A game too Japanese for America, too American for Japan. A game doomed to underperform.

I love the first four Sakura Taisen games so much, dude. I don't even know where to begin in expressing my sheer love for them, even despite all their little problems and oddities. What you're about to read is an EXTREMELY LONG RANT listing all my vexations and disappointments with Sakura Taisen 5, of which they are many. This review has mild to MAJOR spoilers across the entire series up to this point. For reference: I played all the games in Japanese and this game was no different. If there's any spelling mistakes or anything wrong, please let me know.

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みっともない記事を
書かれやがって
このスカポンタン！！
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NARRATIVE and CHARACTERS:
-They all have serious issues. Every single character has a MAJOR BLUNDER in their writing that hampers most of the potential that the cast could've had. I'll start with what I consider to be the most screwed over characters and move from there.
-Ratchet! A character who ROCKED in the Sakura Taisen movie! A character who was foreshadowed in the Sakura Taisen 1 remake and in general was really cool! I really liked what I saw from her in that movie so seeing that she'd be in this game certainly got my hopes up. And yet, she ends up being completely discarded as a character by the end of the first chapter. She doesn't have any character arc and is largely just a "mentor figure" to the protagonist throughout the game. She never even gets in her Koubu again or even... does anything particularly remarkable outside of some occasional pep-talk. You can't even romance her unless you're in NG+. From what I hear she leaves as soon as the New York OVAs begin to get sent to Berlin. I uh... I have no idea what the hell they were thinking with sidelining this character so hard and for no good reason. She would've been the character I romanced had it not been for... well... everything.
-Gemini! There's a scene later on in the game where she's reminiscing on all the good times she's had with the cast. Of the three CG we see during this scene, we see one of her and her imaginary sister, one of her and Taiga, and one of her goofing off in the background with 3 other cast members in the forefront. In the main story, Gemini has, maybe 10 lines of dialogue with the cast for the first 10 hours of the game, most of it being very generic. She has the least amount of chemistry with the rest of the cast and for being a main heroine, is pushed back way to far and hard into the later ends of the game. It doesn't even make any sense, Gemini had saved the entirety of America not even a year before the game and she just never brings it up to the Star Division, staying on cleaning duty until the plot-device is found on her ass? (Literally) Her personality is also completely different from how it was in episode 0, being FAR more airheaded than she was before, and her "split-personality" issue was NEVER foreshadowed in 0 and exists without any explanation in 5 from what I can remember. In her character arc, its revealed that Gemini's beloved master also molested her as part of "special samurai training" while she was 14 - 15, wrote "ASS" as being Gemini's "finest feature" in the last thing he ever wrote to her and gaslight her into touching her chest whenever she feels down to "soothe herself" from her hardships. We're supposed to think her Sensei is a "silly but goodhearted Samaritan" by the way. I understand the perverted sensei is a character archetype, but in a series that has consistently penalized the player for acting perverted (with VERY few exceptions), Gemini's whole substory felt like a bizarre joke taken too far at everyone's expense. Especially considering you get PUNISHED for telling Gemini what that her "finest feature" was. I still love her design and the idea behind her, but she deserves a better game.
-Taiga is a poor-mans Oogami. He recycles Oogami's catchphrase (粉骨砕身の覚悟で・・・) SEVERAL times, uses the same weapons and final moves as Oogami and in general is just a less interesting Oogami. (He even says the same thing as Oogami when he goes to oogle girls in the bathroom.) For some reason, despite being a 19 year old Japanese man who graduated from military academy, he's written as if he was a 14 year old boy who wants to grow up to be a big strong independent man. I think my biggest problem with Taiga is just how generic of a character he is, how bland his writing and speeches are and how LAME he is. Oogami was a good blend of militaristic, charming and heroic traits and his character growth and the various roles he takes in the games made him probably the best protagonist in any "gal-game" or VN. Taiga is like an FOTM Isekai character. He's the only character I outright dislike in 5.
-Tsubaru is WAY too antagonist and aloof for WAY too long in the game. Usually when Sakura Taisen has "antagonistic" characters, they tend to have some endearing trait to make them likeable and ease off any antagonistic tension before they have their character defining moments and heel turn. Sumire has her haughty attitude and constant humiliations in the Imperial Theater, Orihime has her RIDICULOUS Japanese accent and her over-the-top mean-spiritedness and Glycine has her axe of which I am very afraid of. While these three characters are all wonderful and have character arcs unique to their personal circumstances and development, Tsubaru ends up having NO backstory and the most generic character possible for this sort of archetype. I downright HATED Tsubaru for most of the game until their moment of the spotlight, in which I simply felt largely indifferent towards them.
-Rika is just too extreme and flat in her personality. Iris and Kokuriko (Its spelt COQUELICOT???) have more nuance and more emotional maturity than Rika does. Their issues are more permanent and have more emotional intimacy with the player than Rika ever has, not to mention the banter those two have with everyone compared to how one-dimensional all of Rika's interactions are. Granted, lolis with guns is a powerful combination but I felt disappointed with Rika by the end of the game.
-Saggita is okay, I found her character arc to be a bit awkward in places but nothing serious. She wounded up having the most amount of chemistry between characters, being a sort of mother figure to Rika and having a particularly unique relationship with Taiga, but by the end of the game she wounded up being a bit bland. She quickly drops her LAW talk by the end of the second chapter, which kinda makes sense considering her character arc but only makes her more bland in the long run.
-Diana has a similar problem, but for her main issue is that she (ironically) has no issues. She survives her life-threatening disease by the end of the game and stops being physically disabled by the end of her chapter. Compared to characters like Hanabi, who overcame the worst of her grief but still has to deal with the emotional struggles of losing her fiancé even after her arc in 3, any problem that could have a permanent burden on Diana washes away pretty easily. Her personality is also too squeaky-clean, even characters like Sakura and Erica have personality flaws. Diana was still the character I ended up romancing cause tbf she was really cute regardless.
-Despite all this, I still "like" the cast for what they are, but they're not even in the ballpark of how fantastic the previous casts were. They're not even in the same town, country or continent.
-As for the narrative, despite being only 8 chapters long, every single chapter drags out. They're all around 50 minutes to an hour longer than any of the previous chapters of the older games. The extra length does not feel necessary in telling the grand story it was trying to tell and instead made the experience feel more padded out. The game goes through less scenarios and through a slower pace that made this game a chore to play through.

ART:
-All the sprites look SO MUCH WORSE than the sprites of the original games and I have NO idea how this happened.
-They all have these really washed out colors and weak linework behind every shape. All the shading is done with this really ugly looking airbrush technique and most of the sprites have no contrast or saturation behind them. There's no hard edges in the shading and everything looks like its amateur fanart rather than official sprite work by a company that's been doing this for years. This problem persists even in the CGS, but NOT in the cutscenes which DO have good lighting and illustrations.
-If you want to see a clear cut example of what I mean, take a look at Diana, (one of the MAIN HEROINES) Kayama, and Plum's sprites in this game and compare them side by side to Mell Or Ci's (two minor characters, may I add.) sprites or ANY of the sprites from 3 and see just how much worse the artwork in 5 is.
-Some of the sprites don't even look finished or properly rendered, and I saw several of animation and coloring errors in 5. All of 3 and 4's sprites look so much better than anything in 5, it boggles me how they screwed up such an important element this bad.
-The cutscenes still look decent, if not lower budget. This just makes everything above so much more bizarre.
-The 3d graphics are good for the most part and I don't have any complaints there.

GAMEPLAY:
-Adding on to the previous pacing issue, all the battles are really long and drawn out. The core problem stems from 2 contributing factors; the sheer amount of enemies (or moving parts of a boss) and the un-skippable enemy combo animations. Sakura Taisen 2 had one or two rough stages with bosses constantly spamming their finishing moves and Sakura Taisen 3 had the un-skippable combos (but significantly less enemies), but 5's pacing problem is so much more worse and consistent throughout the entire gameplay portions. Most battles last about an hour if not longer and the vast majority of the time you're just watching the enemies run over and combo you. This is especially bad in all the flying boss stages of which...
-The flying segments kinda bite. Maneuvering and fidgeting about the 3d space to save your action points is awkward thanks to the harder to understand depth perception, even with the adjustable camera angle.
-No minigames! Not even one! I'm not going to say this is a crime against humanity or anything but I really liked the minigames in the previous games for what they were! They were fun distractions that helped contribute to the characters' individuality while providing a decent serving of extra content to have fun with in the post game. The snapshot scavenger hunt doesn't compare to the minigames in the slightest and I didn't even bother with it after the first chapter.
-Sakura Taisen 3 had a museum level where you had to move rare pieces of artwork into a secure storage area before enemies break them. These objects were on rails and moved quickly a down a short path to their destination when you pushed them with your mecha. This takes about 4 seconds. Sakura Taisen 5 has a boat level with the same gameplay premise but instead these statues are off rails, are extremely resistant to movement and on top of this you had to bring them all over to the start location of the stage. This takes about 5 to 10 minutes in total. Not a HUGE blunder of the game, but one that genuinely baffled me considering this specific gameplay set piece wasn't an issue two games ago.
-There's also no operations like in Sakura Taisen 2 or 3, where you can choose how you want your stage to play out.
-Nor any Koubu upgrades, meaning less cool finishing move animations.
-While it IS the "hardest" Sakura Taisen game, every moment of the second half of the game was just a slog to play through. The final chapter in itself is just too long for its own good.
-Really what ticks me off the most about the gameplay is that this is very much the fifth major game in the series and it still has the same problems as the previous games on a WORSE level with LESS content.

MUSIC:
-Honestly its all great, even in some places fantastic.
-It just doesn't hit the same emotional heights as tracks like 夢の続き, 御旗のもとに or ANY of the big emotional tracks of the last games.
-Like no for real I can't listen to SEVERAL tracks off of those first four games or else I burst into tears.
-An 8/10 OST is still an 8/10 OST, but those old songs shake my FUCKING WORLD.
-This OST doesn't.

SETTING and SIDE-CHARACTERS:
-New York and America as a setting was underutilized and wrapped up shockingly early especially compared to Paris in 3. While not one of the strongest aspects of the game, an appreciated detail of 3 was the inclusion of a whole bunch of citizens to interact with during your free time. Characters like Ebiyan, Glycene's head maid, the priest, Jeanne and so on all helped in fleshing out Paris as a living breathing setting. 5 has Harlem and its citizens at the start of the game who are nowhere near as memorable and are just there as a part of Saggita's backstory rather than as a tool to flesh out New York. There's also a detective, I guess. There's a shockingly tiny supporting cast in 5 and New York and its citizenry ended up feeling half-baked as a consequence.
-Nobunaga and co. being the villains of the game was a an odd choice. Even 5's prequel game, Episode 0, had an evil confederate sorcerer as the main antagonist. Sakura Taisen 3 had appropriately themed baddies with French names for their mecha on top of that. I can appreciate the absurdity of fighting Nobunaga in New York but this feels like its stemming more out of creative bankruptcy or indifference than anything else. (I still like Ranmaru.)
- New York's side characters and the supporting staff of the Star Division also just kinda suck too. If they're not bland and forgettable then they don't even come close to the previous cast member equivalent. (Sunny is... fine.)

GENERAL VEXATIONS and DISAPPOINTMENTS:
-No awesome surprises like the Tokyo girls' arrival in Sakura Taisen 3, the two-pilot mecha in 4, or the new OPS in 2 and 3.
-The voice acting doesn't even come close to being anywhere near as good or dramatic as the previous games. None of the antagonists have performances anywhere near as dramatic as characters like Tenkai, Kongyo, Oni-o, or Patrick Hamilton.
-Sakura Taisen 0 ended up serving no purpose as a prologue, even though I liked parts of that game this game pretty much ignores the entire story and throws like, ONE short flashback you can easily miss.
-The game is too similar is its progression and writing to previous games too. While this is a bit of an issue to varying extents throughout the series, the games usually more than make up for it with its other strengths, or that issue can be excused for some other reason exclusive to the specific game. This one...
-Game characters in general are also just "too extreme" in terms of their personalities. Even the most eccentric characters of previous games had nuance to them or were explored in different ways across different situations or settings. 5's cast is very much one, or two-note, if they're lucky, from start to end.
-Yoneda was the perfect balance of being a comic relief character and a tragic figure. Despite all the shit he puts Oogami through, he truly loves both him and the girls as if they were his own children. His departure in Sakura Taisen 4 was the perfect bittersweet sendoff you could make for a character like him. Grandma, while not as good as a character, still rocked in delivering her almost parental love in Sakura Taisen 3 and its spin-off material. I never got the impression Sunny really gave a shit about his team since he was so busy pretending to be the badguy. Sunny is an entertaining side character, sure, but not much else. In general none of the characters really have that sort of powerful emotional connection to each other as any of the old characters did.
-In general, the emotional highs and lows of Sakura Taisen 2 or 4 are never reached, with everything taking a much more generic "by the numbers" approach you'd see in mediocre seasonal anime.

This was a game made by obligation rather than passion. You had the perfect ending. You had the perfect ending to your series and you just had to make another game. You just had to make another game because you just had to make some more money. Sakura Taisen 5 would go on to be the worst selling mainline game in the series. I don't hate this game, I still recommend people to at least try it out and see if they like it, but there's a reason why this game was so poorly received by fans of the original games and why it did so poorly.