So, after spending the last 3 blogs ranting about a series that I love, (and not good ranting), I figure for this one I spice it up a little and rant about a series that I love! …Wait that doesn’t sound right. Anyway, today we’re going to be talking about one of my all time favorite series.. ever.

Okay.. if your first thought is “Wait Justin that doesn’t look like a video game at all it’s more like an anime!” You’d be partially correct. This is Sakura Wars. It started out as a video game series, with it’s first coming out in 1996 in Japan only on the Sega Saturn. It then went on to have 4 other games in the series, with one remake of the original released for Playstation 2. However, only the fifth game was released overseas to countries not named Japan for the Wii and PS2. So, you may ask, what on earth is this series about.

Flowers of War

Anyway, the main plot of the series is as follows:

1.) We’re in the 1920’s in: Tokyo for games 1,2, and some of 4/ Paris in 3 and some of 4/ New York in 5

2.) Steam Power rules all.

3.) There are demons running around that are trying to bring darkness into the world.

4.) We have GIANT MECHS that we use to fight the demons. Who also have giant mechs.

5.) The only people who can pilot these mechs are the 2 male captains (Ichiro Ogami and Shinjiro Taiga), and all the other female characters in the game.

Now, if this doesn’t already sound like the most badass thing ever, then I respect your opinion but will disagree 100%. If you are on the fringe about it, let me sell you with the best point about all the ladies who can pilot mechs.

6.) Since the world can’t know about our amazing giant mechs, you work undercover in a theatre performing plays and such.

Now, that’s just badass. As for the gameplay, it’s just about 50% Visual Novel based and 50% Grid-RPG based, so it’s fairly standard. So, you may be asking yourself “This all sounds super freaking awesome, but if all but one were only released in Japan, how on earth did you figure out about this series?

TL;DR

So basically around 2012 there was a crossover game between Sega (people who made Sakura Wars), Capcom, and Namco Bandai that featured Sakura Wars characters in it, despite practically being a dead franchise at this point, with the 5th games sales overseas not being the best. So, I played said crossover game (Project X Zone for the 3DS), and fell in love with, the music that played whenever Sakura Wars stuff happened.

So, I do RESEARCH on YouTube and find the original track, which has vocals in it because they couldn’t get the rights to vocal songs for the game.

And I fell in love with it instantly. Just.. I wish I could write the words for how I felt but that was a long time ago. SO I do even MORE research on this series, cry when I realized the games were only out in Japan. BUT THEN one day I was in a GameStop for my birthday and looking around games.. When I saw it.

And if anything from the previous hundreds of words taught you anything about me, I picked this up as fast as I possibly could and bought it. And I fell in love with the series. There’s just something so charming about the series as a whole. Also while doing my research I found out that in 2000 and 2001, there was a 25 episode TV Show that aired over in North America, so I watched that on YouTube. AND THEN there was also a movie that came out in 2001, which was on the iTunes store… so I bought that and had a wonderful time.

Okay so what?

Okay, at this point I probably seem like a crazy person just ranting over an obscure series that no one ever knows. While that might be true, that’s for us people over in North America. Let’s look at the wiki page for Sakura Wars and see what it says.

For a niche game series like this, I’d say 4.5 million sales is a success. And all the other awards are awesome. But it gets even better.

THEY HAD A WHOLE STORE AND CAFE DEDICATED TO THIS SERIES IN JAPAN AND I WILL BE FOREVER SAD I NEVER HAD THE CHANCE TO GO TO IT.

Anyway, if I’m gonna leave you guys with anything off of this post, it’s that sometimes you don’t need to be a fan of large scale games that get new entries every year. Sometimes being content with what you have is okay.

Okay but real talk SEGA get your act together and give me a damn remake for this series and send it over to America please.

And, I’ll leave you with possibly the greatest video game commercial ever.

Enjoy