You Should Play Sakura Wars
It's frustrating being a fan of dating sims in the west.
There is a pervasive mentality that the genre is illegitimate at best, and a joke at worst. Every April Fool's Day, you see other game developers treat one of your favorite types of game as a punchline, and no one questions whether that's warranted. It certainly doesn't help that dating sims have largely never left Japan, so even if western gamers were interested, they don't have many options to engage with the movers and shakers of the genre.
So we have this massive blind spot in gaming history in the 90s, where a massively popular genre rose and fell, leaving a huge footprint on the medium in its home turf, but nary a trace elsewhere. But these games still deserve to be championed outside of Japan. Some of the most beloved developments in game design over the past two decades have come from dating sims, showing the genre's constituent pieces have broad appeal.
I believe that dating sims can and should be given a chance to shine on the world stage, and that starts with raising awareness of the best and brightest among them. And I can't think of a better starting point than Sega’s 32-bit opus, Sakura Wars.
In the early 90s, game studio RED Company made a name for themselves with genre-defining anime RPGs and VNs on the PC-Engine CD, releasing some of the best-selling games on the system. But with NEC's next-generation console dead in the water, they needed a new home. As luck would have it, Sega came knocking, eager to make the Saturn the new home to their talent and give the console the killer app it desperately needed.
Enter Sakura Wars, a collaboration between the two studios that blended visual novels, dating sims, and strategy RPGs into a something completely new. Set in alternate-history roaring 20s steampunk Japan (And Paris and New York City), you're tasked with leading a squad of Takarazuka-esque actors who inspire hearts of the city from the stage by day and fight hell's demons in spirit-powered mechs by night. The general gameplay loop of each game goes like this:
-Each chapter begins in visual novel mode to progress the story. Occasionally, timed dialogue prompts will appear which let you respond to your squadmates, who will respond positively or negatively depending on how your response aligns with the situation, their personality, and their current mood.
-Next, you can use your free time between major plot beats to wander around the hub area and hang out with your squadmates as you like, allowing you to follow their particular side-stories or play mini-games with them to further your mutual trust.
-Nearly every chapter ends with a strategy RPG battle where the trust you built with your team will determine their effectiveness for that fight.
Sakura Wars manages to seamlessly mesh all of its genres together by always making the cohesion of your team and the bonds you form with them the focus across all styles of play. Your dialogue choices' effect on a character's mood is the sole thing determining their stats - grinding isn't even an option because it would make your team feel more like tools than people. In order to maximize the effect of your actions during free time segments, you have to understand the daily habits and interests of each character to know where you're likely to find them. The timed dialogue choices (A hallmark of the series known as LIPS, the Live & Interactive Picture System) requires you to know your friends well enough to be able to shoot from the hip with your words, treating dialogue more like a real conversation than a puzzle to be solved. This mechanic is designed to reward you for treating your squad like people rather than a stat sheet, and because of that, you feel a lot closer to them than the cast of most RPGs. It wears the badge of a dating sim with pride - showing off the genre's best strengths of in-depth character studies - while wedding it with traditional strategy combat to give your decisions life-and-death weight.
Later games in the series do even more with the dialogue choices, using the analog stick to meter the intensity of your response, showing different options becoming available as the timer counts down, mimicking physical actions with stick movement, or even going so far as to completely change the objective of the upcoming mission based on your choices beforehand. I really appreciate how much effort Sega and RED put into making the visual novel segments feel kinetic and impactful rather than purely a vehicle for text.
Combat in Sakura Wars doesn't take a backseat to the story segments, either - it stands as some of the most creative and engaging in the genre. Every battle in these games feel completely different than the last - there are very rarely missions which boil down to "defeat all the enemies". There is always some twist to your goal, like rushing to rescue a kidnapped teammate before they are killed by an enemy bomb, destroying part of the battlefield to block the enemy's advance, or dividing up your squads to defend one map while fighting a boss in another. The variety in these fights ensure there is never a dull moment, and you're never quite sure how your goals might change a few turns from now.
Early Sakura Wars games use a standard isometric grid for movement, while post-Saturn games use a new system with free-roaming 3D movement - a major development in SRPGs at the turn of the millenium. But both systems retain the focus on your squadmates' trust with you. A few times per battle, the player can choose to rush over and guard a weakened teammate from all damage from anywhere on the map - not only saving a surrounded teammate in a pinch, but also giving you a trust bonus with them. Squadmates with whom you share an exceptionally strong bond will reward you with the team-up attacks to wreck every enemy in a huge radius. Even in battle, Sakura Wars always keeps your attention on your comrades who you've grown to care about.
Like any good dating sim, Sakura Wars' cast is memorable and complex, letting you get to know each character as if they were friends or family before deciding to settle down with your favorite. At multiple points throughout my time with these characters, I've stumbled across interactions which have surprised me with glimpses at whole new dimensions to their personality.
It's not meant to be easy to get there - you have to work for it and meet each of them on their own level. But that's true of all relationships, platonic and romantic, real and fictional. It's... humbling to see such care and thought put beneath the surface of these characters who already start out strong on the surface. They really do feel like old friends who always bring a smile to your face.
Sakura Wars is also shockingly diverse for its era, incorporating characters from all around the globe and from all walks of life. Despite being set in Tokyo, the first two games alone has your cast comprised of members from France, Russia, Germany, China, and Italy - even taking real-life historical events into account for their backstories to inform who they are as people. Later games move to Paris, New York City, and beyond with even more diverse casts. I sense a great sense of unity and equality were driving themes in the series from the way these characters were created. There are even multiple romanceable nonbinary characters in the main casts of the games, something that I can't recall its genre peers doing until recent indie games!
Want to date a nerdy Chinese inventor whose gadgets always blow up in her face? Maybe a neurodivergent Texan cowgirl living with her horse in a New York City apartment? Maybe a Transylvanian master thief with the mouth of a sailor? Sakura Wars has you covered with some of the most memorable casts in any RPG series.
So what gives, why is Sakura Wars still super niche outside of Japan? Other games have taken its ideas and ran with them to make games which have found mass appeal across the globe. Modern Persona games' focus on social mechanics and daily time management owe a lot to these games. Modern Fire Emblem games owe even more, and they sure as hell wouldn't exist without trailblazers like Sakura Wars doing the same thing generations prior. Many of the same Sega staff behind SW went on to make Valkyria Chronicles, which took Sakura Wars 3's battle system and social squad bonding and made a beloved classic. Timed dialogue choices went on to be a cornerstone of Telltale’s catalog of adventure games and Sakura Wars did it decades sooner. Hell, western gamers even seem to like romance in their games so long as it's cut in with a more locally-mainstream genre like RPG. Listen to any Mass Effect fan and the first thing they'll likely recount about those games is their memories of romancing their favorite space hunk.
But none of those games label themselves as a dating sim specifically, even though they meet much of the criteria. "Dating sim" appears to be a dirty word over here, and any game which gets marked with it gets shunned by the gaming public. The components are all there, and they're all beloved, but that semantic hurdle is seen as insurmountable. Dating sims "don't sell" in the west, so on the off chance we do get one, it's given no marketing, and then when it inevitably fails to bring in new fans, it's seen as more proof of the genre's status as a joke. It's extremely frustrating, because I know dating sims ARE popular over here under different names, it's just that gamers and publishers can't get over their preconceptions on the matter.
Which is why I want to raise awareness about this genre and remove the stigma which has been attached to it. If you've ever enjoyed pursuing a romance in a game, if you've ever found yourself jonesing for more of the social mechanics and character depth of many a modern RPG, or even if you're just a fan of SRPGs who wants to see a take on the genre which still feels fresh and focused nearly 30 years on, I implore you to give Sakura Wars a try. Let yourself get to know some of Sega’s best-written characters and see what Japanese gamers have been raving about for ages.
As of now in the mainline series, only Sakura Wars V: So Long, My Love has been officially released in English on PS2 and Wii (5 years late, and not even by Sega themselves, but I digress…), and it is an excellent starting point, requiring essentially no knowledge of the previous games while retaining all the advancements of the mainline series up until that point. The first and second games on Sega Saturn have also received translation patches, with a patch for the third game on Dreamcast currently in the works. I don't recommend the modern reboot on PS4, as it does away with many of the series' best qualities, and underwent a very rocky shift from SRPG to Dynasty Warriors-style action, but if that sounds like more your speed, then go for it.
I love this series to bits, and I hope that if you're still interested after reading this far that you soon will, too. And to any existing fans which read this through to the end anyway, strike a victory pose, comrade - I salute you!
