Sengoku Basara Retrospective: Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes/3

Capcom pretty much perfected the Sengoku Basara formula the first game created with Sengoku Basara 2 Heroes.  After riding that for a few years and releasing a fighting game in the interim, it was time for Sengoku Basara to evolve with the console hardware.  With a new game engine and new play style, the next Sengoku Basara game was indeed an evolution, but the most important evolution of all was that IT’S IN ENGLISH!  IT’S IN ENGLISH!  IT’S IN ENGLISH!  IT’S IN ENGLISH!

They even got T.M. Revolution to do the opening in English!  I don’t blame anyone for thinking it’s not though.

With the Sengoku Basara anime premiering around the same time, there was a media blitz of Sengoku Basara in English.  No more Devil Kings!  No more stupid, incomprehensible old-timey Japanese speaking style!  No more looking at translation documents online just to understand the game!  Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes was faithfully and fully translated with an English dub and even sold for a discounted 40 dollars!  The very thought of selling a full retail game for 10 dollars less than normal was shocking.  It’s like Capcom didn’t care about the money and only wanted to share their amazing game.

Unfortunately for Capcom, their previous failure to translate Sengoku Basara 2 came back to bite them in the story.  Unlike 2, which was pretty much the first game except actually good, Samurai Heroes is a real sequel and taking the 3 out of the title of the English release didn’t make that any less apparent.

The manual plays with the backstory by adhering more to real history.  In yet another Street Fighter comparison, it seems to pick and choose the events from previous games.  According to how the manual tells it, Mitsuhide made Nobunaga kill himself at Honno-ji, then Hideyoshi came in and unified Japan. Now, at the start of this game, Ieyasu (who aged up for the plot) kills Hideyoshi, after which Hideyoshi’s most loyal retainer, Mitsunari Ishida, swears revenge.

The focus of Samurai Heroes is the battle of Sekigahara, considered the battle that ended the Sengoku period. Sengoku Basara 2 had a Sekigahara stage to fight Ieyasu on, but that was just there to be a familiar historical location.  Each character’s (initial) story in Samurai Heroes focuses on Ieyasu and Mitsunari gathering allies and clashing at Sekigahara, which has numerous variants depending on the story.

Much has changed in Japan since Sengoku Basara 2.  Several characters are no longer around.  For historical reasons, Honganji, Azai and Imagawa are gone because they were killed by Nobunaga, Francis Xavier wasn’t in Japan for long so Xavi’s gone, Hanbe presumably died of his illness, Shingen is also ill now and I think Itsuki’s Japanese voice actress died so she wasn’t brought back.  Samurai Heroes makes it clear that time has passed and now there are new characters taking the stage.  This is a problem for American gamers.

Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes’ story was designed to be a sequel and it has many references and character progression written around that all lost on American gamers who didn’t get to play Sengoku Basara 2 because Crappy Com had to hit the coke too damn hard.

One could make the argument that Samurai Heroes is a good jumping-on point because it introduces several new characters for American players to latch onto and not having prior knowledge of SB2 might make things less confusing because many of those new characters are sort of retconned into the previous games’ story.  For example, Mitsunari and Kanbei’s backstories say they were involved with Hideyoshi, but were never mentioned, the Saica were supposedly working under both Nobunaga AND Hideyoshi, but were never mentioned, and the games don’t actually call attention to it, but Yoshiaki Mogami was Masamune’s uncle and ally, but he wasn't mentioned either.  Personally I can brush those off as the characters simply being elsewhere during the stories told in the first 2 games.  Whether you think that or not, Samurai Heroes’ numerous bouts of continuity and expectations that players played the first 2 games make the storytelling come off as far inferior to what it should be.  There are several examples of this:

• Yukimura in the first 2 games was defined by his loyalty to Shingen to a comical degree, but in this game Shingen is ill and Yukimura has to take the charge himself, becoming his own lord and having to make decisions for the clan instead of going along with the decisions Shingen made for him.  That major turning point for his character is lost on American players that didn’t get to play (properly translated versions of) the first 2 games.

• Yukimura and Masamune being rivals is treated like the player already knows they are, except American players DON’T know that because that was established in Sengoku Basara 2.  History doesn’t work as a background for this either because there doesn’t seem to be evidence the two even knew each other in real life, unlike Shingen and Kenshin.

• Hideyoshi is brought up a lot, but the player never really learns who the Sengoku Basara version of Hideyoshi was because that was in Sengoku Basara 2.  All he has in Samurai Heroes is a brief appearance in a couple of pre-rendered cutscenes and an entry in the character gallery, which is more than what can be said for Hanbei, who didn’t even get that.  Hanbei is only mentioned a few times in the whole game, his only appearance is a distant shot from the back and without playing Sengoku Basara 2, American players have no idea who that guy is or if the guy being brought up in dialogue and the guy shown from the back in one cutscene are even the same person.

• Sorin Otomo takes over Xavi’s religion after Xavi departed and Sorin’s stage is filled with pictures of him with Xavi.  Who was this Xavi person?  Never explained.  That was in the first 2 games.  It’s also kind of strange the way Sorin begins his battle with “Let’s go Xavi!”  Not that strangeness is out of place for Xavi’s followers, but it’s a reference to Xavi’s opening battle cry from the previous games.  The ones Americans didn’t get to play.

• When Motonari enters Sorin’s stage, he briefly remembers that he’s Sunday and resists the thought.  This is a reference to a variant on Xavi’s stage in SB2 in which Motonari and Yoshihiro both convert and change their names to Sunday and Chester, respectively.  American players probably kept playing the game waiting for an explanation to what Motonari was talking about and they will never get it because that was in the game they didn’t play.  Motonari’s Sunday outfit is also his alternate costume, but at least it’s silly-looking regardless of context.

• Oichi’s joke weapon is a set of hand puppets of Nagamasa and the description reads “do you remember why you’re crying?”  Even if history does say Nobunaga killed Nagamasa, it’s doubtful an American gamer would know what Nagamasa looked like in Sengoku Basara 2 and make the connection.

• Oichi in her stage mentions Nouhime and Ranmaru.  American gamers don’t know who they are, at least in the context of Sengoku Basara, because they were in the first 2 games.

• The “new” character Tenkai is very obviously Mitsuhide in a mask and that is kind of a joke, but American players wouldn’t know that because they don’t know what Mitsuhide looked like in previous games.

Capcom tried to advertize the anime, Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings, and the manga, Sengoku Basara: Samurai Legends, as being prequels to Samurai Heroes because they’re adaptations of previous games.  I’ll go more into that in the next post when I go over spin-off media, but for now I’ll just say they aren’t canon and Samurai Heroes is clearly going off the games specifically and nothing else.  Missing all these subtleties doesn’t ruin the story, and there is an opening narration for each of the playable characters, but playing Samurai Heroes first and playing it after playing Sengoku Basara 2 are noticeably different experiences.

The way the story works this time essentially combines story mode and conquest mode into one.  It plays out in branching pathways, where you choose which stage to play, like in conquest mode, but the progression of conquering Japan is pre-set and has cutscenes and dialogue along the way, like SB2’s story mode, making for a nice blend of the two.  Initially each character can only go down one story path (or two, in the case of some neutral parties like the Saica) that ends with some variant on the battle of Sekigahara.  After that, new story paths open up to more character-specific side story routes, helpfully spelled out on a flow chart.  Samurai Heroes has less characters than SB2, but there’s more story content to do with them.

That story content got a substantial upgrade in presentation.  The CGI cutscenes that open each character story are more limited and re-used, but they aren’t as needed this time around because now there’s top-quality motion capture AND facial animation to make some cutscenes on-par with the CG ones using the in-game models, something that the cinematography accounts for.  There are some excellent cutscenes that combine the camera, music and motion capture to their fullest effect.  Ieyasu and Mitsunari’s initial endings in this game are to this day two of the most heart-wrenching I’ve ever seen in any medium because of how it all comes together.  Even outside the cutscenes, when characters are just talking character portraits on the map screen, the story is held up in enormous part thanks to Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes claim to fame: the English dub.

Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes has the single greatest English dub in the history of gaming.  Every single voice role is perfectly cast with the perfect English voice actor and every single actor is an A or S-lister with no exceptions.  It is a cast of the best of the best of the best of the best of the best.  Pointing out standout performances is almost a disservice because in this game every performance is a standout performance, but there is some particular voice casting choices that are so perfect for the specific voice actor that you would swear some kind of divine presence preordained the characters to be voiced by these actors and no one else.  We all know Troy Baker, Travis Willingham, Johnny Bosch and Laura Bailey are going to put on a good performance, but some of the actors go beyond just being awesome.  These are actors where casting them was a stroke of genius.

Christopher Corey Smith as Yoshiaki is my favorite performance of his by a country mile.  This combined with Lego Joker, The Emperor of Palamecia and Rufus is what made me a big advocate for Christopher Corey Smith.  He is awesome at playing eccentric or villainous or eccentric villainous characters, which is exactly what Yoshiaki is.  Just listen to that fancy dandy dialect.  Nobody could possibly do it better.  Funimation agreed because they would later fly him over just to do a few lines for a bit part in the movie Sengoku Basara: The Last Party.  If it’s not Christopher Corey Smith it’s not Yoshiaki!

Kyle Hebert not only sounds the part of Muneshige, he looks just like Muneshige.  I can’t be the only one seeing this, right?  Muneshige looks like Kyle Hebert in samurai armor!  Hebert didn’t see the resemblance when I asked him, but look at them side to side and tell me I’m wrong.

Tenkai is a creeper and looks like he touches children so he’s voiced by Vic Mignona.
 
If you listen to Tony Oliver’s Lupin the Third voice, he can sound really whiny at times, which he’s really good at.  Tony Oliver can do a really solid whining voice, so the whimpering, constantly whining Hideaki is perfect for him.  Nobody could do it like Oliver.  As Bang Shishigami shows us, he can also do a very nice hammy, heroic voice as well, which he puts on for the invincible Kanetsugu!

Dino Andrade as Kenshin might be the biggest stand-out, casting-wise.  The idea behind Sengoku Basara’s Kenshin Uesugi has to do with a myth that the real person might have been a woman in disguise.  In the Japanese version, this meant casting Romi Park, a woman known for playing young boys, to try and play into that myth by making him harder to distinguish between a man and woman.  In the anime and Devil Kings, Greg Ayres and Alessandro Juliani are men who try to put on effeminate voices for the same effect.  I don’t think those actors succeeded in what they were going for because even with the voices they put on, Park sounds like a girl and the other two sound like boys.  With Dino Andrade’s performance, I genuinely could not tell if the voice was male or female before I knew the actor.  His Kenshin is the most androgynous, most gender-neutral voice I’ve ever heard and that complete and total ambiguity is exactly what this version of Kenshin should sound like.  This is some Maddie Blaustein stuff and she was transsexual.

Of course, I can’t not mention Peter Beckman, the Great Old One of the West.  His performances as Yoshihiro and the Narrator are his best ever.  Peter Beckman’s deep baritone explodes with power in every line he speaks, whether he’s playing Golbez, Zangief or Yoshihiro.  It’s perfect casting for an old, yet bombastic warrior.

Beckman fills in the hole left by the absence of the  Great Old One of the North, but in Garry Chalk’s place as Nobunaga is Keith Szarabajka.  For reasons I won’t go into, Nobunaga is more demonic, calm and malevolent in Samurai Heroes.  Naturally, when you need someone who sounds like a calm and creepy demon you want to get the guy who voiced the Cenobite-inspired demon Craniac in Extreme Ghostbusters.

The voice casting is so damn good that even the throwaway characters get the best of the best.  In Samurai Heroes there are 4 area lords that are more or less there to pad out the stage count, even if their stages are really fun.  They are not involved with the story, they’re often eliminated by other armies quickly, they have no facial animation and have no special dialogue with other characters.  Even these jobbers get Michael Sorich (also voicing Yoshitsugu), David Lodge, Ted Sroka and even Eddie Frierson!  Yes, this game has the voice of Frax from Power Rangers Time Force!  The same Frax puppeted by Frank West!

In a high-energy franchise like Sengoku Basara, having the best voice actors possible is critical and Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes delivered on that tenfold.  The game wouldn’t be nearly as good without it, just like it wouldn’t be as good if it weren’t one of the best games to play.

Samurai Heroes completely overhauled the combat from Sengoku Basara 2.  No longer do you come in with two special attacks.  Now characters come in with 4, and a 5th super attack you can choose from an unlockable 3.  Each special attack is assigned to button combinations that depend on the control scheme.  Since this came out on the PS3 and Wii, the command for how to use each special attack is different between the PS3 controller, Wiimote Nunchucks and Wii classic controller.

Having 4 special attacks drastically opens up combo and gameplay potential, further boosted by the introduction of many new character-specific quirks that make each one even more diverse in their playstyle.  Oichi’s new dark hand attacks act separately from what Oichi is doing when she uses them, essentially meaning she can keep attacking without canceling out of her attack animation.  Magoichi, who replaces Nouhime, can switch between 3 different firearms that each have a different normal attack combo.  Mitsunari, my favorite, is a speedster who has the option to teleport right into wherever his attack landed, allowing him to get some distance and follow-up his speed blitzing.  Learning each character is more involved than ever and makes it even more satisfying when you use the arsenal of moves given to become a killing machine with a combo reaching the thousands, a combo much easier to achieve thanks to the new hero time system, which slows down time and extends its use with every kill.

There’s not only an arsenal of moves to use, but also an arsenal of weapons, which Samurai Heroes gives more focus.  Each character’s selection of weapons, in addition to inherent abilities and attack power, also has a varying number of accessory slots.  Weapon accessories are functionally the same as equipped items from the previous games, except there’s a potential trade-off with what weapon you use when equipping them because the number you can equip is no longer tied to the character’s level.  Most of the accessories themselves are now crafted and bought at the Basara Mart with materials and money are gathered from the different stages.  I don’t think any of the changes to how items work were necessary, but I don’t mind them either.  At least needing specific materials and some money is a better alternative to how in Sengoku Basara 2 some of the items were so ludicrously expensive you could never hope to get the money for it even after hours of play, even if the lottery in 2 Heroes helped.

2 player co-op returns again and can now be used in any mode, including story mode.  For those that don’t have a second player, there’s the ally system.  Each named officer in an army (including the main generals) can be brought along to a stage and each has a different ability.  Unless they’re an important character, these abilities amount to giving you an attack or defense boost under certain conditions, like fighting on the sea or at night, and when you use your basara attack near them.  They don’t do a lot beyond that, but the diorama helmets they wear are delightfully silly.  Natually if I want to win I bring Yoshiaki.  He’s the man.

Samurai Heroes also introduces dashing, which is good because the stages in the game are bigger and better.  The size of some of Samurai Heroes’ stages surpass the biggest ones in Sengoku Basara 2.  There are still linear maps, but there’s a greater emphasis on maps with open areas and big, sprawling battlefields with more structures and layers.  Some are so big the game had to add ballistas and pulleys to launch players across the map, which is now fully visible at all times.  The game is no longer held back by draw distance, at least for the environments.  When you get to a high vantage point of a stage and look around, you can see the whole thing.  Sometimes the game has to play catch-up with rendering the enemies though, possibly because so much effort has been put into really making those enemies fly this time.  Armor pieces fall off as they take damage, there are many more animations for the attacks they can be hit with and no matter how many enemies your most enormous super attacks annihilate, the game never drops below 60 FPS.  This is on the Wii, too.

BOOM!  BOOM!  BOOOOOOOOOM!

A new feature of the stages makes them a little more involved than going from point A to point B this time around: command posts.  Command posts are destructible wooden towers (usually) helmed by the enemy.  There are several reasons to want to destroy command posts: they spawn in enemy troops, destroying them causes an explosion that damages nearby enemies for a bigger combo, they can give you a boost if you pass by one after a while, the boss is stronger for each command post they control and in some stages taking them is required.  They make it feel more like you’re dominating the battlefield when enemy soldiers stop spawning in and are replaced with your own.

If all of that wasn’t enough, stages in Samurai Heroes often have a secret or two to find.  There are hidden areas, hidden routes and hidden command posts not shown on the map until you discover them.  I have been playing this game for 15 years and just recently I STILL found a secret I didn’t know about.  They are far in away the best stages the franchise has ever had.

My favorite stage in the whole franchise is Dragon Race at Oshu, and that’s one of the linear stages.  You start out fighting on foot and after taking a command post the game gives you horses.  As you approach Masamune seated on his own horse, he challenges you to a race down a race track.  It’s similar in premise to the horse tracks of previous games, but this time it’s a race and the actual track has many more layers, including parts where it expects you to make jumps and hit unmanned command posts, if you can.  If you hit the command post at the end before Masamune, you don’t have to take it in the ensuing fight with Kojuro.  After you defeat Kojuro, HE races off on a horse, except this time the goal is to kill him before he reaches Masamune at the end, otherwise you fight both at once.  Both horse racing sections are accentuated by one of my favorite music tracks in any game ever, Dead Heat. “Kojuro!  Ride like the wind!”

 

The entire soundtrack to Samurai Heroes is some of the best ever composed. Music from previous games were re-composed to be even better.

Stage themes sound more striking and memorable.

It also varies wildly.  In the same game, there’s a song with castanets and light guitar riffing, a song with an upbeat, almost J-pop vibe and Kanbei’s theme.

By every measure Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes deserves its reputation as one of the great timeless masterpieces of gaming history.  The stories are well-presented and well-told, the voice acting is perfect, the stages are the best ever, it has one of the finest soundtracks ever composed and the gameplay is the best in the genre.  Several of my character’s levels are maxed out and I’m still going back to play Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes 15 years later.  I give it a 9 out of 10.  There is only one thing that keeps it from getting a perfect score, maybe 2 depending on one’s point of view.

In my post on Devil Kings, I complained about how the game only gave you one special attack to start with, the priming attack, and thus you didn’t come in with a full move set.  Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes effectively does the same thing.  Each character only starts out with 2 moves, half their base move set, and because of this, coupled with pitiful level 1 starting damage, the first couple of stages with them aren’t very fun or interesting.  I’ve seen some people come back to playing this game after a long time and saying it’s better than they remember it being, but the reason for that is probably because when they come back to their old save data they aren’t starting at level 1.  Leveling up isn’t as slow as Devil Kings, so you don’t end a character’s story with an incomplete move set, but this was still a bad decision.

The other “maybe” flaw is dependent on if you want quality or quantity.  16 playable characters is as many characters as the first game had, but it’s a noticeable downgrade from Sengoku Basara 2 and especially 2 Heroes, even disregarding moveset clones and less-complete characters.  The stage count is also a little smaller, especially if you only count the regular stages more frequently played and not stages that only appear at the end of a character’s story mode.  I think the smaller count on both is made up for by how much more fun they all are to play, in addition to the more expanded story content for the characters.  If the higher character count is what’s important, there’s Sengoku Basara 3: Utage for that.

Sengoku Basara 3: Utage is pretty much what Sengoku Basara 2 Heroes was for SB2, but I won’t be giving it its own post because it’s not as big a leap as 2 Heroes was.  Like 2 Heroes, it excludes all the stories from Samurai Heroes and adds 8 new linear ones for characters that are newly playable, one of whom is Hisahide.  Every character with facial animation from SH (including Takeda, for one cutscene) was made playable as well, even though some are restricted to free mode and the new conquest mode.

Instead of making the stories a blend of conquest mode and story mode, it’s back to the basics with a dedicated conquest mode, where you attempt to conquer Japan, now with many more new factions and the option to invade any warlord still in the war.  I’m not a big fan of getting the free choice for any stage because in SB2 I liked the way you could strategize around where your territory is and which place you wanted to invade, watching your color slowly spread out and consume the map like Zerg creep.  It also introduces an alternate conquest mode where you bet money on what warlord is going to win battles, but it seems to be just an arbitrary game of chance, which isn’t needed because Utage brought back the lottery.  Still, it’s a good mode for trying out all the new characters.

Utage also brings back the minigames and for combat there’s an option to switch hero time to the old way it worked in SB2, where you got an attack and defense boost.  Biggest of all is the new tag team option.  If you level up an ally character that is also playable to the maximum, you get the option to switch out with that character in a stage, effectively letting you use 2 characters at once.  Besides that it’s just more.  More characters, more alternate costumes, more stories and a handful of more stages as well.

Normally I would say Utage is the best Sengoku Basara game yet, but in addition to the 8 stories being only 3 stages long, none of it is in English.  If you came off of playing the faithfully translated Samurai Heroes, it’s not as much of a chore to play in Japanese because you hopefully put the visuals and the text to things like weapon accessories to memory, but for all the new stuff, time to break out those translation guides.

I’ll put it this way: I have 2 choices.  With Samurai Heroes, I can play a fully translated game in English with a compelling story that has Peter Beckman and Christopher Corey Smith.  With 3 Utage I can play a game with less compelling, less substantial stories with one eye on a laptop text document while listening to characters speak in an archaic, obnoxious and incomprehensible old-timey Japanese language style.  I think I know which one I’ll play.  I still give Utage an 8 out of 10.  The character count and added content for playing with others is enough to recommend it, but I don’t think you’re missing too much if you're satisfied enough playing Samurai Heroes

I’m not terribly miffed about Utage not coming out in English.  Not every game can and sometimes expansion packs and updated re-releases are considered too redundant to bother, like the Kingdom Hearts Final Mix games (at first).  As long as all the mainline Sengoku Basara games come out in English from this point on, I’m good.  As long as all the mainline Sengoku Basara games come out in English from this point on, I’m good.  As long as all the mainline Sengoku Basara games come out in English from this point on, I’m good.  As long as all the mainline Sengoku Basara games come out in English from this point on, I’m good.

Sengoku Basara 2 took Japan by storm, but with Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes's English release, it took the world by storm and raised the bar for English game releases as well as action games in general.  The subsequent exaltation among gamers paved the way for more Sengoku Basara to come out in English. This was a Sengoku Basara media explosion.  Next time we’re going into some of the results of that media explosion with Sengoku Basara's spin-off media.