Sengoku Basara Retrospective: Sengoku Basara: Sanada Yukimura Den

I originally ended my Sengoku Basara retrospective at Sengoku Basara 4 because the main series and all the English media was already covered and the last game, Sanada Yukimura Den, is story-focused when fan translations are already incomplete and sparse for Sengoku Basara 4, which is still more than Sanada Yukimura Den got.  Since then I discovered a miracle.  An app for the iphone that, in a way, breaks through Capcom’s attempt to stop American players from enjoying Sengoku Basara 4: the translate app.

With the translate app, players can take pictures of the screen as the dialogue appears and form halfway comprehensible translation of all the text.  It doesn’t make the Japanese voice acting any better, but with the help of the translation app I can finally understand and somewhat enjoy the stories of Sengoku Basara 4, which, it turns out, are wonderful.  Sengoku Basara 4’s stories have something for everyone.  It has stories that are funny, sad, cute, awesome and everything in between.  It’s a pain to have to take constant pictures of the screen as the dialogue goes along and it doesn’t alleviate the depression of Capcom’s vicious betrayal, but it does make it partiallypossible to play the game to the potential it was made to be played.

It also means that Sengoku Basara: Sanada Yukimura Den is on the table.  Now that I can understand this more story-centric game, I can give my thoughts on it proper.

It’s a very odd decision for Capcom to make another Sengoku Basara game after 4.  For Japanese audiences at least, there was no way in hell they were ever going to top that.  When you reach the peak there’s nowhere to go but down.  Trying to make another game is a fool’s errand.  Apparently it was done because some kind of anniversary in Japan made Yukimura Sanada a hot trend, so much so that Samurai Warriors came out with their own Yukimura game, Spirit of Sanada.

It doesn't have Yukimura's name because Masayuki is just as important.

Demands, screams and begging for Sengoku Basara 4’s English version overshadows Sanada Yukimura Den.  It’s the last game anyone mentions when people discuss the Sengoku Basara games coming out in English.  It wasn’t well received in Japan and, from what I understand, effectively killed the franchise there.  Is Sanada Yukimura Den actually bad though?  I knew there’s no way in hell it was going to match up to Sengoku Basara 4, but I just had to see if it was bad enough to warrant its reputation.  With my translate app, now I know.

 
Sengoku Basara: Sanada Yukimura Den primarily focuses on Yukimura, his father Masayuki, his brother Nobuyuki and also gives some attention to Masamune, Yukimura’s rival in the mainline games.  It goes through some of the highlights of Yukimura’s life, like the battles of Ueda Castle and Tenmokuzan, interpreting them the Sengoku Basara way with pre-established Sengoku Basara characters, but some of Yukimura’s personality is tweaked a little.

See, Yukimura in Sengoku Basara was always more of a combination of the real life Yukimura and Shingen Takeda’s hot-headed successor Katsuyori Takeda.  In this game Katsuyori Takeda is his own faceless background character and dies as part of the more history-adhering plot.  Yukimura doesn’t even serve Shingen in this game.  He’s dead by the time Yukimura is of age.  Without Shingen and with Katsuyori made into his own character, Yukimura doesn’t have as much of his impulsive, silly and borderline sycophantic side, but he’s no less firey or fiercely loyal.  The whole story is less silly and comedic moments are very sparse, bringing to mind the central conflict of Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes.  Make no mistake though, Sengoku Basara is unavoidably silly on a base level.

It’s fun seeing how Sengoku Basara plays with history in this game, if you know it.  One of the things known about the Sanada brothers is that Nobuyuki eventually joined Ieyasu’s side and their forces would fight against each other.  Naturally Sengoku Basara makes it into a Cain and Abel story, not dissimilar to how the brothers are portrayed in Samurai Warriors 4 and 4-2.
 
Then there’s Masamune.  In real life, Yukimura and Masamune probably never met and if they did meet it only could have been when Yukimura and Masamune’s forces clashed at Osaka.  Sanada Yukimura Den’s story starts with the two meeting as children when they had different names.  Many Japanese historical figures had name changes through their lives for reasons I won’t get into, but Sengoku Basara uses those to distinguish between a character’s child form and older form, something previously done in one of those PSP games with Ieyasu’s pre-Samurai Heroes version.  Nothing in the history books say Yukimura/Benmaru and Masamune/Bontenmaru met as children, but nothing says they didn’t either so for Sengoku Basara that’s fair game.  It even shows the origins of both character’s signature weapon styles: the six swords and dual spears.
 
My favorite part is Masamune’s assault on Hideyoshi.  In real life, Masamune knew that Hideyoshi had pretty much already won and decided surrender was the best option, but instead of making himself look like a weenie he went up to Hideyoshi wearing bright, fancy clothes while carrying a big cross on his back.  The reason as to why seems to depend on who you ask, but one interpretation is that he did it to show Hideyoshi that he was a badass mother fucker regardless of whether he was surrendering.

In Sengoku Basara he wears a beautiful white robe with a big glowing golden cross embroidered on the back of it that is implied to give him super powers as he tears through Hideyoshi’s forces with all 6 swords just to have a slug at the big guy himself and send a message to not mess with the Date clan.  He surrenders by the end though.

All these Sengoku Basara-interpreted moments in history have cutscenes done with the highest care put into motion capture and cinematography that all the biggest and best in-engine cutscenes the previous two games had.  Even if the writing adjust things a little for the sake of history and makes things more consistently dramatic than usual, Sengoku Basara’s style hasn’t lost its edge.

My biggest problem with the story is that most of these big events lack connective tissue.  Before every mission there’s a text scroll with narration explaining the situation.  I know that’s how Sengoku Basara 2’s stories did it, but these missions jump years ahead of each other.  It covers all the parts players strictly need to know and there is tons of dialogue that paints a picture, but it almost seems like Sanada Yukimura Den expects the players to know real Japanese history to fill in the gaps when they discuss certain characters that are never shown or sometimes were never relevant in a Sengoku Basara game at all.

I know a bit of sengoku period history so that wasn’t the worst part for me.  The worst part was what I had to do to get the story in the first place because of, once again, the awful way of speaking Japanese every character uses.  Sanada Yukimura Den makes things a hell of a lot easier for the translate app because you can now view the transcript of all the spoken dialogue in the pause menu and thus can easily take a steady picture to have it translated.  For other games or manga the app works great, but it's obvious it's more there so that people can get around in foreign countries in the modern day, meaning it's probably set to translate how normal people talk, not the alien cipher the Sengoku Basara characters use.  I know auto-translations are infamously spotty, but this is the spottiest I’ve ever seen.  I can only understand the resulting translations about half the time and this game is very dense in its dialogue, meaning I’m spending at least 5 minutes on the pause menu to read conversations that were already said in-game and that is such a drag.  If that wasn’t enough story for you, there are also audio conversations between characters you can unlock with their own transcripts, which means more obnoxious and archaic Japanese dialogue, more confused translations from the app and more tearfully wishing you were listening to Johnny Yong Bosch instead.

It’d be a very different experience if I could enjoy the story without interrupting the gameplay because the combat is unique from Sengoku Basara 4’s, at least in the finer details.  The main controls with jumping, the basara attacks and the special attacks are all the same, but battle preparation has seen major simplification.
 
There are no more items, weapon accessories, inscriptions or weapon stats.  Weapons are now purely cosmetic.  Instead there are pre-made sets of abilities that act similarly to items, boosting stats and applying different bonuses.  These bonuses are activated during the mission as players gather a special energy obtained from breaking blue boxes, killing certain enemies and, with the use of a new super mode, killing any enemy.  With no items, there is also no crafting and everything is done with money.

The presets.

Battles are now mostly linear affairs.  There are no more control camps (except in one mission, kind of) and most of the time you only play as one character at a time.  There are times where control between characters will switch for the next part of the story and other times where you can switch between them on separate parts of the battlefield, but you don’t get to have a backup partner character trailing behind you like previous games and consequently there is no multiplayer.
 
This all might seem like sacrilege, but I think it’s all part of what Sanada Yukimura Den is aiming for: it goes back to the simpler times of the first 2 games.  I love all the customizability of the previous 2 games, but they did gradually lose some of the pick-up-and-play aspect in the process when I’m spending so much time on an equipment screen.  Sanada Yukimura Den lets you get right into the action while still having some choice on how to go into a mission.

I also think the lack of multiplayer in the main campaign is for the better because it allows for a better narrative and gameplay focus without having to force a tagalong.  There are a handful of instances in the story where the gameplay changes for a bit, like Sasuke defending Ueda castle using shuriken in a glorified turret section or Yukimura galloping through the fields on horseback while avoiding enemies and barricades.  These deviations are fun and do a great job varying up the gameplay while maintaining the speed and spectacular action that makes up Sengoku Basara.  There’s no need to shoehorn in the possibility of a second player into them.

Fights with other characters feel more like they were made with a single player in mind too.  While previous fights with other characters might as well just be fighting a second player controlling them with all their moves, there was a effort to make the fights in Sanada Yukimura Den feel more like boss fights with more telegraphed attacks, phases and forms as they progress.  Having a second player works for the chaotic battlefield the other games were all about, but the ones here try to be more isolated duels, even if they aren’t anywhere close to the level of a game like Devil May Cry or Metal Gear Rising.

That it’s made to be closer to the first couple of games extends to how the combat feels.  It’s hard to describe how different it feels from Sengoku Basara 4, but Sanada Yukimura Den’s combat feels a little more up close and personal, with smaller environments, slightly slower attacks and more condensed enemies to kill.  That along with all the other changes makes Sanada Yukimura Den a refreshing and unique game from the rest of the franchise.  If I want more complexity and bigger battlefields I’ll go play Sengoku Basara 4.  I like this game’s old style of Sengoku Basara design with the addition of some all-new enemies and the extended movesets and graphics of the later games and boy does it have the graphics down.

Sanada Yukimura Den is the most gorgeous game in the franchise.  I think the smaller level designs and lack of split screen made it so rendering power didn’t need to be spread out because these environments have never looked better.   It has a long draw distance, a high frame rate, dynamic lighting and lots of little details for each stage like falling cherry blossoms and reflective gold.  Enemies get hit with even more flash and impact and there’s a lot of pretty glowing and streaks of light emanating from Yukimura and Masamune’s weapons that have never looked better.

Even the music is awesome and might be an even bigger shift than the gameplay.  I don’t think there’s any guitars in the whole soundtrack, which again seems almost sacrilegious.  In its place are beautiful orchestral tracks that sound right out of Final Fantasy 12.  It legitimately took me a while to realize that the traditional guitar and Japanese instruments Sengoku Basara is known for wasn’t in the game because it fit in so damn well that it was never jarring.  They went with something different and I’m glad they did because it turned out wonderfully.  I almost raised my fists when I heard that sweeping orchestral rendition of Yukimura’s theme toward the end and when he comes charging on horseback in one mission it's triumphant and puts me right in the moment.

The main story of the game is a great time, but Sanada Yukimura Den’s biggest flaw is that it’s the only reason to play it and yet the whole thing is only 4 hours, give or take.

It’s an enjoyable 4 hours and I certainly can’t accuse it of wasting my time, but not only is the story being hampered by language barrier woes as it is, there’s not a lot else of substance in the game.  There are the six-coin challenges in the story mode that task you with fulfilling objectives for each mission, but they don’t offer much of a reward beyond more money.  There are character side stories that let you play a mission with other Sengoku Basara characters, but those missions are just fighting an enemy or group of enemies in a small stage while dialogue plays out with no cutscenes whatsoever.  There’s the previously-mentioned voiced dialogue conversations, called “voice dramas”, but those might as well just be the side stories without the gameplay.  You get the ability to play story missions with any character after beating it, but even though every story mission is ballin’, there are only 10 of them.

The content outside of the story mode that is actually enticing are two things.  One is the new characters.  The only new characters are Masayuki and Nobuyuki, but Yukimura and Masamune have whole new movesets and their child forms have their own too.  That’s 6 new characters to play with.  Not bad, but they did cut corners.  The child characters have no super attack and the new adult ones only have one.

The second is the Sanada Trials mode, unlocked after beating the main story.  It’s just another score attack mode similar to tournament modes in previous games or the Bloody Palace in Devil May Cry games.  You have 10 minutes to kill sets of enemies and can extend the timer by fulfilling certain objectives, all to get more money.
The best thing about this mode and the free play story mode is that every single playable character from Sengoku Basara 4 Utage is playable in it, all of them have their entire movesets unlocked from the start and they have all their DLC weapons and costumes available, meaning I can finally play as Wesker Hisahide and Ryu Ieyasu.

Having access to everyone and all their stuff further contributes to the pick-up-and-play design philosophy this game seems to aim for.  It’s an ok distraction if you want to just fight guys with a Sengoku Basara character without going through all the battle preparations and equipment of the other games. It’d be more fun if you could do it with another player.
 
It’s not just the story mode that doesn’t allow a second player.  The entire game is single player only and that alone makes the Sanada Trials mode inferior to all the previous mob-fighting bonus games of the franchise.  I understand why that doesn’t work for the main mode, but for what reason is there to not to allow a second player in the challenge mode like in the other games?  This mode would be perfect for some casual fun time with friends.
 
The Sanada Trials could’ve been added to one of the main games for 5 dollars as DLC and it’s not good enough to make up for the game’s dearth of content.  You play Sengoku Basara: Sanada Yukimura Den for the story, but even that has a problem with cohesion between its story beats and the near-impregnable language barrier.  Ironically, I would recommend playing Samurai Warriors 4 or 4-2 before playing this just because that game can bring players more up to speed as to what Sanada Yukumura Den is adapting from.  If it were in English, I would recommend it as a fun little spin-off game.  In Japanese it’s harder to enjoy, but I’m glad I played it.  It's not bad, but I wouldn't go rushing out to get it.  I give Sengoku Basara: Sanada Yukimura Den a 6.5 out of 10.

In some missions you can use 2 Masamunes, you meatriders.

With my generally positive reception to this game, you might be asking why Sengoku Basara: Sanada Yukimura Den wasn’t well-received in Japan.  In my opinion it looks great, sounds great, plays great, has a nice story (that would be way more enjoyable in properly translated English) and gives a gameplay experience that you can’t get with the other Sengoku Basara games.  There are a few things I speculate as to why people didn’t like it.  A contributor was all the changes and simplifications I’ve gone over.  I like what Capcom did here, but a lot of people didn’t.  The bigger reason is probably the content to price ratio though.

This game’s lower level of content would be fine for a lower-priced side game made to give the fans a little more to do, like, Saint’s Row: Gat out of Hell or Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare.  It was not priced lower though.  Capcom tried to price this like a full game.

That’s especially weird to me considering Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes, a fully featured mainline game, was sold at a lower price than other games. I got Sanada Yukimura Den for a little over 30 dollars and there are far better games I could’ve spent that money on, but I don’t feel ripped off.  If I paid 50-60 dollars instead I definitely would.

The pricing was objectively their first big mistake, but the other might’ve been making this after Sengoku Basara 4 Sumeragi, the game that has the potential to be the single greatest game ever made.  Like I said toward the start of this article, when you reach the peak there's nowhere to go but down and SB4 is so content-rich that everyone was still playing it.  Why would players bother with another Sengoku Basara game while they were busy with the one they already have, let alone an inferior one?

The final nail in the coffin was Tecmo Koei’s game.  I haven’t played it myself yet, but from what I gather, Samurai Warriors: Spirit of Sanada also looks great, plays great, sounds great, has a nice story translated into English and added features to distinguish it from games in its own franchise too.  Spirit of Sanada, however, went even further than Capcom’s game.  It added more playable characters (including Sasuke), had more to do in between story missions and had a more complete story chronicling Masayuki’s early days (which Sanada Yukumira Den skips) with cutscenes of comparable quality.  Simply put, it was a much more complete, content-rich game.

Pictured: connective tissue.

If people were given a choice of their Yukimura game, they were probably going to that one.  Personally I don’t see any spinning piledrivers or people being sucked into fancy hats in Spirit of Sanada so I wouldn’t choose it.

We know why Sengoku Basara: Sanada Yukimura Den never came out in English.

However, even if Capcom weren’t the most evil company in gaming and instead were a perfectly sane company that cared about money and goodwill with their fans, I see good reasons for this not coming out in English.  Like I said, there’s historical context the game seems to expect the player to know, it already wasn’t very well-received in Japan, where people would know that context better in the first place, and nobody I’ve ever seen wants Sanada Yukimura Den in English especially badly.  They want Sengoku Basara 4.

It was with Sanada Yukimura Den that the Sengoku Basara franchise died in Japan.  There was a mobile game that quickly shut down and nowadays the characters make cameos and crossover appearances in games like Teppen and Monster Hunter Puzzle, which at least means Capcom hasn't forgotten the franchise.  If Sengoku Basara is included, I'm there.

The franchise is not dead in America, however.  As long as Sengoku Basara 4 never comes out in English and Capcom can continue to revel in the despair and misery of their fans, Sengoku Basara will be in the conversation for generations to come.  That is, Sengoku Basara 4 will be.  Sanada Yukimura Den is just kind of there.