I finished Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love and wrote about it a year back here on Era and how it was one of the most charming, well presented, and fun game that I had ever played. I wanted to play some more of these games, but turns out that this was the only one to ever get localized. Interesting fact though, in an interview with NIS America's President back in 2010, Akenaga said that a company DID try to localize Sakura Wars 1 & 2 (Dreamcast ports of these games) for the PSP; but because the game was mostly visual novel segments, when it was sent to Sony Computer Entertainment for approval, they rejected it. I remember hearing that the same thing happened with the Sakura Wars 1 for the PS2 (a remake of the original game), but can't seem to find the source that I read this from so I think it's necessary that I note that.
What do we have from the Sakura Wars series outside of Japan?
We actually got the manga for the first game:
Tokyopop translated and released it back in 2005. I bought and read them, and they were pretty great. The problem with this was that there is a lot of content that goes on between battles in the Sakura Wars games (this is the visual novel element of the games) of which they tend offer a large amount of character development. The manga only really took the key plot points from the first game and didn't include any of these other events. To make things even worse, Tokyopop never published the last three volumes of the manga.
Besides the manga, we got a lot of the series' anime:
The one above is the only anime series that came out of the franchise. the rest are OVAs. It's also pretty great and has the spirit of the game, but again, it does some things differently. This anime is an adaptation of the first game, but instead of focusing on Ichiro Ogami, the protagonist of the first four games, it instead follows Sakura Shinguji, who is essentially the second star of the franchise. For the most part it follows the game's story, but certain key events are changed and don't follow what happened in the original game. If anyone played Tales of Zestiria, then watched Tales of Zestiria the X, it was kind of like that. And as stated previously with the manga, the anime also doesn't try to offer the character development that the games had. This still had really great animation, music, and art though, and I would still recommend it.
Besides this series, we got a lot of other anime from the franchise:
- Two OVA collections: The first acting as a prequel to the first game's events, and the second taking place during the first and second game, but instead of focusing on the plot, it was more like the character events that took place during the visual novel segments of these games. I think they offered some interesting lore on the games, and it was nice for the latter to show the characters being themselves and being away from battle.
- The Movie: This was an original story for the first game's cast, as well as starring a character who would be in the main cast of the fifth game. This was full cinematic release in Japan, and it shows because out of all that I will mention, this one has the best animation. I did however feel sort of disinterested by the plot and characters, with the former being the very standard "we have to save the city" story and nothing interesting coming out of it, and the characters themselves felt somewhat one-note.
- Sumire OVA: This one is weird. Not going to go into spoilers, but it is an OVA dedicated to probably the third most important character in the first game's cast. It's only 30 minutes, and it focuses on this character after Sakura Wars 4, so I'm kind of confused on what audience this is for? I mean it got a dub and a DVD release.
- Ecole de Paris OVAs: This one is also weird, it's a prequel to Sakura Wars 3. Honestly, I didn't really have any feelings towards it. The animation was just okay, the dialogue was boring, and it felt like there was material I needed to know from the third game to understand what was going on. Again, really curious what the intended audience for this hour and a half OVA prequel to a game we never got was, we never got the hour and a half sequel either.
What's funny about all of this is that the one OVA sequel we didn't get, was the one to Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love, the only game in the series we ended up getting.
Other than these materials; Sakura Shinguji, Ichiro Ogami, Gemini Sunrise (Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love deuteragonist), and Erica Fontaine (Sakura Wars 3 deuteragonist) were all playable in both Project X Zone games:
I find their inclusion in these games interesting for a couple of reasons:
- In Project X Zone 1, they were tied with Street Fighter for having the most playable representatives for a franchise. And in Project X Zone 2, they ended up having the most representatives for franchise, both for the playable cast, and the villain cast, with the Sakura Wars games being the only series to have a villain for every game the playable character represented.
- Project X Zone 2 was different from Project X Zone 1 in that it added new characters from series that were more popular worldwide (Ace Attorney, Virtua Fighter, Devil May Cry, Streets of Rage, etc.), while taking out characters from the original game that were from franchises that were less popular/not as popular outside of Japan (Valkyria Chronicles 3, Super Robot Wars, Shining Force, Cyberbots, etc.)
That's all I really have for this post of mine. Thought it would be interesting to share with the people of Era what I've found out about this series since I got into it last year, I've come to really like it as you guys can probably tell. Would love to hear the y'all's experiences with it and hopefully Shin Sakura Wars ends up being great.
