Sengoku Basara Retrospective: Sengoku Basara 4 (Sumeragi)

I remember where I was when the first trailer for Sengoku Basara 4 was released.  I’ve never been so hyped for a game in my entire life.  No other game can come close to the excitement and anticipation for a sequel to one of the greatest games of all time and everything else in the meantime was just something to occupy me until I could finally play it.

Years passed.  The game came out in Japan, where it was promptly exalted as one of the all-time master works of the gaming medium.  People outside of Japan kept importing it and sang the same praises  Then the updated version, Sengoku Basara 4: Sumeragi, came out and importers basically exalted it as the greatest game of its genre ever made.

I told those people to stop.  I told them to buy the English version when it comes out.  Just like Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes, Samurai Kings, Samurai Legends and End of Judgement, Sengoku Basara 4 was going to have an amazing English release and those people importing it were both buying a worse version and putting in time that would not carry over.  That’s what I believed.  Why wouldn’t I?  This was Capcom, the greatest game company in the medium.  They were on fire in the early 2010s, with hit after hit after hit after hit and the occasional fumble, but nobody’s perfect.  I believed in Capcom.

Year after year after year after year after year after year I kept thinking that it would finally be the year we got the English version of Sengoku Basara 4 and that with all that time being spent on it, the English version was going to be as perfect as possible.  They must’ve been doing 100 takes on every single line of English dialogue so that the sound of it touches the pleasure sensations of the brain.  There was going to be more extra content in the English version than the English release of Kingdom Hearts.  I kept buying Capcom’s games, feeding them money, comfortable in knowing it was going into the English version of the greatest game ever created, maybe even the greatest thing ever created as a whole in the history of the universe.

The hype grew with each passing year.  Sengoku Basara 4’s English version is so hyped up that playing it might put someone into cardiac arrest just from starting the game!  I took that built-up hype to every Capcom showcase.  “Maybe we’ll get a release date for the English version of Sengoku Basara 4!”
People kept telling me there wouldn’t be one, but I believed in Capcom.  They made Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes, one of the hallmarks of gaming.  They gave us that game because they knew the world needed it and not Devil Kings.  There’s no reason why they wouldn’t just do what they already did for one more game.  That would be a complete and utter betrayal to every single Capcom fan.  I made the foolish decision to believe in something.  Never believe.

It took many years for me to realize that Capcom is no longer the good company that gave us Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes.  They have no intention of delivering nirvana to their fans.  Sengoku Basara 4 will never come out in English and they have made it their mission to make their fans as miserable as possible, keeping the English version of Sengoku Basara 4 from them just to watch them squirm.  They are evil.

When I came to grips with that, I finally just imported the Japanese version after 6 years of hype and it is the single most depressing, soul-crushing game I’ve ever played in my life.  Not because it’s bad, but for the polar opposite reason.

Specifically this is about Sengoku Basara 4: Sumeragi.  Unlike 2 Heroes and 3 Utage, which were expansion packs rather than updated re-releases, 4 Sumeragi actually is an updated re-release with all the original game’s content, just with a different menu and the

opening cutscene of the main mode cut for some reason.

From what I can piece together about the story, Sengoku Basara 4 can best be described as a dream match game.  It doesn’t follow a continuity and harkens back to the first game, where it was a very simple premise without all the moving parts of Samurai Heroes.  Here, Yoshiteru Ashikaga calls on the warlords of Japan to show him their fighting spirit and conquer the nation as a true leader or something.  For context, in history Yoshiteru was the leading shogun in Japan whose assassination kicked off the Sengoku period in the first place, making him being the impetus of the warring here very apt.

Everyone who was playable in 3 Utage comes back except for Ujimasa Hojo.  4 introduces new characters and brings back a few from Sengoku Basara 2 to add to the cast.  Hideyoshi and Hanbei are back and now also have Mitsunari, Yoshitsugu and Ieyasu on their side, allowing for some of the dynamic Samurai Heroes only referenced in the backstory.

Nagamasa is back in the shiny new graphical style too, but the biggest glow-ups of all is Sakon Shima and Katsuie Shibata.  Sakon and Katsuie are not technically “new” characters.  Both of them are one of many regular, generic, named generals in Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes, with Sakon in the Karasu Castle stage and Shibata on the Incident at Honno-Ji stage.  Now they’re distinct, younger and fight with dice and spinning blades.  This phenomenon of throwaway characters suddenly having character designs is something that also happens in Tecmo Koei’s Samurai Warriors series as well, but it’s even more noticeable there because the characters upgraded to playable status are sometimes up close in cutscenes of Samurai Warriors games prior to that.

Sakon works with Mitsunari and I think Katsuie becomes friends with Masamune.

The way stories work in Sengoku Basara 4 has a little bit of every previous entry built into it.  Similar to the first game, a selection of stages is given for the player to choose from and they don’t need to be beaten in any particular order, except unlike the first game, there’s a lot more story.  Between every stage is extensive dialogue conversations telling a character’s story.  Since these interim story segments are independent of the stages chosen, it doesn’t relate to what happens in them, which is similar to how Samurai Heroes would do things in certain parts of its stories.  To still give the stages character, there is still character-specific dialogue when playing them and sometimes even a special cutscene for when 2 characters that are rivals fight in a stage as a sort of evolution of the rival cutscene concept from the first game.

I can't understand ANY of this!

Similar to Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes, there’s a branching path toward the end of each conquest.  Every character has a conquest route, where they get a cutscene after clearing a final, challenging stage, and a drama route, where the story pivots in a new direction and it essentially turns into the linear stories of Sengoku Basara 2 for a couple of stages.  A handful of characters also get an “anime” route, which is basically another drama route except they conclude with an awesome anime cutscene from Production I.G.  Apparently Capcom loved Samurai Kings so much that they got I.G. on for an actual game and just like that series, they look outstanding.  Don't worry about having to replay the whole thing just to get to the branching path either.  In Sumeragi you can skip right to them and it will replay all the dialogue up to that point to get the player that can understand anything anyone is saying up to speed.

While it doesn’t go as in-depth in an overall plotline as Samurai Heroes does, there is a lot more story content this time around.  As I said, every single character has at least 2 story routes and a few have 3.  This game has a whopping 40 characters! That’s more than double the number in Samurai Heroes and 10 more than 3 Utage!  It’s the biggest character count in any Sengoku Basara game and none of them were left behind in anything, from the movesets to the stories!  These are probably the finest stories ever told too!  Too bad we’ll never know!

 

I don't understand what is going on with all the animals in this game.

This is where the soul-crushing depression sets in.  There’s so much dialogue.  So much obnoxiously spoken, incomprehensible, annoying dialogue all in that awful manner of speaking Japanese I hate so much.  All the things you love about Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes’ characters and dialogue is gone.  Good story?  You can’t understand it.  Good voice acting?  No.  Your favorite characters back again?  Some imposter who’s not Christopher Corey Smith is wearing Yoshiaki’s skin and has none of the charisma that makes him my favorite.  It’s endless hours of what might as well be spoken nonsense and any online fan translations you can find online are not finished.  The stories of Sengoku Basara 4 are lost.

This means that there is no motivation to play.  The characters don’t have any motivation that I can make out so why should I?  Who are these new guys?  I don’t know.  What’s even the point of playing?  To get to the end of some story I don’t know anything about, possibly about guys I don’t know, playing stages with conversations that make no sense, then an ending that comes out of nowhere because I don’t understand what the end goal or context was in the first place?  It’s all for nothing.  This is what I hyped up Sengoku Basara 4 for after over 6 years; nothing.

That’s especially depressing because the gameplay and design achieved perfection.  Capcom officially made gameplay without flaw.  The controls are unchanged from Samurai Heroes, which was already a pinnacle, but a fair number of extra features were added to elevate it just a little more.  Now, in addition to parrying, performing a dodge at the exact moment an attack hits a player does a super dodge of sorts that grants more distance and brief invincibility.  Having a second character is now mandatory and if they’re not controlled by a second player, they can be commanded to attack a certain area, can be switched to on the fly and when the basara gauges of both characters are full, they can unleash a highly damaging attack over a wide area that’s guaranteed to clean house and decimate enemy commanders.

Each character has their own animal ink painting for it.

For some extra spice, certain stages have the roulette wheel presence, no doubt because of Yoshiteru somehow.  The guy’s castle is a giant roulette wheel of spinning rooms, his castle’s arena is a giant roulette wheel and he spins his red and black swiss army weapon in his hand like a roulette
When you destroy certain control camps or kill enemies holding a roulette wheel on their backs, a roulette spins onscreen and depending on the result, a variety of wacky things can happen.  You can suddenly be playing as a bombardier or Motochika’s giant machine, the Rising Sun (Akatsukimaru).  You might get attacked by guys who look suspiciously like Miyamoto Musashi and Haruhisa Amago from previous games.  My favorite is the one that changes the player into Kanetsugu.  Finally you can play as the invincible Kanetsugu, though for some reason “invincible” translates to “dies in one hit and then you revert back to your character.”  The big advantage of Kanetsugu is he can kill anything in one hit so it can make stages go a lot faster if you know what you’re doing.  The Rising Sun’s flame cannon is almost an instant kill too, once you get used to positioning it right.

Participating in any of the roulette shenanigans rewards special golden coins used in a special shop to buy weapons, costumes and a new attack for every character, further upping their movesets.  Remember, that’s 40 characters each given more costumes and bigger movesets, including all the returning ones.

With how many advantages players were given for Sengoku Basara 4, you would think it’s too easy, but the enemies and hazards upped in power to match all the new abilities players are given.  Enemy commanders can now organize them into specific formations, like human pyramids of canon wielders, lines of charging spear twirlers or just walls of treasure holders with boosted health to get in the way.  This makes all the enemy soldiers pose much more of a threat than trying to overwhelm the players with their numbers, but there is a major boost in the number of enemies that can be onscreen at once now, so they’re better at that as well.
Command camps were also given multiple tiers that need to be taken down and can be done faster if a brief timing minigame is triggered.  In addition, those command camps are more likely to be taken back this time around.  In Samurai Heroes, only in a few stages is there a chance the enemy will be able to take one of your command camps and that's usually because the enemy commander is loose on the battlefield, but in 4, many stages have a genuine threat to command camps from regular enemy soldiers and the generals that lead them, making the player have to run all over the battlefield to keep things under control, decimating hundreds along the way.

Regardless of how difficult the game is from a character and stage design standpoint, the preparations before battle have been expanded so thoroughly that a lot of the difficulty is up to the player.  You can change difficulty mid-story, for one, but the bigger customization is from the overhaul of equipment.

Items/weapon accessories are gone in Sengoku Basara 4 because they are rendered obsolete.  In previous games when you got weapons you already had, they would level up that weapon instead.  Now, even if they’re the same weapon type, they are given separately and have different inscriptions on them.  The inscriptions take the place of the power-up items, like more health, more damage to certain enemies or immunity to certain elements.  They can be transferred to other weapons via a the new weapon fusion system, which doubles as a more player-controlled form of leveling up their stats.

The more gimmicky items, like lowering your level to 1, allowing friendly fire damage to allies and other such handicaps or buffs, are regulated to new consumables that can be used with each mission.  The items that changed the music have been replaced with a music customization feature that lets you choose from music you’ve bought in the in-game store.  It’s all so streamlined and convenient because you can do those things without having to take up an item slot this way, not that I minded before.

Maxed out super weapon.

The new weapon customization system can be a big game changer in and of itself.  In addition to the inscriptions, each one has 5 different stats that can be powered up through weapons fusion and materials gathered in the stages.  You can make a stupid powerful weapon, weapons only specialized in a couple stats, an optimal weapon for a specific stage or even a pathetic weapon for a self-imposed challenge.

The whole game’s battle preparation and stage selection systems let you play the game your way.  Do you want to go in at level 1 with a bad weapon?  You can.  Do you want different music?  You can change that.  Do you want to just plow through the enemies with a weapon you dumped all your material into and one-shot everyone?  That’s doable.  Do you want to use another character?  You can change your partner (just not the story character) and switch to them in the stage.  Are you in the mood for a shorter stage or a long and epic one?  The story mode gives you the option for either a lot of the time.  Do you not want the wacky roulette effects on a stage that has it?  You can toggle that.  Sengoku Basara 4 never makes you do anything you don’t want to.

Even when you do have to play a stage toward the end of a story route, every single stage in the game is just as good, if not better, than the masterful stages of Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes.  True to a dream match game, several stages are enhanced recreations of ones from previous games, like Honno-Ji, Kawanakajima, Sekigahara (only one this time) and the cliffs of Mikatagahara.  Other stages up the crazy factor to new heights, like an extended rail shooter section in Kanbei’s stage and the entirety of Sorin’s new theme park, Xaviland.  Some of the bigger stages have different armies teaming up or fighting each other alongside the player.  There's one stage that has Nobunaga, Ieyasu, Yoshiteru and Hideyoshi all in one!  There isn't a single stage that isn't beautiful and unique.

The story mode even introduces special stages, like playing a stage where two characters team up or fight each other, or boss fights against a character in a small arena, which facilitate fights with characters that aren’t tied to an army.  The special stages add even more variety to an already content-rich game.

The two minor flaws in Samurai Heroes are gone.  If you recall, one of that game’s flaws was that it has a slow start, where you don’t have your full set of moves for any character until a few stages in.  That only happens for the first couple of stages in Sengoku Basara 4.  SB4 introduces items that give an accumulated pool of experience that can be used to quickly level up a character.  After just a few stages you can get the extra experience necessary to level up any character from level 1 to level 15 or 20, unlocking at least their main 4 moves right then and there.  Problem solved.  To make things even easier than that, playing two characters at once means you are leveling up two at once as well, further mitigating the time needed to level up.

The other debatable flaw in Samurai Heroes was the fewer number of characters and stages.  If it isn’t obvious by now, that is no longer the case.  Sengoku Basara 4 has 40 characters and over 45 stages!  Free play mode says there’s only 43, but that doesn’t take into account the special event stages from the story mode and doesn’t discount a few stages that are 100% the same except for one added factor at the end.  The amount of content in the game is positively staggering.  With no more flaws, Sengoku Basara 4 would be perfect.  Would be.

In English, Sengoku Basara 4 would not only be the greatest game ever made, but the greatest creation in the history of mankind.  It is hyped to death for a reason.  In Japanese it’s the most disheartening, depressing game I’ve ever played in my life and it hurts me to do so.  The gameplay is perfect, but there’s more to a game than gameplay.

All that customization stuff is incredible, but I could only give an overview of it from what I could piece together.  I can’t read most of those inscriptions, I don’t know what any of the weapon stats are nor what the game-altering items do.  I can’t tell which music track is which for the music customization, with a scant few exceptions.  I had to fumble through the menus for hours over several play sessions before I could figure out what does what and my reward for when I'm actually playing is stories with hours of constant dialogue both in and outside of stages that’s all gibberish to me and has no Johnny Bosch, no Dino Andrade and no Peter Beckman.  Then cutscenes play with no context, stages tell me to do things I can only guess at and I again fumble trying to use characters I didn’t use in the previous game because the combat is so intricate that you have to know a character’s quirks to use them effectively, which requires reading difficult kanji.  All the while I think about how I wasted 6 years of my life believing in a company that in reality has nothing but contempt for their fans and with nothing to show for it except a finished game in which Capcom only needs to do what they already did to make it the greatest game thing in history.  As I already stated, there aren’t even fan translations to save us this time.  The few translations you can find are incomplete, but even if they weren't, they can't change the voice acting into the English dub of Samurai Heroes that put it on the map.  The only ones who can make this game perfect are Capcom and they never ever will.

The good company known as Capcom that we once loved is dead.  At some point, Captain Obvious came into his office after the tremendous success of Sengoku Basara 4 in Japan, ready to get the English version underway and change the world forever.

When Captain arrived, however, Crappy Com was at the CEO’s desk, looking a lot less high and a lot more cynical.

“Mr. Com,” Captain Obvious says.  “I thought you died.”

Crappy slowly started to reach for something under his desk.  “I did.  Now I am living my life in a new way.”

“That’s great!” Captain Obvious was overjoyed that his returning boss came to his senses.  “You came back at the perfect time, too.  When Sengoku Basara 4 comes out in English, we’ll be the richest company in the entire world!  We’ll be able to buy Disney AND Warner Brothers!  This is going to be the biggest smash success the world has ever-“

Before he could finish his sentence, Crappy Com whipped out his magnum and shot Captain Obvious square in the head.

In the modern day, it is Capcom’s mission to make sure their fans suffer.  They do not think American players don't want a game about historical Japan.  The continued success of Samurai Warriors and Nioh shows that's impossible.  They do not care about money.  If they did, Sengoku Basara 4 would be in English.  They do not care about their reputation.  If they did, Sengoku Basara 4 would be in English.  They do not care if they built up and established Sengoku Basara as one of the biggest gaming powerhouses in the world.  If they did, Sengoku Basara 4 would be in English.  The only thing Capcom cares about now is feeding off of the the misery of the fans who used to believe in them.

They laid a template with Sengoku Basara 4: give English-speaking fans the perfect English release of a game franchise, show those fans they will faithfully have that franchise from that point on, then release the biggest, best, most amazing installment in that franchise in Japan while the English speakers hype up a game Capcom will never give them until eventually the fans start to cry and beg for it.

 

Capcom these days is doing an amazing job with the re-releases of their older games from before they turned evil because those are already in English and Capcom can’t hide them from the players, modern port or not.  New games, however, they will use them to the fullest fan-torturing potential.  Capcom is not going to let players outside Japan have the new Okami and Onimusha games.  They will come out in Japan and Capcom will do everything in their power to make sure they don’t come out in English.  I’ve already been down that path.  Believing in Capcom is foolish and I was a fool to do it.

Sengoku Basara 4’s Japanese version is a symbol of everything wrong with Capcom.  Playing through the confusing menus and incomprehensible dialogue, the only thing that goes through my head is how perfect it WOULD be in English and how Capcom CAN release it in English like they did with Samurai Heroes, but won’t for no other reason than to enjoy watching people beg.  Knowing that is why playing Sengoku Basara 4 is the most miserable experience I've ever had playing a game and I only continue to play it out of desperation for more Sengoku Basara.  All Capcom had to do was dub this one game and they would be exalted as the kings of all gaming.  Instead they’re the single most evil, just barely edging out Ubisoft.  Sure, Ubisoft dangles Beyond Good and Evil 2 at fans of the first game like bait to manipulate and torment them, but at least BG&E 2 isn’t a finished, commercially released game ready to go!  I give the Japanese version of Sengoku Basara 4 a 3 out of 10.  I would give the English version a 20 out of 10, but it’s for that reason we will never get it.

It is impossible to oversell how much of an impact Sengoku Basara 4 would have in English.  It is the only game from Capcom that matters and everything else is a new release of “Not Sengoku Basara 4 in English.”  Capcom is constantly making brand new games from the ground up on brand new game engines with fully dubbed English releases while they have a complete, finished game that only needs its English translation, something they are demonstrably capable of doing to universal acclaim.  That is not a company motivated by finances.  That’s a company motivated by hate and spite.

They even put Sengoku Basara 4 characters in Teppen, in English, as their way of saying "I bet you wish YOU could play this!"  I of course played Teppen anyway.  In fact the Sengoku Basara cards are the sole reason I got Teppen at all because like I said, I'm desperate.  Although the English translation for Teppen isn't consistent with Samurai Heroes'.  Teppen puts last names first and refer to Yoshiaki as a fox when the English version more appropriately called him a weasel instead, among some other minor things.

I know Sengoku Basara has one more spin-off game after this one, but what’s the point?  Sengoku Basara 4 in English would be the last game anyone would ever need for the rest of their lives.  Making another game is pointless and the Japanese version of Sengoku Basara 4 is draining enough.  Besides, it's my understanding that the last game, Sanada Yukimura-Den, is very focused on its untranslated story so I wouldn't be able to type anything about the most important part of the game

Sengoku Basara’s main series could have ended on a tremendous note that immortalized it as quite possibly the greatest duology (for English speakers) to have ever been made.  Instead it dies before it finishes.  Let this retrospective go to show that it doesn’t pay to believe, especially not in Capcom.