Nowadays, "cinematic games" have become an important label for many triple-A masterpieces, and players are always happy with this way of quickly immersing themselves in the virtual world. Probably starting with 32-bit consoles represented by Sony PS and Sega SS, with the help of 3D polygon processing power and large-capacity CDs, game developers can flexibly use camera switching in their works to explain the story with pre-made animations.
But in the mid-to-late 90s, there was a work that adopted an even more amazing idea, that is, the skillful combination of staged stage plays and game interactions, so that players could experience the emotional interaction of characters and the fun of traditional game combat in the framework of the main story line, which eventually became an important milestone in the development of the game.
"Sakura Wars" is the masterpiece of the game manufacturer Sega's heyday, and has won many achievements that future generations have looked up to for a long time, and many of our seemingly ordinary game designs, peripheral schemes, and IP operations today are pioneered by "Sakura Wars" or become mature models.
From the perspective of the worldview, "Sakura Wars" uses a fusion of elements far beyond the common game concepts of the same period, and also adds a considerable proportion of innovation, posing a fantasy big era. Although elemental fusion is not strange today, the sci-fi wasteland worldview "Ark of Tomorrow" can still tell the story of gangster movies in the event, but even in the early 21st century, mainstream manufacturers are rarely widely used.
Its biggest feature is the perfect combination of love development games and strategy game elements, combined with cultural factors derived from Takarazuka opera in Japan, and has gained great popularity.
Multi-element integration is inherently difficult and requires producers to be knowledgeable in many areas. "Sakura Wars" contains many labels such as "tokusatsu", "beautiful girl", "taisho romance", "virtual idolization", "Japanese steampunk" and so on, which are equivalent to tons of books from an intellectual point of view alone.
Sakura Wars' game system has always been the industry benchmark, adhering to the passionate Sega spirit of continuous innovation. The foundation of "Sakura Wars" was to first pull out a system called LIPS that was completely different from most of the text AVGs at that time. Its biggest feature is that it adds a time dimension to the game, and players no longer have the traditional "time stop" cheating ability when making AVG game choices.
This deceptively simple concept gives a qualitative leap to the game's sense of immersion, and as time passes like reality, the options presented to the player will change, and you may have different feedback from the character due to the speed of reaction, or even not operating and waiting for time to pass is also an option. In short, during this time period, by briefly sharing the timeline with the world on the other side of the screen, AVG games finally "lived".
The LIPS system has been evolving in the subsequent works of "Sakura Wars", such as using the joystick to push up and down to control the "force" of the player's choice to further enhance the sense of substitution of the performance. When the player pushes the joystick and shouts "all out", the vibration of the controller and the sound and light are intertwined, as if they are really in the game world.