I always underestimate the length of these final acts.
On approach to the floating fortress of doom, our airship is assailed by armies of robotically enhanced demons. We kill off some bosses (again). The big bad rants incoherently. We have a four phase final boss battle. We get a bittersweet epilogue that sets up the next two games. Also, some bonus Reni stuff.
(EDIT: reduced the size of the imgur pictures in the chapter thoughts)
Chapter 11
► Show Spoiler
Chapter 12 final dungeon and final boss
► Show Spoiler
Chapter 13 epilogue and setup for SW3
► Show Spoiler
Bonus Reni timeline
► Show Spoiler
Now to wait for the fan translation patches for 3 and 4. How many years will it take to see the conclusion to the story?
Sakura Wars 2: Thou Shalt Not Die review
Overall a very good game. Like with Trails Through Daybreak 2, I found this more enjoyable to play than a $100,000,000+ FF7 Remake game, pausing my slow slog through Rebirth to consume this.
Story and Characters
The game takes place in an alternate fantasy 1926 Taisho era Japan. In this world, Japan is seemingly not currently involved in any foreign conflicts, nobody mentions the emperor, and steampunk/magitek technology is being researched. A few rare individual are born with spirit powers, and monstrous demons prey upon humanity. You play as naval ensign Ichiro Ogami, a young man blessed with spirit powers, who is assigned to lead a squad of mech pilots called the Flower Division using their spirit powers to fuel the mechs. Apparently young men with spirit powers are in short supply, so the rest of your squad are young ladies with spirit powers, many of whom are foreigners. The Flower Division is based in a theater, and when they are not fighting they are instead rehearsing for their next play. The game is broken into a chapter format, where the first half of each chapter has you walking around the theater during the day and the night seeing various skits and subplots advance. Then half way through, the bad guys start plotting and the second half is about fighting evil. Rinse repeat for a dozen chapters or so.
The slice of life skits really make the characters feel real, and the game is able to build drama and suspense via character stories and relationships without having to resort to cheap end of the world plots. Unfortunately, there were a couple of hiccups. Kohran's sudden unearned angsting in chapter 4, and a sudden a rehash of a Sakura centric story connected to the Anti-Kouma Corps from the prior game. SW2 goes to greater lengths to flesh out its world than the prior game did, but it feels odd that the aftermath of large scale events that happen later on is not explored.
Sakura Wars has a heavy emphasis on romance. SW2 to me feels very notable in how not only can you carry your romance over from the prior game (usually in any serialized RPG series, optional romances are either reset or only one of the options are canonized. The 13 game long Trails series is a notorious offender), but you get many scenes with your love woven throughout the entirety of the game (as opposed to just getting a small handful of token scenes, if at all). In the first game I chose Sumire, who I carried over into this game. Though the series is named Sakura Wars and the big girl featured in the center of the promotional material is named Sakura, I have never felt that I was "supposed" to have picked Sakura, and this game made me chosen love Sumire feel like the main heroine. (A common complaint amongst JRPG fans is that if the game allows you to pick different heroines than the poster girl, the main poster girl gets so emphasis that you feel like you were supposed to have picked her from the get go). So SW2 feels pretty exceptional here.
Another thing too is that the romance starts from minute 1, as opposed to most other JRPGs and VNs where it doesn't really start kicking in until the latter portion. So you actually get to see the characters be together rather than in an ending CG. Well, not quite. SW2 takes place over a full year, and by the end of SW2, Ogami and Sumire had been going out for... what? Two years since she began warming up to him half way through SW1? At this point there should be talk about getting married. Maybe that's why SW2 has the conclusion it does, to keep you looking forward to the ending in SW4.
Walking with Sumire in the second half of the first game.
Carrying on my SW1 choice into SW2, I was immediately reunited with Sumire from the very first scene, and she got scenes all throughout. Not sidelined, resetted, or forgotten.
As with the prior game (and the JRPG/VN genre as a whole usually), the characters were very likeable, and most of them feel like they really inhabit the world they exist in. The game not only carries over the characters from the first game, but also introduces several new likeable characters:
- Orihime on paper feels like a rehash of Sumire from early SW1, being a young noble lady showing off her cleavage who is standoffish towards the MC, but Orihime's voice actor does a good job making her sound different, and they ultimately wind up having different stories and feeling like different people. It helps that Sumire in SW2 is pretty patient and caring.
- The stoic tomboy Reni very much helps round up the team, gives Ogami a dependable comrade as well as someone to tutor, and also gives Iris another character to bond with besides Ogami.
- Kayama (who you may know from SW5) is introduced here as a slightly dorky but still dependable ally, though the dangerous and alienating nature of his job as a spy is glossed over.
- Deputy Commander Ayame from the first game gets brought back as her cousin Kaede, a little unfortunate that there was no originality here but at least she is pleasant.
- The trio of flamboyant gays now living in the basement are sometimes funny, but quickly wind up becoming one note. Only a couple times did it feel like they were actually useful.
- The fill-in gift shop attendant of Tsubomi is mostly there to make the world feel larger and introduce us to the offscreen Maidens' Academy.
- Minister of the navy Yamaguchi is introduced and has not done anything yet, so maybe he will wind up being important in SW4.
- You may meet relatives of who you romance. I romanced Sumire, and her family were not particularly fleshed out but given dimension to the world.
While a year has passed and the team are now true comrades with each other, I do miss that it is overall not possible to step on anyone's toes in SW2 (aside from Orihime, who is ****** at you no matter what you do for the first 20 hours). You spent most of the first game with Sumire being a little bitchy, a lot of options could cause Sakura to diss you, and Maria wasn't trusting of you. There was also a part where you could eavesdrop on Kanna talking to Maria, and then Kanna opens the door and sees you there and gets ******. So you had to consider what you were doing and how people would react. But in SW2, you can do almost anything and never really antagonize anyone. Maria is now the only character left who can step on your toes if you say certain things (pressing Ogami when he lets slip that he was underwater right after the hot springs segment, or Maria catching you reading a pickup artist guide in the library, or if you knock on her door at night).
As for the best characters, I thought Commander Yoneda stuck out a lot. You do you feel he is on your side, but he is also able to put his foot down. He strikes a good balance between joviality, friendliness, and seriousness. Iris, Reni, and Kanna feel well realized. And also Sumire too, but I romanced her so her extra scenes and that added context might have changed my perception of her.
As for the villains, they are a mixed bag. The Demon King and the Five Elements do an okay job as fodder villains for most of the runtime. Mokojiki and Kasha are probably the most unidimensional and boring. The rest of the Five Elements - Kongou, Tsuchigumo, Suiko, and the Demon King - feel more two dimensional and mildly threatening, given that they come up with more subtle plans to defeat the heroes such as trying to deprive them of funding, infiltrating them, or ambushing them while out on vacation. However, as usual the villains overall are never seen operating together, and are each fought separately. We get one scene where Kongou is trying to radio Saki and send her reinforcements. It would be nice to have seen more coordination like this.
Unfortunately, the final villain, Army Minister Kyogoku, was a real disappointment. With him being a human and a military higher up, I expected that he would have much more depth than the cartoonish kill/conquer everyone blah blah characterization that most of the demon villains in this series have. And his motivations are incoherent, which makes him worse than many of the fodder chapter villains. Another issue is not just the writing, but also the voice direction. We have also had several generic "kill/conquer everyone" demon villains in this franchise, but the ones that stand out do so because of their voice actors, either by making them feel passionate and thus threatening (Kasha from this game, Ranmaru from SW5), or by making them feel more like real people (Kongou and Tsuchigumo from this game), or by giving them the idea that there might be depth or charisma to them (Demon King from this game, Oda Nobunaga from SW5).
Army Minister Kyogoku
(Oda Nobunaga from Sakura Wars V)
He also felt like a missed opportunity, because typically military or government characters in fiction tend to be able to be more threatening onscreen than the generic evils, as they can wield their authority to successfully impede, defame, or dispossess the heroes. You often see this in superhero stories and in Korean Dramas. Dolores Umbridge. Etc. Army Minister Kyogoku could have easily been that. His introductory scene created tension because he was a higher up and our heroes were on his shitlist who were afraid to retaliate against him after he mocked Sakura's father.
In spite of the disappointing final villain, the game still manages to have a memorable ending. Ogami is in the springtime of love when he gets sent overseas by the navy, leading into the next game set in Paris, before his return to Japan in SW4. I wonder if the devs had planned that far ahead. I am looking forward to seeing the reunion in SW4... when that gets fan translated.
Gameplay
The highlight of the franchise's gameplay is how it uses interactivity and timed dialogue windows to make the visual novel segments more engaging. Hearing the timer beeping and seeing the gauge run out, and the risk of making a bad choice that lowers myself in the eyes of the characters made me sit up in my chair and pay attention. Letting the timer run out and remaining silent may also be a good or bad option too. Long timers are also sparingly used to great effect to elevate the tension in climatic negotiations, or to heighten the temptation of doing something like reading a person's private diary that was sitting on the table while you heard the beeping noise.
SW2 introduces a mechanic where the dialogue options available can change if you wait long enough. Early on, the game tutorializes to you that this might be a bad thing to wait and that characters might react negatively if they think you are slow. However, this idea is quickly forgotten, and you almost always want to wait to see if more dialogue options appear. You can almost never wait too long and then have to pick a bad option.
There are other miscellaneous uses of interactivity. You don't just enter someone's room, but instead start outside their door and then have to knock on it and hear if they are there. There might be timed conversations during battle where you need to recall the color of a ribbon a girl heard earlier that day to give her a moral boost (or, if you fail, give her a stat debuff). There is a newly added radio where you have to turn the knob to tune into people's specific number to be able to contact them. Etc. These little details help make the world feel more immersive.
The other thing Sakura Wars does is have timed adventure segments where you can wander around the theater (or in SW5's case, different streets in New York), and time will advance by 10 minutes for each room you visit, characters move around if enough time passes, and you only have so much time per night. There is no icon labelling who is in what room before you enter it, so you have to be paying attention to what is going on in the story and use some predictive thinking to find the people you are looking for. If it is day time and a play is coming up, then characters might be practicing on stage or be in the dressing room. If it is night time then people might be in their rooms. Kohran loves engineering and is often down in the hangar. Sometimes people are in the courtyard or on the balcony. Etc.
However, there are a lot of rooms in the theater, and many of them go unused for most if not the entire game. For example, the theater's underground infirmary, storeroom, and swimming pool, or the VIP entrance, or the 1st floor and 2nd floor seating. Orhihime visits the attic often at the start of the game but then stops going there. I guess these places exist to help build out the theater and make it feel more like a real place, but it is strange that you can waste time each day and night checking out these places and never finding anyone there. I think SW5 wound up having the better idea of moving most the explorable areas out of the theater and into various NYC streets, so there is almost always something happening in each area and you didn't waste time checking it out.
Lastly, there are the SRPG missions where you control a squad of mechs, starting with 4 people and then gradually reaching a full size of 9 characters on the field at once by the half way point. The scenarios usually have you do something in addition to fighting enemies, such as destroying pillars before time runs out or defending something. As with SW1, the lack of difficulty is my biggest disappointment. I ran through the whole game with the team set to the wind strategy for maximum movement speed and the fire strategy which lowered defense to raise attack power. I would get greedy and not use the defense command and endanger my people, and yet never once was I ever punished and lost anyone. Sakura Wars V was by no means a hardcore game, but at least there you could not be reckless, and I did lose people in one mission.
Aesthetics
The game looks great, from the UI wallpapers, to the scene backgrounds, to the character portraits, to the CG inserts be they illustrations or CGI renders of cool mechs. As for mech designs, I particularly liked Reni's Eisenkleid and the Demon King's Dark Kamui. If there is anything lacking, it might be that most of the character's ultimate ability cutscenes aren't that exciting compared to modern ultimate ability cutscenes, but they are still novel. The SRPG environment backgrounds aren't on the same level as contemporary JRPGs on the PS1 that had pre-rendered backgrounds.
I think it is a shame that most of the villains' mechs aside from the Demon King's did not get shown off well in 3D CGI cutscenes or prerendered still. The in-engine cutscene models used for ultimate abilities paled in comparison to their CGI renders. What is baffling is that when looking through the artbook for SW2, Kasha's unique mech Goko was not used ingame, even though it had a high poly 3D CGI render! Ingame, he gets a red red recolor of Mokujiki's green Chiken. Why would the devs create a unique CGI model for Kasha, only to then not take pictures of it and implement it as sprites and implement a low poly version of his model?
Kasha was ROBBED
It was a little underwhelming that the heroes did not get any new Thunderbirds vehicles. It's the same Thunderstrike train, Flying Whale airship, and supersized airship Mikasa from the prior game.
Kohei Tanaka (who you may know as a composer for One Piece) provided great music that still holds up. Often a thing you see with these older JRPG/VN tracks is that a lot of tracks were - or have since become - rather "stereotypical". But SW's songs are still refreshing almost thirty years later and don't sound samey. The songs also have variety within themselves, and do not get boring to listen to over and over. However, there was not enough different cutscene music. I would often find myself humming the song that I predicted would play next, and was usually right.
Overall a very good game. Recommended. Play SW1 first, though. Or play SW5, which is a standalone story, and has more challenging missions.
