending to go for.

The main heroine is Shinguuji Sakura. A yamato nadeshiko and country girl who moved to the city to become part of the Imperial Assault Revue. Easily the best of the six girls, by a pretty big margin. Sure I said they were all great girls, but Sakura stands above the rest as a fine example of a great heroine who isn’t just there to act as a love interest. She demonstrates strenght and confidence during battle, but also acts like a charming and playful girl whenever she’s just at the theater. She also becomes an important support for Ogami when he comes across various obstacles during the story.

She’s strong, completely loyal, funny, good at housework, loves acting, can cook, has a fantastic voice and is very cute(this is important). Basically, she’s the best.

Kanzaki Sumire is an ojou-sama from a rich family who also made a name for herself while working as an actress after joining the Hanagumi. She’s assertive and haughty, the complete opposite of Sakura. She’s rich, pretty, famous and she knows it, so she takes an arrogant rich girl attitude most of the time. She looks down on Sakura for being a country girl at the beginning of the story, but she quickly warms up to her and accepts her as another member of the team and a friend.

I found her to be the second best after Sakura. They’re completely different, but both girls have their own charms. Sakura may be a yamato nadeshiko, but Sumire’s great because after you learn about her and her story you come to realize she’s as insecure as everyone else and just puts up a front to hide her problems.

Being a rich girl, she likes shopping and dressing up, as well as teasing Ogami. She loves to mess around, but still does her best to complete her duties as a member of the Hanagumi and to contribute to their mission of protecting the city.

The other members are Kanna, a martial artist from Okinawa; Maria, a Russian marksman and music fanatic; Kohran, a genius mechanic girl from China who speaks in Kansai dialect and Iris, a french loli with psychic powers.

Honestly they’re all pretty great, but Iris was easily the weakest of the six for me. Still, I greatly enjoyed seeing them all come together as a team. Out of these four, Kanna and Maria were specially good, since I found them more attractive and had better stories than Iris and Kohran.

One thing I found interesting about Sakura Taisen was the different kind of events that would pop up while reading. There were events where you had to press sequences of buttons to perform an action or other ones where you could examine the scene or characters. Then there’s also in-game choices, which are all timed so you have to read and think quick about what you want to pick. Sometimes if you took too long to choose, all three of your choices would change into something else, giving you something new to pick from, and then if you ran out of time or just chose not to pick anything, that also counted as a choice in itself, leading to another possible line of dialogue. There were also certain choices which consisted in choosing the intensity of a certain action, which meant you could choose between Ogami simply saying or yelling something, among other variations.

Lastly there’s the combat.The remake used the ARMS battle system introduced in Sakura Taisen 3 to replace the grid-based battle system from the original game. I actually really liked this battle system, I thought it was interesting and fun to play with. The one problem I had with it was that you could sometimes fuck yourself over by blocking other character’s paths with Koubu. This meant that if you positioned a character in the middle of a semi-narrow space, none of your other characters would be able to pass through so they all ended up wasting turns. The only exceptions are Kanna and Iris, whose Koubus were able to pass through allies.

Attacking was done by pressing certain combinations of buttons to perform combos. Or you could deliberately press a combination different from the one displayed to perform a special attack which carried an effect. You could also trigger team attacks with other characters; change formations which affected the stamina cost of your actions each turn; use Ogami to block attacks for the other girls as well as use each character’s final attack which came with its own animated sequence.

So yeah, the battle system itself is really good, I like it despite the one flaw I mentioned. But there was still one thing that I did not like. The game was too easy. Now, at the beginning of the game this seemed normal, but as I progressed I just realized every enemy and every boss in the game were complete pushovers and not challenging at all. You could rush at the enemies without a care for your character’s safety and still wreck the enemies without any casualties. I actually only had a character die in battle once in my entire playthrough, and it was against the final boss, which by the way, was a total pushover as well.

There are actually stats in the game for each character which you can raise by gaining affection points with them and strenghtening trust but I definitely never bothered to check the stat pages because it’s not like it mattered, I was still going to steamroll whatever they threw at me. This made Ogami’s blocking ability and Iris’ healing skills a bit redundant since enemies were doing shit damage to you. There were certain battles where I had some characters taking big damage but it was really never a problem since I could just heal the very next turn.

So basically battles played really fun and pretty, but the enemies in the game were a complete joke. It’s pretty laughable when the chapter’s boss just comes up menacingly at you and does a whopping 4 damage to a character with over 100 HP.

In conclusion, yeah I thought Sakura Taisen was a fantastic VN. It nailed the most important things a VN needed to have: entertaining story, great characters, good art and nice music. Sure battles were iffy, but I can overlook that flaw because the gameplay aspect of a VN isn’t its most important part.

I would definitely recommend this to anyone, it’s a fantastic ride about girls defending their city and fighting for justice. If I had to use a word to describe it, it would be “charming”. It’s not some thought-provoking story dealing with deep psychological themes. It’s just a story about heroes fighting against the evil forces trying to destroy Japan, but being just that it still manages to be amazingly entertaining and memorable, with an equally great cast of characters which I’m sure I won’t forget about. I’m really not surprised that it became as huge as it did back then and I believe it totally deserved it.

Sakura Taisen managed to esaily become one of my favorites thanks to its charm, and thanks to it, I won’t be able to get “Geki! Teikoku Kagekidan” out of my head for a very long time.