a review of sakura taisen v: episode zero, a videogame by sega/overworks/RED for the sony playstation2 console
by tim rogers, aka 108 joestar, rockstar videogame journalist
1/2
Music became ironic because there's a lot of music. Movies became ironic (and by "ironic" I mean what more civilized people refer to as "parody") because there are a lot of movies. Fiction never really became ironic because the idea of telling a story that didn't happen with words that do exist in a real world is kind of ironic to begin with. It's when you introduce media into storytelling -- or else, when you introduce a guitar and a singer or actors and a camera -- that someone gets the idea to be ironic.
Can videogames be ironic? I don't know. Beat Takeshi's Takeshi no chousenjou, in 1989, was pretty ironic. It is ironic, mostly, because its final boss takes 20,000 hits to kill, and because it opens with a disclaimer that "The man who made this game hates videogames." That's irony in videogames -- hatred of the audience. A game, as I have covered elsewhere, requires the button-pressings of the player to continue. The reason people on videogame-website-related discussion forums feel so compelled to write long, long, long things about videogames is because they have to participate a whole lot more to see the ending of a videogame than they have to participate to see the end of a movie. The relationship between gamer and game is much unlike the relationship between needle and record-groove (that is to say, the needle loves the record groove and vice-versa, so says Tamio Okuda); the game has to love the player even when the player hates the game. If the game hates the player and the player tries to love the game, that is ironic. This says as much for the nature of videogames as it does for my ex-girlfriend.
More to the issue at hand -- is Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero ironic? I'm not entirely sure that the answer is no. However, I'll be slightly ironic and say that I'm sure the answer is no. If Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero is ironic, it's only ironic in a really tragic way, like the stand-up comedian who gets on stage and makes everyone cry. It's ironic like the band Sambo Master, whose lead singer and guitar player played violin for all of his life before trying a guitar last year; he said in an interview that the kind of music he plays -- kind of clean-tone-shredding punk-rock -- was something he originally believed he'd invented. As a child, he was allowed to listen to nothing outside classical music. That I compare his virtuoso to Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero is, alas, meant to be ironic, for Sambo Master is a very, very good band for ignoring the examples that came before them, and Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero is a very, very bad videogame for ignoring good sense and fearing its audience while loving its audience's money.
Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero is a very, very bad videogame. And by "bad," I don't mean bad in a Kingdom Hearts way, where I am compelled to gleefully pick it apart and berate its fans. No, I mean it is very, very bad like your mother said you were when you pushed that kid down the stairs in the third grade. Having been the kid who got pushed down the stairs in the third grade, I can only say that this game is bad in that it reminds me of how that big, oddly much-older-looking bullying kid must have felt when he got home and his mother screamed at him because, like the man I've grown up to be, the kid who got pushed told the principal on his ass. He probably grew up to be a game journalist who will never write about Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero, and more power to him.
I met this game for free. It was handed to me. I started playing it after eating spaghetti. Ahh, spaghetti. At least the spaghetti was impeccably cooked. When I started playing it, I was full. I played it for fifteen minutes, and after those fifteen minutes, I was feeling hungry. The game was not especially bad. It was merely flat. Yet it made me hungry. It was the videogame equivalent of MSG. I resolved to play it until it got interesting.
I ended up beating it that night.
What kind of game is it? Is that an important question? I don't want to talk about it. I will, though. Just give me some time to go off on a couple more tangents. I'll find a way back into the review of the game sooner or later. Just give me a chance. I know my writing process better than you do. (. . . Maybe.)
At Tokyo Game Show this year, Square-Enix revealed this new game called Dirge of the Cerebus, set in the post-Final Fantasy VII game world and starring red-cloaked mystery-man Vincent Valentine as the hero. As you might know, each Final Fantasy game kind of has its own world going on. So each game has the potential to, based on the appeal of its characters, become a franchise unto itself. Drew Cosner, who was in truth very drunk on that first day of Tokyo Game Show, got vocally angry at the trailer for Dirge of the Cerebus. "It's not even a fucking RPG. It's like a fucking stealth-action game. What the fuck is with that bullshit? I want the fucking story continued." I then told Drew, "Dude, just because it's not an RPG doesn't mean it can't have a story." Drew blinked at my explanation, cocked his head to the right, then the left, and said, "Yeah, I guess you're right." So there you have it - Drew Cosner agrees that what we call the "old-school console RPG?" is actually a rather arbitrary genre of gaming. See also: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for evidence of this.
Some polo-shirted "industry analysts" have declared, these days, that there are "too many of those 3D-melee-action games going around GAHYUCK" and then translated Japanese message-board-postings to prove that Japanese people kind of think they suck, too. Dynasty Warriors 2 birthed the genre; Dynasty Warriors 3 did little to innovate it; Shinobi gave it ninjas and a room-to-room setting; Seven Samurai 20XX gave it pretentious art values and is currently available for 300 yen at Bic Camera; Kunoichi was a step in the right direction, as it existed at Tokyo Game Show 2003 -- its final release saw the team head-scratching and eventually ruining the game with "magic" systems and other over-complications. None of these games does anything to advance the design aesthetic further. The new Dynasty Warriors games have tactical elements, sure. Sega's new Shinsengumi, however, though a far worse game, is a better tool for pointing out what I want to point out with this article. See, the Shinsengumi was a group of samurai at the end of the Edo Era, who had various adventures competing with the American soldiers and new-thinking Japanese politicians who clashed in the early 1870s. As a historical setting, it is compelling enough to spin-off into television series and movies that might even be interesting to the non-Japanese. As a game, it's just a melee-3D-fighting walk-and-slash full of cookie-cutter-ninjas with paper-thin political agendas and underproduced midi pipe-flutes.
WHAT I WANT TO SAY HERE, my one point I want to make to you even if you hate me, the one discussion I want to provoke can be provoked with this:
TODAY?S 3D-MELEE-ACTION GAMES ARE WHAT MOST VIDEOGAMES OF THE FAMICOM ERA ASPIRED TO BE.
Of course, we couldn't have photo-real historical samurai fighting and having wacky adventures in sixteen colors. That would have been insulting to the gods of history. So we ended up with characters like Mister Goemon, based on the face of a kabuki actor from an old ukiyoe painting. The Japanese -- even the bold and daring folks at Konami -- didn't feel like messing with actual historical figures with provable backgrounds. Koei took the safe route, and made not a line uttered by characters such as Oda Nobunaga in Nobunaga's Ambition, Liu Bei in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or Song Jiang in Bandit Kings of Ancient China contain any words that those real men might have never used. Even so, those games were sterile menu-clicking affairs. At the same time, side-scrolling platformers based on movies included only a sliver of the vision Shigeru Miyamoto had exhibited in Super Mario Bros.
In Super Mario Bros., the dream of picture-perfect representation of reality is compromised so that we see a man walking from a side view, jumping more times in the first stage than most humans will need to jump in their entire lives. It took considerably less vision to produce Super Mario 64 -- all it took was a cup of coffee and a view of hundreds of pedestrians from Tokyo's Shibuya Hachiko Crossing (we will ignore that Shigeru Miyamoto lives in Kyoto), a thought that "This is an easy viewpoint from which to track peoples' movements," and a machine powerful enough to reproduce such an angle. Now, we see Romance of the Three Kingdoms brought into 3D, with Liu Bei managing to swing a spear, entertain schoolchildren, and be historically accurate all at the same time. Then we see Oda Nobunaga as a first-level boss in Samurai Warriors, the heroes of which are stereotypical Japanese warriors rather than actual people. When Suikoden Musou is released on the PlayStation3, we can perhaps expect a revolution; though that story is taken for "history," it also includes divine intervention and fantastic magic as common themes, so it's no-holds-barred on that one. However, would Koei, as Koei, be able to evolve this form of game on their own? I think not. It's going to take a team-effort led by many bastards who don't think with yen-signs for irises.
I have played, to completion or near-completion, three melee-action-adventures this year. I will now rate them in terms of value:
1. Berserk (Sammy / Yuke's PS2)
2. Dororo (Sega / Red; PS2)
3. Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero (Sega / Red; PS2)
Notice that two of these games are made by Sega / Red. I warn you, however, that those two games, for the most part, are not good games at all. Dororo, at least, has a story to save it. To assign numerical rankings, I would give Berserk a 9.8, Dororo a 6.2, and Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero a 3.6. I will also now point out that Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero outsold Berserk and Dororo, combined, times ten.
That might sound like whining. It sounds like whining, doesn?t it? I sound like a college radio DJ right about now, don?t I? ?Why don?t people like the good music? It's a conspiracy!?E Well, hell, I guess I have to sound like that. Why don?t people like the good games? I?ll tell you why. It?s a conspiracy.
This year's Berserk, by Sammy and Yuke's, based on a manga with a story its fans regard on an almost-historical basis, takes the idea of a melee-fighter and throws in the idea of weight, to extreme and gorgeous effect. It is also a well-presented game. Its graphics are by no means perfect. This is alright. Its graphics sing, with characters who, though far from photorealistic, act with precision facial expressions and body movements. There are blurring effects and tilting, flinging camera angles, all used to tasteful effect. The storyline pops its head in from time to time in the form of battle-sequence idiosyncrasies that are resolved through Shenmue-style quick-time-button presses. For example, when the first boss, a giant troll, swings his club at you, the screen thins into a letterbox for a half an instant. Should you let this go, the troll is going to pick you up and do nasty things to you. Should you press the block button at just the right time, Guts, the brawny hero, is going to vault running up the club and swing his monster sword at the beast's head. Later boss battles reward the cunning player with thrilling, clashing, semi-cinematic duels. Typical melee fights make occasional use of the cinematic "timing" effect as well. Press the square button to swing Guts' nine-foot sword horizontally. A press of the triangle button results in Guts slowly lifting the sword up and placing it on his shoulder, then sending it crashing down. See, though, if you swing the sword horizontally enough times, it picks up speed, allowing you to perform a vertical slash quickly if your rhythm is right. This makes plowing through large fields of bad guys fun. Pressing the X button -- the block button -- during the right enemy frame of animation might just result in a spectacular kind of leap-around during which you can deliver a fatal vertical slash. The melee fields of combat take on a kind of puzzle-game level of twitch; the boss battles carry cinematic vigor. And it's all because of the weight of the sword.
In Sega/Red's Dororo, your character is effectively weightless. The special move combos are started by holding down the triangle button and then letting go to deliver a charged-up attack. This stuns the enemy and starts a menu along the bottom of the screen. The menu is simple and to the point. On it are logos signifying which buttons to press in which order. Press them. When the enemy is dead, a little red flag pops up. Press the triangle button to deliver the final hit, and win. You're freely welcome to keep comboing them after they're dead. If you feel so inclined. Mess up, and the combo ends automatically without the finisher or the bonuses for finishing -- like health power-ups or extra machinegun bullets. The huger your combo, the more plentiful your bonuses. I peaked at twenty-six hits, which was a hell of a lot. If I do say so myself.
(PROTIP: If you don?t say so yourself sometimes, no one else will say so.)
Aside from that, Dororo does little else to further the revolution in terms of gameplay. I've looked at the 3D-melee-brawler plague a lot, these days, and thought of ways to deliver a coup-de-resistance that makes people gape with wonder; as I am not a game designer, I haven't been able to come up with one. My inferiority complex (as well as my lack of industry credentials!) keeps me from trying to make a melee-brawler anytime soon.
Of all the brawlers I've ever played, almost all of them except for Dynasty Warriors 2 and Berserk have an inferiority complex that bogs them down. Dynasty Warriors is so confident that it's making a new genre that it doesn't weep over lost framerates. In the name of risk, it just throws ideas out there to see what sticks. Unfortunately, the stickiest idea seems to be that people will buy the games so long as they keep making them, which accounts for -- well. Four "expansion packs" released this year alone. And how can you expand these games? Why, by adding more missions and characters -- all with real historical context. History, history, history.
Berserk, my Runner-up Game of the Year 2004, doesn't carry itself like the self-hating high-school nerd because it is confident in its role as a small-subject game. It covers a small segment of the legendary manga, which has a significantly-yet-not-hugely obsessive fanbase. Its characters have interpersonal histories and back-stories. Owing some allegiance to the anime that revisioned the manga partly, the game carries over some of the same voice actors and uses the music of the same washed-up (and therefore cool again for us elite) pop-star -- Susumu Hirasawa -- who scored the anime. It even has a new song by Hirasawa, one that sounds almost like his 1998 song "Berserk Forces," blest with six more years of musical reflection and the same number of Korean folk-y pipe-flutes.
Dororo is ashamed of its secrets, deep down. When Sega managed to score the rights to all Osamu Tezuka's famed manga works, WOW and Red somehow ended up with Dororo. Maybe they chose the story, I don't know. A lot of people on the internet started popping out of the woodwork, as people do on the internet, bragging about how "OH YEAH DORORO WAS EASILY THE BEST TEZUKA MANGA, I TOTALLY READ IT," when really the truth stands that it's just an odd, dark little three-volume story that most people don't remember. I, a fan of Tezuka, had never even heard of Dororo, to be honest. I've read it now, though. It deals with a samurai, Hyakkimaru, who was robbed of the forty-nine essential body parts at birth due to a pact his father had made with a demon. When he reaches the age of eighteen, he sets out to get his body parts back, starting with his right eye. He soon meets a young girl/boy/thing kid-thief named Dororo, and they set off adventuring together, saving various towns from various demons. Soon, the story ends.
For the game, Red farmed the character-designing responsibilities out to, as I am scientifically informed, "That guy who did the manga Blade of the Immortal." I don't know that guy's name. He did a pretty above-average job, though, and produced some excellent painted package art. The characters as they appear in the game feel like real people; only the cold-eyed Hyakkimaru stands out as odd. This is, of course, because he is odd. His legs are not real. There's a cannon in one of them. On of his arms has a machinegun in the elbow. Both of his arms have short katanas hidden beneath their fake hands. It's almost like this manga character was invented to be the hero of a too-complicated melee-fighting game.
With all these special abilities, you'd think that Hyakkimaru would have to use them smartly while fighting. Well, so much for that. The bosses are all pretty substandard. Most of them, you chase around in circles until they stop unleashing special attacks long enough for you to score a hit. Get too zealous and try to score a combo, and, well, sorry, Jack, you're going to get hit.
Dororo's story, however, is fascinating. It is so fascinating that I left and began a quest to hunt down the manga not two hours after giving up on the game for good. I read all three manga volumes in an hour. I wish the game would have just had a ?watch?Eoption. The introductory cinematics have a kind of dark flow that absorbs you. The voice of the narrator really puts you in the mood for an adventure about earning control of one's own body. You soon realize that, as Hyakkimaru gains control over his body parts back, he's going to lose his cannon and his machinegun and his elbow swords. This will make him, uniquely, a videogame character that gets weaker as the game progresses. In the manga, this point is driven in nicely. In the game, it is driven in painfully, because you'll soon get to a boss you can't beat, and you'll be aching for that next bit of story.
For those who want to know the story -- read the manga. It covers the same story as the game, and it's better, even if the art is, well . . . kind of oddly cutesy, given the subject matter. If you haven't played the game yet, and are thinking slightly seriously about doing so, read this, and then reconsider:
So you're in the wilderness, with all of four hit points left. Hyakkimaru is near-dead-drained. You enter an area before a cave, Dororo says, hey Hyakkimaru, I'll go in here and check it out. The game then switches control over to Dororo. Dororo is weak and fast. His/her levels are always kind of short, and sometimes with really frustrating camera angles. You die, and it's game over. Well, you don't need to worry about dying in this level. You get inside, and there's a save point. Without thinking, you save it. You might as well -- it's been an hour between save points, anyway. You then face a puzzle. It's not really a "puzzle." It's just a busywork chore. There's a counter that says you need 155 kilograms of boxes on this weight-sensitive floor-panel. There are dozens of boxes, of two sizes. To solve the puzzle, just keep pushing boxes onto the floor panel until you get the right weight. If you're over the weight, push a big box off and push a small box on. The puzzle takes about ten minutes to solve, and nine and a half of those are spent simply pushing and listening to Dororo grunt. When the puzzle is solved, the door opens, and Dororo says, "I wonder what's inside?" A title card then tells us
MEANWHILE!!
Hyakkimaru runs into a temple courtyard, where the resident frail young girl is screaming in terror. Here, in the middle of the temple complex, there's a giant demon swinging a club around. You have to kill him, of course. Hyakkimaru tells the girl to go hide herself; he's going to deal with this. The battle then begins.
You still have just four hit points left.
That's four hit points out of three hundred and eighty. The average enemy attack, at this point, takes off between eleven to thirty. In other words, you're dead in one hit.
Well, after nine tries, I beat the motherfucker. I was so angry when I beat him that I put the game down for a week. When I came back and played through to near the very end, the game did it to me again -- stuck me at a boss with no ability to heal. I died before even getting in one hit on the boss, and turned the game off. I haven't played it since. That -- that shit just ain't common sense. That's bad. Bad boy on that one.
MEANWHILE!!
Sega and Red also bring us Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero, a sad sack of game parts so patronizing and cloying that it is infuriating to think anyone would pay 18,000 yen for the special edition box of it. I don't even know what's in that box. I will no doubt get countless emails telling me that I don't understand Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero, and here, I affectionately tell you people to kindly shut the fuck up. I understand the game as something that I'm playing right in front of my face. I don't need to understand the great historical legacy of genre-blending games it represents. I don't need to understand that there were dating-sim-elements and that you could totally play mahjongg in all the other games to understand that this game, the one I still keep in my house as a reminder of my original sin, sucks on a spiritual level.
What's wrong with it? Well. Like I said before, the hypothesis for this piece is that "Today's 3D melee brawlers are the genre that most action or action-adventure games in the Famicom era aspired to be." Let's remember that a lot of those games, whether sidescrollers or three-quarters overhead-perspective action-adventures, sucked really bad. Now, though, you'd think we have some sort of creative protective measures to prevent suckage. Well, Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero proves that we don't.
Sakura Taisen is a beloved, multiplatform-spanning series of tactical adventure games in which girls in pastel kimonos ride giant robots around the turn of the twentieth century. This is, of course, intentionally anachronistic. The games receive much love because the character designs are often pretty or at least as interesting as the concept of girls in kimonos battling giant robots. I won't say that all Sakura Taisen games suck, though I tempted to by my memories of Episode Zero. There has to be some kind of heart that people find in those games that keeps them coming back. The dating-sim elements might be that something. A friend who's played the first three games tells me that they're great, though "The strategy battles are nothing really special."
Could we say that the tactical turn-based strategy games of old, too, aspired to be 3D melee-brawlers? Hey, why not? Let's say that. Let's say that all strategy games in some way aspired to 3D, real-time, multi-contestant brawling. When my centaur-guy in Shining Force attacks that kobold, it's a simulation of a sword-clashing battle. A real battle of man-with-sword versus man-with-sword requires skills that stretch beyond the realms of mere reflexes or mere tactical tenacity. There's an issue of physique, adrenaline, and courage. Videogames about warfare tend to allow us to participate -- and win -- in a fight though we may be scrawny or fat cowards. This is more or less the "escapism" card, you see -- though it can also be construed as hardware or software limitations. Might, some day, a game be able to read from my grip on the controller whether I've been gaining or losing weight, and adjust my character's size on the melee-battlefield accordingly? Maybe. Do I want a game to do this? Certainly not. Would this level of character-player interaction be considered a revolution? By someone, I'd imagine. Does Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero still suck? Yes.
Does it do anything new? No, it doesn't. Does it do anything halfway new? Kind of -- it introduces the element of speed to melee battlers (your character never steps down from her horse). Is the battling compelling? Not really. What about the story? Don't even go there, girlfriend.
. . .
. . . . . .
Aw HELL no, you went there! Read:
Plucky anime-style heroine Gemini Sunrise hails from Texas. Where in Texas, she never says. The game doesn't mind not knowing the name of a single city in Texas. It just likes the idea of making the brain-empty character from Texas, and that's a little amusing. Gemini is on her way to New York City to join a certain traveling theatrical troupe that will gain her fame. Yet -- she's been stupid, and ridden all the way to San Francisco. So she has to go all the way back across the country, allowing the game to take us on a whirlwind, action-packed ride across America.
On her way to San Francisco, she gets attacked by giant robots in the desert. This is the first stage. We run around between giant boulders and hack at robots. They each explode with one hack. After we kill all ten or so of them, the stage is over. Gemini screams "WE DID IT LARRY!!" (yes, the horse's name is "Larry") and the player is awarded a "C" rank. (The player is always awarded a "C" rank, from what I can tell. It's the game's way of saying "Better safe than sorry," in a kind of money-hungry way. Assuring that the player always feels inferior in an average way is one method of keeping people from selling the game back.) Then Gemini enters San Francisco, is told that New York is the other way, and she begins her voyage back east. While leaving town, she comes across a little girl named Juanita. The girl is being bandied about by several huge men with giant teeth and muscles, and robots. They're calling her "The Miracle Girl." Gemini, trying to develop a character trait, helps Juanita out by killing all the robots. The bad guy, Patrick, runs away. (I think his name is Patrick. It's been so long. I can't remember.) Gemini then says that she likes Juanita and wants to go on an adventure with her. Juanita, the only beacon of reason in the game, acts kind of creeped out, yet chooses to go with the weird sixteen-year-old redhead on a white horse with a samurai sword, anyway. Juanita's voice actress, if my ears don't lie, is a female serial killer who squeezes human vitreous humour into her tan-tan ramen. Her hair is white and her eyes are red, so you know something's up with her! Gemini doesn't seem to notice. Soon, the game has introduced a guy who lives in the desert and drives a really big motorcycle-like car-contraption. Later, we meet a big, muscly guy with fat blond hair, from Texas, who is an old friend of Gemini's, and also a driver of the same kind of big motorcycle-like-car-contraption. He comes along on our journey to make it to New York whilst avoiding the massive waves of giant robots that attack, trying to steal away Juanita. By this point, they've tried to steal her in the streets of San Francisco, in the deserts of Nevada, and out in front of the MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas, even though that casino has no reason to exist yet. Out of nowhere, one night before they decide to bathe together, Gemini confesses that she loves Juanita, and Juanita is so pleased she screams. The two guys are watching this, of course. So are the bad guys. So of course there's a battle in the bathing place. And of course, soon after this, there's an epic struggle of a large American mercenary army facing off against the giant robots in the fields of Gettysburg.
This is the game's only interesting set-piece. The goal of this mission is to kill a hundred opponents. The battlefield in this case does not end. It stretches on without limits. Ride that horse, smack its ass, run faster, swing the sword, and keep killing. Kill a little robot and score a point. Kill a giant robot and score a point and a health power-up. This battle, for the most part, works, and when I got to the stage of the game where I felt like replaying a few levels for the hell of it, this was the one I played the most.
Other levels are crammed full of nonsense. Some of the desert canyon stages can probably be charged as felonies in some countries. For whatever unearthly reason, there are these flying enemies that stick way back, and wait for you to start an attack. When you're in the middle of attacking a strong enemy, they'll shoot you with some beam, sending you bouncing back. When all the enemies in an area are dead, you'll try to kill the floaters only to wonder how you're supposed to do that. The proper method involves jumping up, floating back a bit, and doing a mid-air slash that just barely brushes past the little bastards. They won't attack you at this point. They'll just float up and wait to die. You kill them, hitting them maybe once in every six attempts, and then you continue to the next area of the stage. You fight big enemies. Then, soon, without asking your permission, the level ends, and you get a "C" ranking.
The game's fullest sin is inconsistency. One desert canyon stage won't physically allow you to jump down from one ridge of a hillside to another. Yet, it will let you fall off a bridge and into a bottomless canyon. The death-fall takes all of a minute to complete, as well, which is really, really cute. The in-game graphic engine consists of fully-animated models for each character, yet the characters have no facial expressions. Nor is there any way to rotate the camera around to see their faces. When characters talk, it is through full-screen hand-drawn models that never, ever change. Gemini is always grinning with eyes in upside-down Us. The Texas guy always has that shitty sneer on his face. The characters are fully voiced, as well as fully subtitled. Sometimes, you'll have to choose what to say. You have three seconds to make the choice. The choice makes no difference. It might make a character lose patience in Gemini. In might make a character flirt with Gemini. It will not change anything, not the characters' relationships with each other, and not the flow of the game's stages. The characters revert to their normal relationships two lines later. The least the game could do is animate its talking heads -- as it is, they just stand there with twitching lips, which are "technologically enhanced" so that they stop twitching when a line of dialogue ends. It's boring. I'm not expecting the dynamic virtuoso of Gyakuten Saiban 3, here. I'm just wishing for something like it. Or maybe I'm spoiled by Usagi, by Warashi, which has super-hi-resolution characters that slide in and out, zoom, and moved during dialogue scenes. In Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero, it's all simple, static, unmoving, unchanging gameplay.
There's little "change" involved in this game. Gemini Sunrise, the plucky heroine, never changes. At the end of the game, following the near-end of the world, she's still as plucky as when she awshucksed off her ending up in San Francisco when she meant to go to New York. The game behaves badly, like a bratty child. It thinks that everything it does is right, or new, when really it's just being a snot-nosed prick. At the end of levels, your "C" rank is converted to experience points which can be used to buy strength upgrades. You then look at your status menu. Your have three upgrade choices: attack power, defense, horse power. I ended up maxxing each one before the final mission. At the end of some missions, you're awarded a new weapon, saddle, bridle, or spurs. You then look at the menu, where you see that there are only five slots of spurs and saddles. This means, of course, that when you get a new saddle, you put it on without thinking. This reminds me a lot of the "mazes" in the "Quest Mode" of Soul Calibur II, where every room was a fight with "defeat the opponent" being the goal, and most every "maze" was just a straight, snaking procession of rooms. It's an illusion of depth, and a piss-poor one.
The story, too, has illusions of depth. The criminals responsible say that they're setting Sakura Taisen V in America in hopes that they'll be able to release the game in America as well. Americans, they take it, won't take kindly to a game about Japanese girls battling robots in Japan; Americans battling robots in America, though -- that's a hot idea. This is why Overworks is putting a lot of overwork into Sakura Taisen V. The fans have been salivating for so long, and the designers had been sweating for so long, that they popped out this Episode Zero to tide people over. For a person who held within him no frothing demand for Sakura Taisen V -- hell, a person who thought this game was Sakura Taisen V until just before the end, when someone told me otherwise -- this game is visible as just a piece of fan-service bullshit meant to bevy the real game's budget. It's a Japanese CD single. If it, however, is the A-side, then the B-side's chance of being brilliant is not so high.
The characters are not real people. They are some of the fakest people I've ever seen in videogames. They act with no regard to what real people are supposed to be like. I was ready to forgive this as just a quirk of anime nature, really. All of fifteen minutes into the game, I was bored with the game's system, yet hopeful that it might get entertaining at some point. Yet I was already questioning pathways to the game's spiritual redemption as a character drama. I only found one such pathway, and it was enough to carry me through to the rest of the game. Namely, I wanted to know why the bad guys were calling Juanita the "Miracle Girl." I resolved to play the game until I found out why. If it was something stupid, I threatened to turn the game off.
Furthermore, I had one condition: I would be able to forgive whatever idiocy the story threw out so long as no characters made direct reference to the machines. So far, no one had said anything along the lines of "Mah motorcycle's a fast'un," or "Look out for dem giant ROBOTOTRONS they's fierce GAHYUK."
**SPOILERS**
Well, in the end, it is revealed that Juanita is "The only citizen to survive the Battle of Gettysburg." This is spoken in 1927. The Battle of Gettysburg was in 1865. Juanita is ten years old. She is, of course, for some reason, immortal. The people of Gettysburg herald her return as a great omen -- "She can save us, now, from the evil!" The bad guys, revealed to be Confederate soldiers still nursing a grudge, then open a pathway to the Garden of Eden, where the scarfaced lead villain plans to make Juanita Eve to his Adam. There are many big battles leading up to vapid, running-around-in-circles final confrontation in which all the characters assemble and chant about humans having "rights and stuff" and about how "war is bad and you guys lost so give up already and give us back our princess." The game ends, Gemini continues alone to New York while Juanita runs off with the twice-her-height guy from the desert and the hair-combing guy from Texas becomes the President of the United States (I shit you not). Over the credits, we see a music video of the title song playing in a quarter-screen window. You'll have to wait for the actual game to view it full-screen, folks!
On the first battle in the Garden of Eden, the guy from the desert looks at the incoming parade of giant robots and whispers to Gemini, now suddenly covered in fear:
"I think these guys are . . . different from us."
I just about lost it. I just about cried. It was worse that Aeris?Edeath in Final Fantasy VII. All at once, all the storyline's idiocies came crashing down.
"WAIT WHAT THE ONLY CITIZEN TO SURVIVE THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG WHAT DID SOMEONE DROP AN ATOMIC BOMB OR SOMETHING?"
I am not a patriotic American. I don't live in the country, and I haven't, for a long stretch of my life. Yet I know at least a little bit about the nation's history. I know what Gettysburg was. If these Japanese game designers want to make a game a hit in America, the least they can do is open a damn book. First they lump all of Texas into one expansive city full of grinning tools, and then they go so far as to recall the name "Gettysburg" only to apply it to . . . what, exactly? A little Mexican girl who speaks Japanese and is for some unexplained reason gifted with eternal life?
When I finished the game, I tried to play some of the old missions again. Just to try to find some gameplay depth. It wasn't until the final mission that I realized Larry -- that's the horse -- can do a stomp attack. This is activated by pressing the jump button during mid-jump. The stomp attack shoots up the orange combo meter to near-full. The thing about the combo-meter is this: when it fills up, it starts to go down. Get hit by an enemy, and the combo-meter disappears. What you do is keep killing enemies while the combo meter still has some juice. Use the stomp move, and you can keep charging up the combo meter. Kill five enemies before the combo meter runs out, and you get a 200 SP bonus. Ten enemies gets you another 200 SP. Fifteen rewards you with a leap up to 500 additional SP. SP are the points you use to power yourself up.
By this point in the game, I'd already charged up all of my SP. Yet I continued, just playing around with the combo system to see what I could do. I ended up racking up some thirty-kill combos. I wondered, as I replayed the first few levels, if I would have found them more exciting had I known about the combo system. Then after some four levels ended abruptly and awarded me with a "C" rank, I realized that no, I wouldn't have. I would have been more frustrated, if anything. The levels would have seemed too bombastically easy. That, and once you get to the harder missions -- you know those enemies I mentioned, the flying ones that wait to fire at the most annoying times? They'll let you charge up to a fourteen-hit combo before firing a totally unblockable light-speed beam at you. This beam damages you, and resets your combo meter. That's the game's idea of challenge for the person who wants to combo -- clumsily kill the flying assholes first, getting your back lambasted by the little robots, and then turn around and begin the combo. It's shallow, it's vapid, it's stupid, and I can't help thinking that it's just some sophomoric way of inverse-pandering to the people who would otherwise say the game is too easy.
I could go into more detail. I could use big words and wave my metaphorical hands about what this game represents in the grand scheme of the artistic decay of the universe. I could make you feel the game's pain. Instead, all I want to tell you is that it's not worth it. If you're a Sakura Taisen fan, chances are you'll want to play it, much as I'd advise you to quit it like cigarettes. Then again, I never tell people to quit cigarettes. I let them decide on their own. Play Berserk instead. If you claim that you don't like the manga -- well, now's a good time to read it. Watch the anime, too. Listen to the music. Or don't do any of those. After all, they're not required. Just play the game by itself. A videogame is a videogame. Have we not learned that lesson before, a million times? Videogames aren't movies, just as cups of hot apple cider are not cups of hot cocoa, and just as schoolgirls with shotguns are not cups of hot cocoa.
Of course, there are always ways to compare them.
Hell if I know what they are. I'm going to go play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas right now. I entrust the future of the 3D beat-em-up to Yuke's and - should they see the light - Treasure. That'd be really something.
--tim rogers has been to gettysburg
by tim rogers, aka 108 joestar, rockstar videogame journalist
1/2Music became ironic because there's a lot of music. Movies became ironic (and by "ironic" I mean what more civilized people refer to as "parody") because there are a lot of movies. Fiction never really became ironic because the idea of telling a story that didn't happen with words that do exist in a real world is kind of ironic to begin with. It's when you introduce media into storytelling -- or else, when you introduce a guitar and a singer or actors and a camera -- that someone gets the idea to be ironic.
Can videogames be ironic? I don't know. Beat Takeshi's Takeshi no chousenjou, in 1989, was pretty ironic. It is ironic, mostly, because its final boss takes 20,000 hits to kill, and because it opens with a disclaimer that "The man who made this game hates videogames." That's irony in videogames -- hatred of the audience. A game, as I have covered elsewhere, requires the button-pressings of the player to continue. The reason people on videogame-website-related discussion forums feel so compelled to write long, long, long things about videogames is because they have to participate a whole lot more to see the ending of a videogame than they have to participate to see the end of a movie. The relationship between gamer and game is much unlike the relationship between needle and record-groove (that is to say, the needle loves the record groove and vice-versa, so says Tamio Okuda); the game has to love the player even when the player hates the game. If the game hates the player and the player tries to love the game, that is ironic. This says as much for the nature of videogames as it does for my ex-girlfriend.
More to the issue at hand -- is Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero ironic? I'm not entirely sure that the answer is no. However, I'll be slightly ironic and say that I'm sure the answer is no. If Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero is ironic, it's only ironic in a really tragic way, like the stand-up comedian who gets on stage and makes everyone cry. It's ironic like the band Sambo Master, whose lead singer and guitar player played violin for all of his life before trying a guitar last year; he said in an interview that the kind of music he plays -- kind of clean-tone-shredding punk-rock -- was something he originally believed he'd invented. As a child, he was allowed to listen to nothing outside classical music. That I compare his virtuoso to Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero is, alas, meant to be ironic, for Sambo Master is a very, very good band for ignoring the examples that came before them, and Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero is a very, very bad videogame for ignoring good sense and fearing its audience while loving its audience's money.
Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero is a very, very bad videogame. And by "bad," I don't mean bad in a Kingdom Hearts way, where I am compelled to gleefully pick it apart and berate its fans. No, I mean it is very, very bad like your mother said you were when you pushed that kid down the stairs in the third grade. Having been the kid who got pushed down the stairs in the third grade, I can only say that this game is bad in that it reminds me of how that big, oddly much-older-looking bullying kid must have felt when he got home and his mother screamed at him because, like the man I've grown up to be, the kid who got pushed told the principal on his ass. He probably grew up to be a game journalist who will never write about Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero, and more power to him.
I met this game for free. It was handed to me. I started playing it after eating spaghetti. Ahh, spaghetti. At least the spaghetti was impeccably cooked. When I started playing it, I was full. I played it for fifteen minutes, and after those fifteen minutes, I was feeling hungry. The game was not especially bad. It was merely flat. Yet it made me hungry. It was the videogame equivalent of MSG. I resolved to play it until it got interesting.
I ended up beating it that night.
What kind of game is it? Is that an important question? I don't want to talk about it. I will, though. Just give me some time to go off on a couple more tangents. I'll find a way back into the review of the game sooner or later. Just give me a chance. I know my writing process better than you do. (. . . Maybe.)
At Tokyo Game Show this year, Square-Enix revealed this new game called Dirge of the Cerebus, set in the post-Final Fantasy VII game world and starring red-cloaked mystery-man Vincent Valentine as the hero. As you might know, each Final Fantasy game kind of has its own world going on. So each game has the potential to, based on the appeal of its characters, become a franchise unto itself. Drew Cosner, who was in truth very drunk on that first day of Tokyo Game Show, got vocally angry at the trailer for Dirge of the Cerebus. "It's not even a fucking RPG. It's like a fucking stealth-action game. What the fuck is with that bullshit? I want the fucking story continued." I then told Drew, "Dude, just because it's not an RPG doesn't mean it can't have a story." Drew blinked at my explanation, cocked his head to the right, then the left, and said, "Yeah, I guess you're right." So there you have it - Drew Cosner agrees that what we call the "old-school console RPG?" is actually a rather arbitrary genre of gaming. See also: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for evidence of this.
Some polo-shirted "industry analysts" have declared, these days, that there are "too many of those 3D-melee-action games going around GAHYUCK" and then translated Japanese message-board-postings to prove that Japanese people kind of think they suck, too. Dynasty Warriors 2 birthed the genre; Dynasty Warriors 3 did little to innovate it; Shinobi gave it ninjas and a room-to-room setting; Seven Samurai 20XX gave it pretentious art values and is currently available for 300 yen at Bic Camera; Kunoichi was a step in the right direction, as it existed at Tokyo Game Show 2003 -- its final release saw the team head-scratching and eventually ruining the game with "magic" systems and other over-complications. None of these games does anything to advance the design aesthetic further. The new Dynasty Warriors games have tactical elements, sure. Sega's new Shinsengumi, however, though a far worse game, is a better tool for pointing out what I want to point out with this article. See, the Shinsengumi was a group of samurai at the end of the Edo Era, who had various adventures competing with the American soldiers and new-thinking Japanese politicians who clashed in the early 1870s. As a historical setting, it is compelling enough to spin-off into television series and movies that might even be interesting to the non-Japanese. As a game, it's just a melee-3D-fighting walk-and-slash full of cookie-cutter-ninjas with paper-thin political agendas and underproduced midi pipe-flutes.
WHAT I WANT TO SAY HERE, my one point I want to make to you even if you hate me, the one discussion I want to provoke can be provoked with this:
TODAY?S 3D-MELEE-ACTION GAMES ARE WHAT MOST VIDEOGAMES OF THE FAMICOM ERA ASPIRED TO BE.
Of course, we couldn't have photo-real historical samurai fighting and having wacky adventures in sixteen colors. That would have been insulting to the gods of history. So we ended up with characters like Mister Goemon, based on the face of a kabuki actor from an old ukiyoe painting. The Japanese -- even the bold and daring folks at Konami -- didn't feel like messing with actual historical figures with provable backgrounds. Koei took the safe route, and made not a line uttered by characters such as Oda Nobunaga in Nobunaga's Ambition, Liu Bei in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or Song Jiang in Bandit Kings of Ancient China contain any words that those real men might have never used. Even so, those games were sterile menu-clicking affairs. At the same time, side-scrolling platformers based on movies included only a sliver of the vision Shigeru Miyamoto had exhibited in Super Mario Bros.
In Super Mario Bros., the dream of picture-perfect representation of reality is compromised so that we see a man walking from a side view, jumping more times in the first stage than most humans will need to jump in their entire lives. It took considerably less vision to produce Super Mario 64 -- all it took was a cup of coffee and a view of hundreds of pedestrians from Tokyo's Shibuya Hachiko Crossing (we will ignore that Shigeru Miyamoto lives in Kyoto), a thought that "This is an easy viewpoint from which to track peoples' movements," and a machine powerful enough to reproduce such an angle. Now, we see Romance of the Three Kingdoms brought into 3D, with Liu Bei managing to swing a spear, entertain schoolchildren, and be historically accurate all at the same time. Then we see Oda Nobunaga as a first-level boss in Samurai Warriors, the heroes of which are stereotypical Japanese warriors rather than actual people. When Suikoden Musou is released on the PlayStation3, we can perhaps expect a revolution; though that story is taken for "history," it also includes divine intervention and fantastic magic as common themes, so it's no-holds-barred on that one. However, would Koei, as Koei, be able to evolve this form of game on their own? I think not. It's going to take a team-effort led by many bastards who don't think with yen-signs for irises.
I have played, to completion or near-completion, three melee-action-adventures this year. I will now rate them in terms of value:
1. Berserk (Sammy / Yuke's PS2)
2. Dororo (Sega / Red; PS2)
3. Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero (Sega / Red; PS2)
Notice that two of these games are made by Sega / Red. I warn you, however, that those two games, for the most part, are not good games at all. Dororo, at least, has a story to save it. To assign numerical rankings, I would give Berserk a 9.8, Dororo a 6.2, and Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero a 3.6. I will also now point out that Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero outsold Berserk and Dororo, combined, times ten.
That might sound like whining. It sounds like whining, doesn?t it? I sound like a college radio DJ right about now, don?t I? ?Why don?t people like the good music? It's a conspiracy!?E Well, hell, I guess I have to sound like that. Why don?t people like the good games? I?ll tell you why. It?s a conspiracy.
This year's Berserk, by Sammy and Yuke's, based on a manga with a story its fans regard on an almost-historical basis, takes the idea of a melee-fighter and throws in the idea of weight, to extreme and gorgeous effect. It is also a well-presented game. Its graphics are by no means perfect. This is alright. Its graphics sing, with characters who, though far from photorealistic, act with precision facial expressions and body movements. There are blurring effects and tilting, flinging camera angles, all used to tasteful effect. The storyline pops its head in from time to time in the form of battle-sequence idiosyncrasies that are resolved through Shenmue-style quick-time-button presses. For example, when the first boss, a giant troll, swings his club at you, the screen thins into a letterbox for a half an instant. Should you let this go, the troll is going to pick you up and do nasty things to you. Should you press the block button at just the right time, Guts, the brawny hero, is going to vault running up the club and swing his monster sword at the beast's head. Later boss battles reward the cunning player with thrilling, clashing, semi-cinematic duels. Typical melee fights make occasional use of the cinematic "timing" effect as well. Press the square button to swing Guts' nine-foot sword horizontally. A press of the triangle button results in Guts slowly lifting the sword up and placing it on his shoulder, then sending it crashing down. See, though, if you swing the sword horizontally enough times, it picks up speed, allowing you to perform a vertical slash quickly if your rhythm is right. This makes plowing through large fields of bad guys fun. Pressing the X button -- the block button -- during the right enemy frame of animation might just result in a spectacular kind of leap-around during which you can deliver a fatal vertical slash. The melee fields of combat take on a kind of puzzle-game level of twitch; the boss battles carry cinematic vigor. And it's all because of the weight of the sword.
In Sega/Red's Dororo, your character is effectively weightless. The special move combos are started by holding down the triangle button and then letting go to deliver a charged-up attack. This stuns the enemy and starts a menu along the bottom of the screen. The menu is simple and to the point. On it are logos signifying which buttons to press in which order. Press them. When the enemy is dead, a little red flag pops up. Press the triangle button to deliver the final hit, and win. You're freely welcome to keep comboing them after they're dead. If you feel so inclined. Mess up, and the combo ends automatically without the finisher or the bonuses for finishing -- like health power-ups or extra machinegun bullets. The huger your combo, the more plentiful your bonuses. I peaked at twenty-six hits, which was a hell of a lot. If I do say so myself.
(PROTIP: If you don?t say so yourself sometimes, no one else will say so.)
Aside from that, Dororo does little else to further the revolution in terms of gameplay. I've looked at the 3D-melee-brawler plague a lot, these days, and thought of ways to deliver a coup-de-resistance that makes people gape with wonder; as I am not a game designer, I haven't been able to come up with one. My inferiority complex (as well as my lack of industry credentials!) keeps me from trying to make a melee-brawler anytime soon.
Of all the brawlers I've ever played, almost all of them except for Dynasty Warriors 2 and Berserk have an inferiority complex that bogs them down. Dynasty Warriors is so confident that it's making a new genre that it doesn't weep over lost framerates. In the name of risk, it just throws ideas out there to see what sticks. Unfortunately, the stickiest idea seems to be that people will buy the games so long as they keep making them, which accounts for -- well. Four "expansion packs" released this year alone. And how can you expand these games? Why, by adding more missions and characters -- all with real historical context. History, history, history.
Berserk, my Runner-up Game of the Year 2004, doesn't carry itself like the self-hating high-school nerd because it is confident in its role as a small-subject game. It covers a small segment of the legendary manga, which has a significantly-yet-not-hugely obsessive fanbase. Its characters have interpersonal histories and back-stories. Owing some allegiance to the anime that revisioned the manga partly, the game carries over some of the same voice actors and uses the music of the same washed-up (and therefore cool again for us elite) pop-star -- Susumu Hirasawa -- who scored the anime. It even has a new song by Hirasawa, one that sounds almost like his 1998 song "Berserk Forces," blest with six more years of musical reflection and the same number of Korean folk-y pipe-flutes.
Dororo is ashamed of its secrets, deep down. When Sega managed to score the rights to all Osamu Tezuka's famed manga works, WOW and Red somehow ended up with Dororo. Maybe they chose the story, I don't know. A lot of people on the internet started popping out of the woodwork, as people do on the internet, bragging about how "OH YEAH DORORO WAS EASILY THE BEST TEZUKA MANGA, I TOTALLY READ IT," when really the truth stands that it's just an odd, dark little three-volume story that most people don't remember. I, a fan of Tezuka, had never even heard of Dororo, to be honest. I've read it now, though. It deals with a samurai, Hyakkimaru, who was robbed of the forty-nine essential body parts at birth due to a pact his father had made with a demon. When he reaches the age of eighteen, he sets out to get his body parts back, starting with his right eye. He soon meets a young girl/boy/thing kid-thief named Dororo, and they set off adventuring together, saving various towns from various demons. Soon, the story ends.
For the game, Red farmed the character-designing responsibilities out to, as I am scientifically informed, "That guy who did the manga Blade of the Immortal." I don't know that guy's name. He did a pretty above-average job, though, and produced some excellent painted package art. The characters as they appear in the game feel like real people; only the cold-eyed Hyakkimaru stands out as odd. This is, of course, because he is odd. His legs are not real. There's a cannon in one of them. On of his arms has a machinegun in the elbow. Both of his arms have short katanas hidden beneath their fake hands. It's almost like this manga character was invented to be the hero of a too-complicated melee-fighting game.
With all these special abilities, you'd think that Hyakkimaru would have to use them smartly while fighting. Well, so much for that. The bosses are all pretty substandard. Most of them, you chase around in circles until they stop unleashing special attacks long enough for you to score a hit. Get too zealous and try to score a combo, and, well, sorry, Jack, you're going to get hit.
Dororo's story, however, is fascinating. It is so fascinating that I left and began a quest to hunt down the manga not two hours after giving up on the game for good. I read all three manga volumes in an hour. I wish the game would have just had a ?watch?Eoption. The introductory cinematics have a kind of dark flow that absorbs you. The voice of the narrator really puts you in the mood for an adventure about earning control of one's own body. You soon realize that, as Hyakkimaru gains control over his body parts back, he's going to lose his cannon and his machinegun and his elbow swords. This will make him, uniquely, a videogame character that gets weaker as the game progresses. In the manga, this point is driven in nicely. In the game, it is driven in painfully, because you'll soon get to a boss you can't beat, and you'll be aching for that next bit of story.
For those who want to know the story -- read the manga. It covers the same story as the game, and it's better, even if the art is, well . . . kind of oddly cutesy, given the subject matter. If you haven't played the game yet, and are thinking slightly seriously about doing so, read this, and then reconsider:
So you're in the wilderness, with all of four hit points left. Hyakkimaru is near-dead-drained. You enter an area before a cave, Dororo says, hey Hyakkimaru, I'll go in here and check it out. The game then switches control over to Dororo. Dororo is weak and fast. His/her levels are always kind of short, and sometimes with really frustrating camera angles. You die, and it's game over. Well, you don't need to worry about dying in this level. You get inside, and there's a save point. Without thinking, you save it. You might as well -- it's been an hour between save points, anyway. You then face a puzzle. It's not really a "puzzle." It's just a busywork chore. There's a counter that says you need 155 kilograms of boxes on this weight-sensitive floor-panel. There are dozens of boxes, of two sizes. To solve the puzzle, just keep pushing boxes onto the floor panel until you get the right weight. If you're over the weight, push a big box off and push a small box on. The puzzle takes about ten minutes to solve, and nine and a half of those are spent simply pushing and listening to Dororo grunt. When the puzzle is solved, the door opens, and Dororo says, "I wonder what's inside?" A title card then tells us
MEANWHILE!!
Hyakkimaru runs into a temple courtyard, where the resident frail young girl is screaming in terror. Here, in the middle of the temple complex, there's a giant demon swinging a club around. You have to kill him, of course. Hyakkimaru tells the girl to go hide herself; he's going to deal with this. The battle then begins.
You still have just four hit points left.
That's four hit points out of three hundred and eighty. The average enemy attack, at this point, takes off between eleven to thirty. In other words, you're dead in one hit.
Well, after nine tries, I beat the motherfucker. I was so angry when I beat him that I put the game down for a week. When I came back and played through to near the very end, the game did it to me again -- stuck me at a boss with no ability to heal. I died before even getting in one hit on the boss, and turned the game off. I haven't played it since. That -- that shit just ain't common sense. That's bad. Bad boy on that one.
MEANWHILE!!
Sega and Red also bring us Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero, a sad sack of game parts so patronizing and cloying that it is infuriating to think anyone would pay 18,000 yen for the special edition box of it. I don't even know what's in that box. I will no doubt get countless emails telling me that I don't understand Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero, and here, I affectionately tell you people to kindly shut the fuck up. I understand the game as something that I'm playing right in front of my face. I don't need to understand the great historical legacy of genre-blending games it represents. I don't need to understand that there were dating-sim-elements and that you could totally play mahjongg in all the other games to understand that this game, the one I still keep in my house as a reminder of my original sin, sucks on a spiritual level.
What's wrong with it? Well. Like I said before, the hypothesis for this piece is that "Today's 3D melee brawlers are the genre that most action or action-adventure games in the Famicom era aspired to be." Let's remember that a lot of those games, whether sidescrollers or three-quarters overhead-perspective action-adventures, sucked really bad. Now, though, you'd think we have some sort of creative protective measures to prevent suckage. Well, Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero proves that we don't.
Sakura Taisen is a beloved, multiplatform-spanning series of tactical adventure games in which girls in pastel kimonos ride giant robots around the turn of the twentieth century. This is, of course, intentionally anachronistic. The games receive much love because the character designs are often pretty or at least as interesting as the concept of girls in kimonos battling giant robots. I won't say that all Sakura Taisen games suck, though I tempted to by my memories of Episode Zero. There has to be some kind of heart that people find in those games that keeps them coming back. The dating-sim elements might be that something. A friend who's played the first three games tells me that they're great, though "The strategy battles are nothing really special."
Could we say that the tactical turn-based strategy games of old, too, aspired to be 3D melee-brawlers? Hey, why not? Let's say that. Let's say that all strategy games in some way aspired to 3D, real-time, multi-contestant brawling. When my centaur-guy in Shining Force attacks that kobold, it's a simulation of a sword-clashing battle. A real battle of man-with-sword versus man-with-sword requires skills that stretch beyond the realms of mere reflexes or mere tactical tenacity. There's an issue of physique, adrenaline, and courage. Videogames about warfare tend to allow us to participate -- and win -- in a fight though we may be scrawny or fat cowards. This is more or less the "escapism" card, you see -- though it can also be construed as hardware or software limitations. Might, some day, a game be able to read from my grip on the controller whether I've been gaining or losing weight, and adjust my character's size on the melee-battlefield accordingly? Maybe. Do I want a game to do this? Certainly not. Would this level of character-player interaction be considered a revolution? By someone, I'd imagine. Does Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero still suck? Yes.
Does it do anything new? No, it doesn't. Does it do anything halfway new? Kind of -- it introduces the element of speed to melee battlers (your character never steps down from her horse). Is the battling compelling? Not really. What about the story? Don't even go there, girlfriend.
. . .
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Aw HELL no, you went there! Read:
Plucky anime-style heroine Gemini Sunrise hails from Texas. Where in Texas, she never says. The game doesn't mind not knowing the name of a single city in Texas. It just likes the idea of making the brain-empty character from Texas, and that's a little amusing. Gemini is on her way to New York City to join a certain traveling theatrical troupe that will gain her fame. Yet -- she's been stupid, and ridden all the way to San Francisco. So she has to go all the way back across the country, allowing the game to take us on a whirlwind, action-packed ride across America.
On her way to San Francisco, she gets attacked by giant robots in the desert. This is the first stage. We run around between giant boulders and hack at robots. They each explode with one hack. After we kill all ten or so of them, the stage is over. Gemini screams "WE DID IT LARRY!!" (yes, the horse's name is "Larry") and the player is awarded a "C" rank. (The player is always awarded a "C" rank, from what I can tell. It's the game's way of saying "Better safe than sorry," in a kind of money-hungry way. Assuring that the player always feels inferior in an average way is one method of keeping people from selling the game back.) Then Gemini enters San Francisco, is told that New York is the other way, and she begins her voyage back east. While leaving town, she comes across a little girl named Juanita. The girl is being bandied about by several huge men with giant teeth and muscles, and robots. They're calling her "The Miracle Girl." Gemini, trying to develop a character trait, helps Juanita out by killing all the robots. The bad guy, Patrick, runs away. (I think his name is Patrick. It's been so long. I can't remember.) Gemini then says that she likes Juanita and wants to go on an adventure with her. Juanita, the only beacon of reason in the game, acts kind of creeped out, yet chooses to go with the weird sixteen-year-old redhead on a white horse with a samurai sword, anyway. Juanita's voice actress, if my ears don't lie, is a female serial killer who squeezes human vitreous humour into her tan-tan ramen. Her hair is white and her eyes are red, so you know something's up with her! Gemini doesn't seem to notice. Soon, the game has introduced a guy who lives in the desert and drives a really big motorcycle-like car-contraption. Later, we meet a big, muscly guy with fat blond hair, from Texas, who is an old friend of Gemini's, and also a driver of the same kind of big motorcycle-like-car-contraption. He comes along on our journey to make it to New York whilst avoiding the massive waves of giant robots that attack, trying to steal away Juanita. By this point, they've tried to steal her in the streets of San Francisco, in the deserts of Nevada, and out in front of the MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas, even though that casino has no reason to exist yet. Out of nowhere, one night before they decide to bathe together, Gemini confesses that she loves Juanita, and Juanita is so pleased she screams. The two guys are watching this, of course. So are the bad guys. So of course there's a battle in the bathing place. And of course, soon after this, there's an epic struggle of a large American mercenary army facing off against the giant robots in the fields of Gettysburg.
This is the game's only interesting set-piece. The goal of this mission is to kill a hundred opponents. The battlefield in this case does not end. It stretches on without limits. Ride that horse, smack its ass, run faster, swing the sword, and keep killing. Kill a little robot and score a point. Kill a giant robot and score a point and a health power-up. This battle, for the most part, works, and when I got to the stage of the game where I felt like replaying a few levels for the hell of it, this was the one I played the most.
Other levels are crammed full of nonsense. Some of the desert canyon stages can probably be charged as felonies in some countries. For whatever unearthly reason, there are these flying enemies that stick way back, and wait for you to start an attack. When you're in the middle of attacking a strong enemy, they'll shoot you with some beam, sending you bouncing back. When all the enemies in an area are dead, you'll try to kill the floaters only to wonder how you're supposed to do that. The proper method involves jumping up, floating back a bit, and doing a mid-air slash that just barely brushes past the little bastards. They won't attack you at this point. They'll just float up and wait to die. You kill them, hitting them maybe once in every six attempts, and then you continue to the next area of the stage. You fight big enemies. Then, soon, without asking your permission, the level ends, and you get a "C" ranking.
The game's fullest sin is inconsistency. One desert canyon stage won't physically allow you to jump down from one ridge of a hillside to another. Yet, it will let you fall off a bridge and into a bottomless canyon. The death-fall takes all of a minute to complete, as well, which is really, really cute. The in-game graphic engine consists of fully-animated models for each character, yet the characters have no facial expressions. Nor is there any way to rotate the camera around to see their faces. When characters talk, it is through full-screen hand-drawn models that never, ever change. Gemini is always grinning with eyes in upside-down Us. The Texas guy always has that shitty sneer on his face. The characters are fully voiced, as well as fully subtitled. Sometimes, you'll have to choose what to say. You have three seconds to make the choice. The choice makes no difference. It might make a character lose patience in Gemini. In might make a character flirt with Gemini. It will not change anything, not the characters' relationships with each other, and not the flow of the game's stages. The characters revert to their normal relationships two lines later. The least the game could do is animate its talking heads -- as it is, they just stand there with twitching lips, which are "technologically enhanced" so that they stop twitching when a line of dialogue ends. It's boring. I'm not expecting the dynamic virtuoso of Gyakuten Saiban 3, here. I'm just wishing for something like it. Or maybe I'm spoiled by Usagi, by Warashi, which has super-hi-resolution characters that slide in and out, zoom, and moved during dialogue scenes. In Sakura Taisen V: Episode Zero, it's all simple, static, unmoving, unchanging gameplay.
There's little "change" involved in this game. Gemini Sunrise, the plucky heroine, never changes. At the end of the game, following the near-end of the world, she's still as plucky as when she awshucksed off her ending up in San Francisco when she meant to go to New York. The game behaves badly, like a bratty child. It thinks that everything it does is right, or new, when really it's just being a snot-nosed prick. At the end of levels, your "C" rank is converted to experience points which can be used to buy strength upgrades. You then look at your status menu. Your have three upgrade choices: attack power, defense, horse power. I ended up maxxing each one before the final mission. At the end of some missions, you're awarded a new weapon, saddle, bridle, or spurs. You then look at the menu, where you see that there are only five slots of spurs and saddles. This means, of course, that when you get a new saddle, you put it on without thinking. This reminds me a lot of the "mazes" in the "Quest Mode" of Soul Calibur II, where every room was a fight with "defeat the opponent" being the goal, and most every "maze" was just a straight, snaking procession of rooms. It's an illusion of depth, and a piss-poor one.
The story, too, has illusions of depth. The criminals responsible say that they're setting Sakura Taisen V in America in hopes that they'll be able to release the game in America as well. Americans, they take it, won't take kindly to a game about Japanese girls battling robots in Japan; Americans battling robots in America, though -- that's a hot idea. This is why Overworks is putting a lot of overwork into Sakura Taisen V. The fans have been salivating for so long, and the designers had been sweating for so long, that they popped out this Episode Zero to tide people over. For a person who held within him no frothing demand for Sakura Taisen V -- hell, a person who thought this game was Sakura Taisen V until just before the end, when someone told me otherwise -- this game is visible as just a piece of fan-service bullshit meant to bevy the real game's budget. It's a Japanese CD single. If it, however, is the A-side, then the B-side's chance of being brilliant is not so high.
The characters are not real people. They are some of the fakest people I've ever seen in videogames. They act with no regard to what real people are supposed to be like. I was ready to forgive this as just a quirk of anime nature, really. All of fifteen minutes into the game, I was bored with the game's system, yet hopeful that it might get entertaining at some point. Yet I was already questioning pathways to the game's spiritual redemption as a character drama. I only found one such pathway, and it was enough to carry me through to the rest of the game. Namely, I wanted to know why the bad guys were calling Juanita the "Miracle Girl." I resolved to play the game until I found out why. If it was something stupid, I threatened to turn the game off.
Furthermore, I had one condition: I would be able to forgive whatever idiocy the story threw out so long as no characters made direct reference to the machines. So far, no one had said anything along the lines of "Mah motorcycle's a fast'un," or "Look out for dem giant ROBOTOTRONS they's fierce GAHYUK."
**SPOILERS**
Well, in the end, it is revealed that Juanita is "The only citizen to survive the Battle of Gettysburg." This is spoken in 1927. The Battle of Gettysburg was in 1865. Juanita is ten years old. She is, of course, for some reason, immortal. The people of Gettysburg herald her return as a great omen -- "She can save us, now, from the evil!" The bad guys, revealed to be Confederate soldiers still nursing a grudge, then open a pathway to the Garden of Eden, where the scarfaced lead villain plans to make Juanita Eve to his Adam. There are many big battles leading up to vapid, running-around-in-circles final confrontation in which all the characters assemble and chant about humans having "rights and stuff" and about how "war is bad and you guys lost so give up already and give us back our princess." The game ends, Gemini continues alone to New York while Juanita runs off with the twice-her-height guy from the desert and the hair-combing guy from Texas becomes the President of the United States (I shit you not). Over the credits, we see a music video of the title song playing in a quarter-screen window. You'll have to wait for the actual game to view it full-screen, folks!
On the first battle in the Garden of Eden, the guy from the desert looks at the incoming parade of giant robots and whispers to Gemini, now suddenly covered in fear:
"I think these guys are . . . different from us."
I just about lost it. I just about cried. It was worse that Aeris?Edeath in Final Fantasy VII. All at once, all the storyline's idiocies came crashing down.
"WAIT WHAT THE ONLY CITIZEN TO SURVIVE THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG WHAT DID SOMEONE DROP AN ATOMIC BOMB OR SOMETHING?"
I am not a patriotic American. I don't live in the country, and I haven't, for a long stretch of my life. Yet I know at least a little bit about the nation's history. I know what Gettysburg was. If these Japanese game designers want to make a game a hit in America, the least they can do is open a damn book. First they lump all of Texas into one expansive city full of grinning tools, and then they go so far as to recall the name "Gettysburg" only to apply it to . . . what, exactly? A little Mexican girl who speaks Japanese and is for some unexplained reason gifted with eternal life?
When I finished the game, I tried to play some of the old missions again. Just to try to find some gameplay depth. It wasn't until the final mission that I realized Larry -- that's the horse -- can do a stomp attack. This is activated by pressing the jump button during mid-jump. The stomp attack shoots up the orange combo meter to near-full. The thing about the combo-meter is this: when it fills up, it starts to go down. Get hit by an enemy, and the combo-meter disappears. What you do is keep killing enemies while the combo meter still has some juice. Use the stomp move, and you can keep charging up the combo meter. Kill five enemies before the combo meter runs out, and you get a 200 SP bonus. Ten enemies gets you another 200 SP. Fifteen rewards you with a leap up to 500 additional SP. SP are the points you use to power yourself up.
By this point in the game, I'd already charged up all of my SP. Yet I continued, just playing around with the combo system to see what I could do. I ended up racking up some thirty-kill combos. I wondered, as I replayed the first few levels, if I would have found them more exciting had I known about the combo system. Then after some four levels ended abruptly and awarded me with a "C" rank, I realized that no, I wouldn't have. I would have been more frustrated, if anything. The levels would have seemed too bombastically easy. That, and once you get to the harder missions -- you know those enemies I mentioned, the flying ones that wait to fire at the most annoying times? They'll let you charge up to a fourteen-hit combo before firing a totally unblockable light-speed beam at you. This beam damages you, and resets your combo meter. That's the game's idea of challenge for the person who wants to combo -- clumsily kill the flying assholes first, getting your back lambasted by the little robots, and then turn around and begin the combo. It's shallow, it's vapid, it's stupid, and I can't help thinking that it's just some sophomoric way of inverse-pandering to the people who would otherwise say the game is too easy.
I could go into more detail. I could use big words and wave my metaphorical hands about what this game represents in the grand scheme of the artistic decay of the universe. I could make you feel the game's pain. Instead, all I want to tell you is that it's not worth it. If you're a Sakura Taisen fan, chances are you'll want to play it, much as I'd advise you to quit it like cigarettes. Then again, I never tell people to quit cigarettes. I let them decide on their own. Play Berserk instead. If you claim that you don't like the manga -- well, now's a good time to read it. Watch the anime, too. Listen to the music. Or don't do any of those. After all, they're not required. Just play the game by itself. A videogame is a videogame. Have we not learned that lesson before, a million times? Videogames aren't movies, just as cups of hot apple cider are not cups of hot cocoa, and just as schoolgirls with shotguns are not cups of hot cocoa.
Of course, there are always ways to compare them.
Hell if I know what they are. I'm going to go play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas right now. I entrust the future of the 3D beat-em-up to Yuke's and - should they see the light - Treasure. That'd be really something.
