Sakura Taisen 2 - (Sega Saturn/Dreamcast/PC/PSP)/(1998)

This much-anticipated sequel was released for Saturn in April of 1998. It remains the breakout hit of the Kimi, Shinitamou Koto Nakare or "Beloved, You Must Not Die" - from a controversial wartime poem by Akiko Yosano. Selling over half a million copies - this also makes it the #2 best-selling gal game title of all time. It began the tradition of using a historical, poetic quotation as a subtitle; this time being the biggest addition to the game, of course, is the expanded cast of heroines: two new arrivals, Orihime and Reni, have joined the Imperial Revue. Ogami returns to the theater from a one-year deployment aboard a Navy ship, and finds most of the Flower Troupe away on various business. Eventually the Black Nest Society are found to be at it again, and the now 9-member Flower Troupe is called upon to save the capital once more.
series,

Characters

Reni Milchstraße
A stoic, androgynous child prodigy from Germany. When first arriving at the Imperial Revue after a stint at the experimental Star Troupe in Europe, Reni is assumed to be male. An incident in the bath eventually reveals that she is female. Her intellect and fighting skill are tremendous, but her apparently emotionless nature causes her difficulty in social adaptation. She does get along well with Iris, though, the other precocious young member of the Flower Troupe. She pilots a blue Eisenkleid with a lance. Calls herself boku, the ambiguous but slightly masculine personal pronoun.


Orihime Soletta
Scion of a noble Italian family, and prodigy of the stage. She serves as a hot-blooded highborn counterpart to Sumire's simmering haughtiness. For reasons not immediately clear to Ogami, she has a deep resentment for Japanese men (even though her father is one). This makes her a classic tsundere (tough/soft) gal-game archetype. Furthermore, she speaks with an outrageously exaggerated accent and mixes foreign words into her Japanese sentences liberally, making her seem even more distant. She was a member of the experimental Star Troupe that briefly operated in Europe. She pilots a magenta Eisenkleid with... steam-powered lasers. Calls herself watashi, a normal personal pronoun, but always spelled out in hiragana as if spoken with an accent.

Kaede Fujieda
The replacement for Fujieda Ayame, and her sister. Due to events at the end of Sakura Taisen 1, Ayame doesn't return in ST2. Thankfully she has a sister who is also readily capable of fulfilling the "unattainable older woman" archetype.






Kayama Yuuichi
Head of the intelligence unit Moon Troupe, and an old friend of Ohgami from their Navy days. It seems that any time Ohgami is unsure of himself, Kayama appears mysteriously, strums a few chords on his flamenco guitar, makes passes at any attractive women present, lays down some sage advice, and disappears. He's basically like James Bond but in a crazy, hilarious Sakura Taisen way.





ST2 also introduces the cutesy child character of Tsubomi, with her catch phrase "smile, smile!" And, of course, the insufferable, hyper-caricatured okama (effeminate male) trio of the Rose Troupe, presumably for comic relief.

The return to Japan

The game systems are a refinement upon the formulas introduced in ST1. The original LIPS types are back, plus several new types. In one, you need to facilitate a touchy conversation between several characters on screen. This generally involves clicking randomly back and forth between them until the situation is worked out or until you fall asleep at the controller, whichever comes first. Another type changes up the answers on you halfway through the time limit, which sometimes helps you and sometimes harms you. Still another gives an overarching time limit that counts down while you deal with several individual time-limited LIPS choices. The biggest addition to LIPS is the personality gauge, which uses colors to track the kind of answers that you give to your troupe in LIPS decisions, recording whether you are a gentle or strict leader. Different characters prefer for Ohgami to behave in different ways, so the meter affects the way various scenes play out throughout the game. Unfortunately this feature is not used in later games in the series.

Dreamcast version

PC version

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