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Sengoku BASARA, or “The Western Market That Could Have Been”

This is the Great Nippon Spirit.

Many of you anime fans who like to keep current with Japan’s anime seasons have probably heard of — or have been watching — Sengoku Basara. The show just recently ended its first season, with a second season announced by Production I.G. Studios themselves. The entire cast of characters has a rabid Japanese fanbase, primarily female — a strange paradox, given that the anime is very blatantly a shounen battle series. The original video game franchise has grown from the first game, Sengoku Basara, to a straight-up sequel, a Guilty Gear-esque 2D fighter developed by ArcSys and Sammy, a PSP brawler that quickly took first place in software sales on its release; and a third title in the works for 2010. The anime brought with it a number of incredible product placement opportunities, from cellphone straps and character novelties to a Pizza Hut endorsement, a special rice label deal, a half-dozen different character-specific flavors of energy drink, and, oh, a stage play. Outside of Japan, however, Sengoku Basara (known to the rest of the world as Devil Kings) has almost never been heard of. What happened?

Why would a franchise that took off so well in Japan not carry its success over to western markets? In anime production, this is a common litmus test: if Japan eats it up, America probably will too. The anime — and by relation, the games — took the same route many other widely-popular series have taken: Code Geass, Naruto, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and other franchises have all shared similar marketing strategies as Basara, and they each have dedicated fanbases in the US and other countries. Merchandise opportunities are not nearly as common internationally as they are in Japan, of course, but the immense popularity of the franchise says volumes about the quality of the games (and now the anime!) themselves. Is it so unknown because the same experience simply could not translate to a Western audience? This was what Capcom belived when they originally planned Basara’s international release: the game may be fun, but Japanese history will scare Westerners away. At the time I’m sure it sounded reasonable, but in retrospect their decisions drove far too many nails in Basara’s coffin, and directly brought about Basara’s failure outside of its native stomping grounds. What exactly did they do to cause it to flop so terribly in the US?

Basara was released in the US during a strange time in Capcom’s history: their “experimental” division, Clover Studios, had just gotten off of the ground with their best — and only — titles: God Hand, Okami, and Viewtiful Joe. While Devil Kings was not a Clover franchise, it fell into an already-cramped release schedule filled with holiday PS2 titles (and arguably their Clover Studios titles and other Capcom franchises as well, which all seemed to come out within months of Devil Kings’ US release.)  It was a hack n’ slash one-versus-10,000 beat’em up title based (in Japan) on Japanese history. Capcom was especially feeling pressure from a particular new title, Koei’s Samurai Warriors, which also was a hack n’ slash one-versus-10,000 beat’em up, and was also centered around Japanese history, and also featured many of the same characters found in Basara, since both casts were based on actual historical figures. Capcom feared that Western buyers would look at Devil Kings, the brand new franchise, and then look at Samurai Warriors, the technically-new-but-older-because-of-Dynasty-Warriors franchise, and because Koei’s Warriors franchise had seniority, it would be chosen over the new copycat title. In their infinite wisdom, Capcom sidestepped this egregious error by completely removing anything relevant to Japanese history.

Takeda Shingen will have none of your shenanigans.

Practically all of the revisions were done in translation. Everything looked and played the same — no major changes to art assets and character designs were made. No longer was Devil Kings a game featuring feudal Japanese warlords, it was just a game featuring feudal warlords that happened to all look very Japanese. No longer were they fighting for control of ancient Japan, they were fighting for control of some ancient country that nobody seemed to care enough about to even give it a name. The in-game map of the country (which the player sees often) was very obviously the Japanese mainland, but it was never referred to specifically as Japan, and because it was turned on its side, it was hard to tell if it was even a non-fictional country at all. Takeda Shingen (OYAKATASAMAAAA) would become “Red Minotaur,” his right-hand man Sanada Yukimura turned into “Scorpio,” Date Masamune became “Azure Dragon,” Oda Nobunaga was named “Devil King” because apparently they ran out of stupid anime names and had to steal one from the title of the game, and every other character recieved other embarrassing names Americans don’t feel comfortable repeating in front of other Americans. Names of locations also changed: the battle of Sekigahara, for instance, became “Ruse at Riverglen,” and now shares a name with dime-a-dozen upper-middle class suburbs across the US. Instead of having nice whitewashed brick walls and cheap sportscars parked in double garages, Devil Kings’ Riverglen features big Japanese-looking gates, hordes of stupid Japanese-looking grunt soldiers, peasant shacks, and other things made of bamboo and rice like everything else in Japan even though it isn’t supposed to be Japan. What was supposed to be a purposefully flamboyant — yet still wildly compelling and genuinely interesting — take on Japanese history was blended into a cacaphony of misguided Japanese stereotypes of what Americans like in their games, tacked on to a boring old gameplay engine that another company pioneered and thrived off of three years prior.

A brilliant interview with Basara producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi shows that this wasn’t the first mistake:

IGN: We’ve had a chance to play Devil Kings, and obviously the first thing that comes to mind is Dynasty Warriors. Koei has pretty much had the monopoly on that genre from the beginning. Why tackle it now?

Kobayashi: Basically, the concept behind this is that until now, I have worked on many projects that have sold well overseas. Of course, Resident Evil 4, Devil May Cry, games like that. What I wanted to do this time is make a game that would really sell well in Japan. You look at sales numbers and you see that Dynasty Warriors games sold really, really well [in Japan]. And I thought, “Well, we’ve got Killer 7, which is totally new and might sell well in Japan, but let’s do something that we know will sell.”

…

Kobayashi: Then, we said, “Okay, let’s release it in North America — what can we do to make it different again?” So we said, “Okay, we’ll make it dark.” Call it Devil Kings. The main character sold his soul to the devil. We’ll darken up the background, give more moves, more ability to power your character up, and things like that for the American market.

IGN: Plus it’s not historically accurate?

Kobayashi: The Japanese version of the game is based on Japanese history. There are some fantasy elements that didn’t actually happen, of course, but enough of it is there.

With the U.S. version, we’ve taken that element out entirely. Some of the backgrounds may retain that eastern flair. Many of them don’t and are brand new; many of the enemies are brand new; and it’s no longer based around the idea of feudal Japan at all. That part of the game has now been changed to be darker, devilish.

This is entirely true, except for the entire last half. None of the backgrounds changed that much, if at all; most of the enemy units could be found in both titles; and if you had a brain in your head you could tell that this was all somehow involved with feudal Japan. The changes that were made were tiny — a lazily-made “priming” system that basically gave you two-for-one hits on individual enemies, and the difficulty level was bumped up a notch. Despite IGN schmoozing over Devil Kings with Capcom and Kobayashi before it came out, the very first thing they did in their review a few months later was bash it in comparison to Dynasty Warriors:

Aside from this twist to any sort of sensible timeline (which isn’t a bad thing), Devil Kings is essentially a copy of Dynasty Warriors in almost every single aspect. It features hundreds of imbecilic warriors to slaugher with entirely monotonous controls, moves and so forth. While Dynasty Warriors has been riding on the same basic mechanics title after title and not offering a whole lot of improvement to the fundamental combat system, Devil Kings could easily have stepped in and moved the “genre” forward but alas, it does almost nothing of the sort.

Good Job!

Guns are often putted on in Sengoku Basara.

That is a lot of history for one miserable game!! Despite the game’s history being way too long and convoluted, the mistakes Capcom made are self-evident throughout Basara’s production, and there is a very fundamental lesson to be learned in all of this. Capcom first screwed up by trying to copy Dynasty Warriors, sure, okay, whatever. This kind of stuff happens all the time and even the most blatant copies at least sell. The game was originally intended for Japanese markets, so it wasn’t particularly intended for Western markets either, so I suppose I can’t really rightfully complain. They really screwed up, however, when they exported it and took out all of the Japanese history. Koei’s Dynasty Warriors is not currently on what I can only imagine is its third re-release of its 6th reiteration of the same game because of the DURR PRESS X WIN GAEM fighting system.

The historical aspect — Cao Cao and Lu Bu and the Yellow Turban rebellion and all that comes with it — creates an undeniable draw towards the series by allowing the player to feel as though they’re playing history itself; the same with the Samurai Warriors franchise. (Or at least the creator’s vision of history.) Capcom’s thinking behind their decision was that Dynasty Warriors was successful — in America and possibly in Japan — because of its gameplay alone, historical value be damned. By removing any and all interesting historical relevance, all that was left for Sengoku Basara was Dynasty Warriors’ stale combat system with a whole lot more anime garbage tacked on. Because Capcom was so worried about fundamentally matching another successful product, they completely disposed of the one factor that differentiated the product from their competitor. We weren’t impressed by that combat system before Devil Kings was released, why would we like it any more now? Had the historical value stayed, it might have held its own weight in comparison to Dynasty Warriors simply because of the historical content. Instead, its completely fictionalized context proved to be far too little to carry the game as an actual contender to Samurai Warriors — which, ironically enough, came out a few months after Devil Kings. Had the historical value been kept, Devil Kings would have had a monopoly on the Japanese history market for at least a few months. A smooth move indeed, Capcom.

Obviously though, Capcom was wholly uninterested in making a game Westerners would want to play, they simply wanted to make a game that would do well in Japan. In that regard, I guess they did well, because it’s doing just fine there. There are fans over here though — international citizens that import the games because they’re legitimately fun and read the history behind it because it is cool too. And because Samurai Warriors definitely doesn’t have a general with a giant spear who happens to look like — and act like — a giant robot. And Sengoku Basara does. Because it is awesome. We could have had all of that and more — and it would have had the support of many more like-minded individuals who enjoy Japanese history — if Capcom didn’t neuter all of the interesting fluff from Sengoku Basara in its localization. But instead we get this unpopular obscure “there’s no way I’m paying full price for this” title featuring Scorpio and Azure Dragon and Riverglen and some stupid rock of a country, all of which looks strangely Japanese but definitely isn’t because Capcom said so. Thank you, Capcom, thank you.

Author: bigopinion

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