I’ve never played a Sakura Wars game before, so I didn’t know what to expect besides mech fighting.

Turns out, despite being a mech game, the mechs aren’t really a focus? It’s more of a Slice of Life/Harem Visual Novel with simple hack-and-slash mech combat thrown in.

That’s not to say it’s completely bad, it’s just different than what it was advertised as.

The story starts pretty decent, but around the midpoint it kinda forgets it has a main plot for a little bit and just focuses on character driven plot lines. This wouldn’t be a problem in a longer game, but Sakura Wars is about 15-20 hours long, and this part just makes the main plot lose momentum.

Characters are for the most part well written, but after a certain point almost every interaction with your party members is ‘comedic misunderstanding’, where the protag is accused of being a horny pervert over the most random things.

Combat is super simple and doesn’t evolve or change in any way, except for one party member getting an upgrade. All the characters play differently though, but you can’t choose your party for most of the few combat sections this game has. Combat is also paired with awkward platforming.

If you need a quick mech fix, I’d recommend playing this for at least one playthrough.

Un perfecto juego anime de 7. Y lo digo en el mejor de los sentidos.
No es muy largo, el juego hace porque le cojas cariño al cast, las protas son estereotipos andantes que no puedes evitar animar, sucumbiendo a sus dramones telenoveleros... Tiene situaciones cómicas ecchi tanto a favor como en contra del prota, por lo que no es un "juego harem" para chicos sin más. Muy entretenidas sus fases de movimiento andando por uno de los entornos currados con más mimo, pese a su presupuesto (es un juego de nicho, no un Assassins Creed).

Es confort food para tu backlog y me ha gustado por ello.

Sakura Wars (2019) serves as a soft reboot with the theme of passing the torch to a new generation. Honestly, I found this game to be rather average, with characters that felt somewhat clichéd compared to the charm of the previous series (which I've only experienced through comics, to be fair). The action felt lackluster and somewhat like an afterthought, and there was quite a bit of filler content that dragged on, making it a bit challenging to finish. However, I must acknowledge that the game possesses charm and is rich in details, particularly in its 3D character designs, environments, music, scene direction, and other trivial elements that demonstrate the developers' love for the franchise. Looking towards the future, I hope this series doesn't end with just this game.

P.S.: I was particularly bothered by the variety in character design here. It reminded me of Ao no Kiseki when they used character designs by Katsumi Enami from the previous series alongside new designs by Falcom's in-house artists, which felt somewhat jarring. A similar situation occurred here, with Tite Kubo handling the main cast while other characters had distinct designs, diverging from Kubo's artistic style. Additionally, the bromide system still evokes nostalgia with Kōsuke Fujishima's designs.

My Score: 7/10

Despite being a soft-reboot, this entire game feels like you're dropping in on Season 2 of an anime that had a 5 year gap in production. The characters talk with each other like we already met them and know them.

I've wanted to play this game since it came out, at the time I did not have a PS4 and I was playing PSO2 which had a Sakura Wars collab going on despite the fact that PSO2 was only on Xbox and PC at the time. I know it was having the collab at the same time for JP players but still weird. Not sure what I expected going into this though. I think I was expecting something closer to the Saturn games than what I got here. What is here is a light visual novel with social elements crossed with a poor action platformer with musou combat. All equaling a pretty disappointing package with a lot of small things that are annoying but, all of it stems from two major issues I have with the game.

1. There's no real sense of progression. You have cool robots but you never upgrade them, save for an upgrade that's more so a narrative point than it is a gameplay thing. The cool robots never get new attacks, they never get new armor, they never get new weapons. I was able to use the same strategy the entire time and did just fine, the game doesn't even get harder making it feel even shorter than it is. The visual novel elements somehow suffer from this issue too. I never feel like I'm actually getting closer to any of the girls, or anyone else you have chat events with. In Persona and Fire Emblem you feel like you're getting to know the characters personally, separate from whatever revelations come from the narrative. Here it's very superficial casual conversations like you have with someone you work with. Even by the end of the game I didn't feel like my relationship really progressed at all with my choice from the main 5 girls.

2. The game giving most of its focus to Sakura, the most boring member of the Flower Division, made it really hard for me to care about what was going on at almost any moment. She gets so many featured moments through each chapter, even being featured in some way in the chapters where she ISN'T the focus it's distracting when it's a big cast of characters. I'm hoping that the saturn games don't have this issue, or at least that their Sakura is way more interesting. The ending feels really werid if you pick anyone else (which I ended with Azami and the PS4 trophy stats show that Sakura is the most common pick by a large margin, do gamers just have bad taste or something). The rest of the cast have stronger personalities and interesting quirks beyond being the MCs childhood friend and it would be nice if I could've replaced those moments with Sakura with them instead!

On the positive side the combat sections are pretty fun even if they're basic, hitting super attacks on a large group is satisfying. The music is great. I did find the trust sections to be funny even if they just made Seijuro seem like a predator.

Whenever I get to the English patched Saturn game I hope I like that one more.

Technically the game shouldn't have been much, but I just loved every moment. The story was simple but the character were so likeable and engaging that I was just completely invested. The animation was so well done, a bit too much at times, but overall it made the scenes so much better and more fun to watch.

Gameplay wasn't much really, barebones at best with a turn your brain-off mentality. However the dating sim part definitely makes up for it, at least for someone like me that likes romance and also just loves these characters.

Overall it was a really nice chill experience, and it makes me wanna try out the old ones. Maybe sega will release them again one day.