Introduction:

Sakura Taisen is the Japanese cult favorite video game franchise in its purest form. It all began with one vision created by a dream team of accomplished creators, it survived through tough times as the development team took double its scheduled time in development, and then when it was released it sold out within hours. From that point on it spawned a multimedia franchise of sequels, spinoffs, anime, manga, albums, a café in Ikebukuro, (look it up), which lasted until five years ago, and yes even it’s very own stage show which lasted for 9 years. This isn’t your everyday, run of the mill dating sim spat out of Japan. This is a definitive franchise which I can actual call video games. But despite all it’s success in Japan, outside of there no one really has heard of Sakura Wars. Even I just got into it last summer after hearing of Project X Zone, a story for another time. I hope I can interest you guys in at least buying Sakura Wars So Long My Love or if you really get into this, the entire series. Don’t worry there are translation guides out there and my guide for Sakura Taisen 3 to help you along. There maybe a few of us but Sakura Wars fans do exist in America. Now with this let’s jump right into it shall we?

On the surface, the Sakura Taisen series is a hybrid of dating simulators or “visual novels” as some call them and a strategy game with a mecha combat skin, set in alternate-history Taishou era 1920’s, (the Taisho era was before Japan became a dictatorship near World War II), Tokyo, Paris, and New York, with masterpiece-level writing, voice acting, art, and music. It follows several troupes, Imperial Assault Force, Groupe Fleur De Paris, and the New York Combat Revue, which are composed of all-female pilots and include you as Ichiro Ogami or Shinjiro Taiga in Sakura Wars So Long My Love as they fight demons, also in mechs, and their evil magic under the guise of musical theater performers at their respective places, the Grand Imperial Theatre, Les Chattes Noirres, and the Littlelip Theater. It’s worldview embraces absurdity, sentimentality, nostalgia, and lots of stereotypes at the beginning of the games. It’s pride and joy, however, are and have always been it’s characters. It’s unapologetic Japaneseness has made it simultaneously aloof and exotically fascinating to audiences out of Japan and here in America.

Development:

The story of its creation begins in 1994, with a phone call from Shouichirou Irimajiri, vice president of Sega, to

Ouji Hiroi: The man who made Sakura Taisen

Ouji Hiroi, a well-regarded writer and producer and the founder of game developer Red Company. Irimajiri wanted to fill the adventure game gap in Sega's first-party lineup, (kind of like trying to compete with Final Fantasy), and thought Hiroi & Red Company had the sort of creative talents needed for such a project. Hiroi agreed and the two started working at a furious pace, building up a mountain of ideas. Hiroi's first contribution was a scroll of his own calligraphy, a poem to set the tone of the project. (That is just the sort of creative guy Hiroi is.) They dreamed up characters, and then imagined scenes for them. Upon seeing a tabletop war-game being played in the office, they decided to add tactical combat to their adventure concept. Anything was possible, and inspiration was everywhere. And yes they were inspired by something like DnD.

The people who make Sakura Taisen

Early on, they recruited legendary comic artist Kousuke Fujishima to lend his sentimental style to the character designs, and famous anime composer Kouhei Tanaka to provide an fantastical score. Tanaka finished the theme song early, and it served a similar purpose as Hiroi's calligraphy, giving the team an remindful symbol to take to heart. Fujishima brought aboard animator Hidenori Matsubara to help with the massive amount of in-game art and animated sequences. And I do mean massive, more then 80% of the games are hand-drawn! And Futoshi Nagata provided the iconic, retro-futuristic mecha designs. Continuing the all-star recruiting, writer Satoru Akahori was brought on board to start on the scripts. Because Akahori felt most comfortable writing anime scripts, he simply wrote in an episodic format, to the degree that at the end of each episode there was a preview of the next one. Think Pokémon, Hey Who’s That Pokémon? Also known as an eyecatch.  A process developed: as Akahori wrote, Hiroi edited, to make sure the script fit into his perfectionist vision of the game world. This led to the creation of four games' worth of scripts, which were then aggressively pruned down to the very best material. Development took double the planned amount of time, and the game was not released until September of 1996. What had at times seemed like a hugely over-ambitious project, doomed to failure, ended up being a huge hit, selling out on the morning of its release.

Voices:

The Stage Show

Securing a top-notch voice cast is crucial to the Sakura Taisen design. Because music and stage performance are central to its theme, Hiroi Ouji scouted many of the cast by going to live music performances and looking for women who could really sing, rather then just going through voice-acting agencies. He also sought out people who could “speak as if they were singing”; that is, peope who had a lyrical quality to their voices even when talking normally. This doesn’t apply to English voice actors’ seeing as none of them sing and when they do it sucks… terribly. Moving on… The importance places on the voice acting is evidenced by the precise synchronization of the onscreen portraits’ mouth movements with actual phonemes being spoken which is still not done in many games today and I still don’t understand how they even achieved it in 1996. (Sometimes I even imagine some poor, lowly interned, forced to program the timing of every mouth-flap for ever syllable of voice recording throughout every Sakura Wars game). (And I’m going to bash American actors now in that in the English version of Sakura Taisen 5 the lips don’t sync mostly and looks hilarious on occasion). (Except in animated cut scenes they have that down somehow). Another testament to the voice acting talent is the way that the voice-acting cast became just as idolized by fans as the characters were, and were even conflated with the characters in the live stage shows.

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