15/30 Hanagumi Taisen Columns, the best of both worlds
I’ve already mentioned Sakura Taisen and the ST-V, two of the rare successes of the Saturn generation, in this series of posts; let’s talk about the game that brought them together.
Following the success of Sakura Taisen, Sega unsurprisingly rushed to produce a sequel, but that wouldn’t arrive on store shelves until April 1998. To fill the gap, Sega and Red launched a series of shorter-term projects. The first software released was Sakura Taisen Hanagumi Tsūshin, a fan disc that could best be described as a multimedia mook distributed on a Saturn CD-ROM and mainly promoting other goods and future events scheduled for 1997. Appropriately, this product was released for Valentine’s Day. Here’s an excellent overview of the whole experience.
That being said, the second proper Sakura Taisen game on the Saturn would be Hanagumi Taisen Columns, released in March 1997. As you could surmise from the title, it combines the Hanagumi gang (Sakura Taisen’s women’s squad) and Sega’s venerable ochige (blocks dropping and stacking game) Columns. This crossover was most likely inspired by the then recent success of Konami’s Tokimeki Memorial Taisen Puzzledama (1996), which already successfully crossed the worlds of gal games and puzzle games.
Hanagumi Taisen Columns could be called a masterpiece in clever contents recycling. It largely takes the code and routines from ST-V Columns '97, which happened to be developed around that time at AM#1 and released in arcades in January 1997, and adds a bunch of assets straight from Sakura Taisen, adding only a minimal but surgical number of original illustrations, sprites and voice clips.
Nevertheless, the game is much more than a simple Columns ’97 reskin: it adds a whole new system of special attacks inspired by Sakura Taisen’s dialogue choices, and the adventure mode is adapted to each character. To emphasize its fan game nature, Hanagumi Taisen Columns is also compatible with Sakura Taisen’s save files, through the magic of the Saturn’s internal memory (or a boring Memory Card), with small bonuses available in Hanagumi Taisen Columns depending on which character’s ending you unlocked in Sakura Taisen.
The only thing missing from the game is an online mode, via the XBAND adapter. It’s most surprising because this was becoming a rather common feature in Saturn games at the time, especially with competitive puzzle games of this kind, usually via a separate version exclusively focused on online mode, and sold for a cheaper price. We would have to wait for the sequel Hanagumi Taisen Columns 2 on Dreamcast to fight online.
A commercial and critical success on Saturn, Hanagumi Taisen Columns also had the distinction of being the first game originally released on Saturn to the enjoy an arcade career via the ST-V, in autumn 1997. Either through an amusing coincidence or a finely timed schedule, Hanagumi Taisen Columns arrived in the arcades around the same time as Columns Arcade Collection was released on the Saturn, complete with a port of the ST-V game Columns '97. Parallel fates, these two.
One last tidbit for the cunning linguists among you: the 対戦 taisen (meaning “competition” or something like “versus”) in the title Hanagumi Taisen is not the same 大戦 taisen (meaning “wars”, “great battle” etc.) in the title Sakura Taisen. Which makes sense if you know the game’s storyline summarized in the video below, which is a cool retrospective of the two Hanagumi Taisen Columns games.
