Sengoku Basara Retrospective: Sengoku Basara 1

Capcom has made some of my favorite game franchises of all time and there was even a time when I considered them the best company in all of gaming.  The Viewtiful Joe franchise is my favorite in both gaming and anime, Resident Evil is somewhere in the top 5 and Devil May Cry is somewhere in the top 15.  I already did a long series all about both Capcom and SNK’s accomplishments in the arcades, but just below Resident Evil and above Devil May Cry in Capcom’s portfolio is the greatest crowd fighting beat-em-up franchise ever and unfortunately one that Capcom has routinely squandered for anyone outside Japan: Sengoku Basara.

Sengoku Basara has an interesting history, particularly for the western world. What used to be a shining example of Capcom’s brilliance over a decade ago is now symbolic of why Capcom is now the worst company in gaming, but to understand how the franchise got to that point, you have to know where it came from up to where it is today.  Everyone who has ever held a controller who hasn’t already needs to play these games.

For this retrospective, I will go over each main game in Sengoku Basara’s history, what makes them so great (or rather, what makes the sequels great), what made/makes Capcom so bad or otherwise incompetent, and I have a lot to say about some of the spin-off media too, of which there is much.  I won’t go too into the production history because what matters to me most is the end result and the context of when they were released.

The starting point of the whole franchise is of course the very first game and its very first opening, performed by T.M. Revolution, who would come to establish themselves as THE rock band of Sengoku Basara.

As per the name, the time is the Sengoku period.  The Sengoku period of Japan was an absolutely crazy time, so it’s no wonder that it’s been commonly used as a backdrop for various Japanese stories.  For a rundown on some of the important bits, I recommend Extra History’s videos on it.

In short, it was a big nationwide free for all where everyone was trying to have their clan conquer Japan.  It was a time of alliances, betrayal, unconventional war tactics, ninja, samurai, badass monks and fancy headpieces.  It’s the perfect historical period to make an action game out of, which Capcom already took advantage of with Onimusha.  It certainly has more to go off of than the Edo period Samurai Shodown takes place in.

Koei made their own sengoku action game, Samurai Warriors, just one year prior to Sengoku Basara.  It’s possible the creator of Sengoku Basara cribbed a few things from Samurai Warriors, but the initial concept was likely inspired by the Dynasty Warriors games of the time and it just so happens both companies had the same idea, each going about it differently.

With the Sengoku period having so many awesome war heroes and figures that could be considered villains, the idea with Sengoku Basara was to make those heroes and villains into big, bombastic shonen characters, taking the things the person was known for and turning it into something bigger and more grandiose.  That would become the backbone of the franchise.

There are a few of big examples that perfectly illustrate how the Sengoku Basara depictions of historical figures are made.  Nobunaga, the first unifier of Japan, revolutionized the use of firearms in Japanese warfare, had bouts of cruelty such as the mass murder of Mt. Hiei and at one time jokingly called himself the Devil King of the 6^th Heaven in what can be described as trash talking with another warlord, Shingen Takeda.
In Sengoku Basara, Nobunaga uses a sword and shotgun combo, calls himself the Devil King of the 6^th heaven unironically and is an outright supervillain in big, spiky armor with a blood red cape.  His wife Nouhime also wields various guns for her fighting style.

He also liked to wear European clothes, which might explain the heavier, knight-like armor.

Tadakatsu Honda is arguably a more famous example.  In history Tadakatsu was practically the Tokugawa’s ace in the hole.  He was the mightiest warrior in the land, a big dude covered in thick black armor who allegedly was never injured in battle.  In Sengoku Basara he is a robot; a literal killing machine and one in which fighting him head-on is optional and not advised unless you’re overleveled and/or give yourself every advantage.

I think my favorite is Xavi, AKA Charles Francis Xavier.  Xavier was a foreigner to Japan and was shocked to see the rampant violence and the beliefs held by the people there, such as seppuku and the honor until death part of Bushido.  Xavier just wanted to spread Christianity (specifically Jesuit), his happy religion of loving your fellow man, singing church hymns and donating to charity, even if his understanding of the Japanese  language was bad.  He also had his followers burn down those darn false idols of Shintoism.
In Sengoku Basara, Xavi is a weirdo who speaks Japanese all wrong, sings so bad it hurts, rambles about how everyone should feel his love and his land of love has a big treasure room.  The real Xavier also brought with him gifts, such as a clock, a music box and a three barreled rifle.  In Sengoku Basara that means he arms himself with enormous cannons and a big bandolier over his shoulders, accompanied by karakuri clockwork robots of himself.  Sengoku Basara, baby!

It’s the characters that make Sengoku Basara.  While famous battles and landmarks are used as stages, it doesn’t try to adhere to a historical timeline (unlike the Samurai Warriors games).  The Sengoku period, after all, was a time where pretty much everyone was fighting anyone else and it could’ve gone differently than how it did in history.  Sengoku Basara takes a cue from Street Fighter and puts the main plot to the side.  The goal of the game is to simply take your character and fight the other warlords in their territories in order to unify Japan.  With each stage you clear, you conquer that territory while other warlords might take the territory of others to expand their borders as well.  Once all the territories are yours, you win.

Gameplay is very easy to pick up and play.  It’s a crowd-fighting beat-em-up.  The main method of combat is fighting through mobs of enemies with a basic attack button in combination with two special attacks.  The two special attacks, along with modifying items and weapons, are equipped before battle and are switched between mid-battle with the press of a button.  It’s not hard to get a grasp on, but once you unlock more skills there’s a strategy to knowing which one to take into what battle and some attacks and weapons have elemental attributes to consider that each have their own effect.  When you’ve dealt enough damage to enemies (or taken enough yourself), each character can unleash their Basara attack, which can do mondo damage when you use them at the right time.  While it’s simple on the surface, Sengoku Basara is still skill-based and you have to know when to block, when to strike back and when it’s the right time to use your equipped skill.  For example, charged attacks should be used at a distance from enemies so they don’t interrupt you and attacks that do bigger damage to a small area are best for the one-on-one fights with other named characters.

All of this is almost arcade-like in how there isn’t much of a plot.  There is a trivia section in the gallery that explains the real life origins of the stages in the game, but that’s optional and not really reflected in the game.  Even still, there is still a fair bit of storytelling on an individual character basis, again like the Street Fighter games.

When you start your first stage there’s a CG animated cutscene to introduce your character and another one for their ending.  They look pretty good for 2005, but it’s the rival cutscenes that steal the show and look excellent even by today’s standards.  Taking another cue from Street Fighter’s rival battles, each character has a rival warlord where if you challenge them, a fully animated cutscene plays to introduce the stage.  These rival cutscenes are animated by Manglobe, most famous for Samurai Champloo, which is why in some shots Yukimura looks like Mugen and Nouhime looks like Fuu.  They are the visual highlight of the entire game and they spared no expense on their big, flashy action sequences with the excellent shot composition and style you’d expect.  They never fail to get me hyped and for a stage introduction cutscene they’re pretty lengthy to boot.  A lot of games I see with anime cutscenes like these keep them short, but the ones in Sengoku Basara can go on for 90 seconds to almost 3 minutes.

The artwork and style of the menu further contributes to the game’s stylish aesthetic, featuring character artwork by Devil May Cry aficionado Makoto Tsuchibayashi, whose watercolor-like visual style to each of them brings to mind Shiro Amano’s Final Fantasy work.

It’s a good thing that so much of everything around the gameplay looks so good because the actual in-game graphics are ugly as hell.

As much as Sengoku Basara does right in its window dressing, and as fun as its gameplay can be, there is no getting around how bad the graphics are, especially the draw distance.  The draw distance in Sengoku Basara is something I expect from a Nintendo 64 game, not a console that runs Kingdom Hearts!  Anything that’s 20 feet away from you doesn’t exist until you get closer and it materializes out of thin air!  That goes for everything from buildings to mountains to trees.  Until you approach something, it looks like you’re trapped in the endless void of a skybox.  You’d think something like a castle or other huge structure would tower over the rest of a stage as a centerpiece, but no.  It isn’t there until you’re close enough.

Even if you could actually get a good view of everything, most of the stages aren’t much to look at anyway.  A lot of them are dull and flat with recycled textures throughout and very little to distinguish one area to the next.  The terrain of the stages themselves are unique; there's a snowy mountain range, a weird and grassy church with weird symbols on the gates, a river fort and a dark, torchlit stronghold, to name a few.  It's just that even if they can distinguish themselves from each other, stages don’t have interesting details to bring the place it’s supposed to be to life.  It all looks like a copy and paste job, as if they were made in a level editor.

The poor visuals negatively affect the gameplay.  I’ve never been blindsided by anything outside the draw distance, but when your view is that limited you can’t do as much forward thinking in the moment-to-moment gameplay and if you aren’t paying attention to the minimap it’s easy to get lost because everything is so indistinct from everything else, even on some of the strictly linear stages.  Something about the feedback from hitting enemies also lacks an “oomph” factor that’s so important for a beat-em-up.  The whole thing screams “early PS2 game”, but it isn’t an early PS2 game!  This thing came out in 2005!  Devil May Cry 3 came out the same year!

The audio isn't especially good either.  There are some decent tracks, particularly Nobunaga’s theme, but a lot of the soundtrack sounds like generic guitar rifts with techno synth backing that the composer came up with in a few days.  Inoffensive, but not especially notable.  The voice acting is what gets on my nerves.

 

This is going to be a controversial opinion that I’ll get clowned on for because the franchise, including this first game, is known for getting the biggest and best Japanese voice actors around.  For me it’s not as much the actual acting, which is just so-so, as much as it is the obnoxious way they all talk.  I took Japanese as my foreign language elective in college.  I have played a fair number of untranslated Japanese games and have watched untranslated, unsubtitled Japanese anime.  In those I can usually understand about 60-70% of it and I can navigate the menus of this game just fine.  However, if you learned how to speak Japanese as someone does in the modern day, the way everyone talks in Sengoku Basara will still be alien.
They use words nobody uses with phrasing nobody uses in flowery prose nobody uses and there’s a noticeable absence of katakana outside of Xavi, who ironically is the most easy to understand of them all.  It’s basically the Japanese equivalent of using Shakespearean-era English and there’s a damn good reason that kind of English is either toned down or edited out completely in stories set in that era.  This means the dialogue in Sengoku Basara is virtually incomprehensible to anyone who is not 100% fluent in Japanese and while there is a kinda sorta official English release, as well as fan translation guides, this becomes a bigger problem moving forward.

Even if you like the Japanese voice acting though, the most overarching problem of Sengoku Basara is it feels like an unpolished beta with numerous problems in both its gameplay and content.

There are many moves that are practically useless.  Sure I COULD sacrifice my health for more basara gauge or I could just go into combat and get hit for the same effect and little difference.  I COULD throw a flash bomb that stuns maybe 3 enemies at most for a few seconds or I could just use my basic attack.  I COULD use that cross slash move, but it only does slightly more damage than a normal attack, smacks the enemy just out of striking distance and a full normal combo does way more damage.  How much play testing did this game have?

The basara gauge also fills way too fast and some basara attacks are leaps and bounds better than others without balancing the character to make up for it.  This isn’t helped by the unbalanced difficulty, where the game also gets too easy too fast.  The first one or two stages might be a challenge while you’re at level 1, but before long you’re blowing through the stages with ease and because of how simple stages are, winning starts to feel like going through the motions.  There’s a hard difficulty, but the hard difficulty is way too hard to start with and the normal difficulty is what I expect to be fair and balanced, escalating the challenge as it goes.

These two become rivals to each other, but not in this game.

Maybe that could be helped by having a lot of stages, but there are only 18 stages in the entire game, which might seem like a healthy number until you realize that you can get through stages in less than 10 minutes.  You don’t play all of them in one conquest mode playthrough so if you’re good you can blow through the whole thing in less than an hour and if you’re NOT good you can beat it in 90 minutes.  Maybe they expect you to keep replaying them to get more equippable items and special attacks and that’s why you get those at such a snail’s pace, but then that's just artificial longevity.

 

There are 16 characters, but a few are moveset clones and some of the cutscenes are used for multiple characters, which is fine for the rival cutscenes because they’re made to portray both sides equally, but they didn’t bother giving Sasuke, Ranmaru or Nouhime their own openings?

There are so many problems and shortcomings that I can’t really recommend the original Sengoku Basara.  Not on its own.  I play it in the Sengoku Basara HD collection and when it’s paired with its sequel it might as well be a little bonus game Capcom threw in.  It has its good qualities in the character designs and presentation, and the gameplay is fun for a while, but the fun is fleeting and the package as a whole is mediocre.

Despite that mediocrity, the idea was a relatively novel concept at the time.  Sengoku Basara was well-received in Japan and became a top seller for the PS2.  America got the game later that year if you stretch the meaning of “got the game.”  That release will own will get its own post next time.