Sakura Taisen

The Sakura Taisen/Sakura Wars series comprises several video games as well as anime adaptations. The series follows various nations' and cities' Combat Revues in their double lives as performers and demon-fighters. Sakura Taisen also has some of the smallest units seen in the genre, with Spiricle Armors clocking in between 2.6 and 4 meters.

Sakura Taisen (Game Series)

Set amid an alternate history with a steampunk background, Sakura Taisen follows the exploits of Flower Divisions, which serve as both theater performers and anti-demon combatants. Making use of unique mecha called Spiricle Armors, the members of the Revues fight for an uncertain future against the darkness of the human heart.

Integration Notes

General

• The integration of Sakura Taisen leans most strongly on games 2, 3, and 5 in the series. 1 has been placed concurrent with the Devil Gundam incident of 0093; the choice to center these elements was made to maximize easy appability of characters from across the franchise.
• If elements from Sakura Wars (PS4) are used, they will most likely figure in most strongly during Phases 3 and on; the PS4 title takes place more than a decade after the other games, and has setting elements that render many characters unappable or heavily changed from their most familiar state.
• The Combat Revues, rather than being primarily on Earth, use their countries' Neo Colonies as their backdrop. The idealized 20th-century Tokyo, Paris, and New York presented in the Sakura franchise doesn't line up well with our radically different Earth, but lines up great with Neo-Japan, Neo-France, and Neo-America.
• The Demon War that takes place prior to Sakura Taisen 1 has been set concurrent with the Gryps Conflict; the combination of rising inhuman enemies and negative emotional tilt in the era already gave rise to effects like Brave Series's Algernon, which have also been roughly synchronized to Gryps, so this wasn't a hard placement. Due to the unique demands of Spiricle Armors, they never really made it into mainline military use.

Faction Notes

• The Combat Revues have been hooked into Shuffle Alliance infrastructure. The Revues were established in the early 0090s, concurrent with other Shuffle Alliance outworks projects like Mithril. Some members of the Combat Revues are also beholden to their regional military infrastructures; this loyalty tension is intended. (Since we know it'll come up: Gemini Sunrise is from Universal Century Gundam's Texas Colony rather than from Earth Texas, since Britannian Texas carries a very different set of cultural stylings and expectations. This was in fact such a good idea that we've back-proliferated it to Getter Robo Series as necessary.)
• We are open to applications for Combat Revues from other nations besides the ones depicted in detail in each game; the games allude to many others.

• The antagonists of Sakura Taisen 2, being heavily bound up in existing military-hardliner command structures, have been placed in G-Hound. Whether they would remain in G-Hound after making their play remains an open question, but it's certainly where they would start.
• The antagonists of Sakura Taisen 3, with their eye toward resetting the country to a prior state at the cost of its present peoples, have been placed in Amalgam. These goals have some clean handshakes with content introduced in Full Metal Panic! and Mazinger Series, which lives comfortably in Amalgam.
• The antagonists of Sakura Taisen 5, who serve literal historical figure Nobunaga Oda, who has become a demon that no longer understands emotion, have been placed in BioNet. While both Sakura Taisen 2 and Sakura Taisen 5's antagonists want to turn back Japan's clock in broadly similar ways, the implementation of Oda presented here lives more comfortably next to Ultra Series characters than toward Japanese military officers. As presented in both Ultraman X and (if you read... too many... interviews) SSSS.GRIDMAN, we see characters who undergo a similar transformation to Oda's, and in one case even get termed 'Devils of the Hyper World.' It's an easy integration that establishes a broader element of how the world works. (It also makes the Brave Series's Shogun Mifune even funnier.)

Technology and Magic

• Spiricle Armors make heavy use of Spirit Power, a category of power broadly similar to chi (to the extent that it might as well be the same thing); similar to how a Future Century Gundam Mobile Fighter's chi-based attacks won't work for every user, not everyone can pilot units like Kobu effectively. As a unit lock, Spiricle Armors use Kinesthetic functionality, as pilots stick their arms and legs into the machine's arms and legs to drive them.
  • While this is implicit in the previous statement, we're making it explicit: Spiricle Armor use has no correlation with sex or gender!
• Sylusium's properties were discovered during the 0040s during Great Jama Empire attacks and not during the American Civil War. We conveniently had straight-up evil wizards attacking in roughly the right time frame. As time goes on, Sylusium may be used to proliferate some broad categories of power that need proliferating to make plots work without breaking things.
• Characters are not, generally, literal Biblical figures. The handful of living characters this matters to can work something out with us regarding their deal.
• Kouma are human negativity given form. In this sense, they're similar to some Ultra Series takes on kaiju; the two end up very faintly different expressions of the same idea: grudges can become physical. As a result, effects that work on emotion-centered takes on kaiju will also generally work on kouma, and vice versa; whether they're literally the same thing is a kind of complicated taxonomy question that people can argue over.