(small snag in my devious spamming plans, I found out I am not allowed to post more than five messages in a row, as I am not the creator of this thread… Thanks @hellomrkearns !)
08/30 ♬RUN AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT, IMPERIAL ASSAULT FORCE! ROAR LIKE THE THUNDER’S MIGHT, IMPERIAL ASSAULT FORCE!
A shorter post today - well, shorter for me, because the video in question is 45 minutes long - with this VHS cunningly presented as a “video strategy guide” for the first Sakura Taisen. Strategy mes fesses, pardon my French. In truth, it’s more like a big catch-up video for people in too much of a hurry or too scared of a controller to play (or replay) the game.
The video starts by explaining the concept of the game, then, under the guise of guiding the player, offers a money shot of the special attacks, summarizes the various chapters of the first game one by one, shows the various post-game bonus contents and replays some of the most memorable cutscenes. It ends with a pretty cringe-worthy interview between producer Hiroi Ōji and Yokoyama Chisa, Sakura’s famous voice actor and also the voiceover for the entire video. Youtube’s machine translation does a pretty good job of it, methinks.
I won’t dive into a grand exposé of Sakura Taisen today, but I do strongly recommend @Kimimi The Game Eating She-Monster’s various articles on the Sega franchise and its many (sometimes oddball) spin-offs.
Along with Virtua Fighter, Sakura Taisen is undoubtedly the other iconic Sega Saturn game series in Japan. The first game in the series, released in September 1996, is often presented (by its own creators) as that little outsider that nobody believed in, which surprised everyone with its sales and whose ultra-positive word of mouth enabled it to become Sega’s consumer division’s biggest IP in Japan between roughly 1996 and 2002.
I don’t know how much the legend embellishes the truth, but I can testify that, in retrospect, the first game had received rather modest coverage in the gaming magazines and TV shows of the time (for example, in direct contrast with another Hiroi Ōji project for the Saturn, Tengai Makyō Dai-4 no Mukoshiroku).
Above all, Sakura Taisen was released on the right console at the right time: just before the Saturn was eclipsed by the PlayStation, with the general public still active enough on the console for the right amount of curious people to give it a chance, and offering these curious people in turn an experience that perfectly matched the Saturn’s multimedia aspirations (and hardware strengths): a mix of 2D and celluloid, a bunch of animated scenes and dubbed dialogue only possible on CD-ROM with Yamaha’s sound chip and the Codecs from Cybersound and Cinepak, and a top-notch soundtrack and one of the timeless, greatest opening credits in the history of video games. From a game design perspective, it is a romantic adventure game with multiple heroines in the vein of the still very recent Tokimeki Memorial phenomenon, coupled with a ‘for dummies’ version of the hit simulation RPG Tactics Ogre, which had also just been released. That’s what you call catching the effing zeitgeist, people.
Given Sega and Red’s heavy focus, from 1997 onwards, on a multitude of licensed goods for the series, I strongly suspect that this video, released in 1997 for ¥3800 but also available to rent in video stores, was less a real ‘strategic guide’ for owners of the game than a means of recruiting an even wider audience, such as non-gamers who had heard of the IP, or gamers who only had a Super Famicom or a PlayStation at home and still wanted to get a taste of the phenomenon. It may also have been a way for Sega to keep in its ecosystem the people who had already sold the game but wanted to watch their favorite character’s special attacks again.
This VHS is the kind of by-product that does not make any sense in the Age of YouTube, except to talk about it in a thread like this.