Please. I am begging every single one of you western outlets popping up with Sakura Taisen 101 articles on the eve of the PS4 game's localization coming out.

Stop.

Calling it.

A.

Visual.

Novel.

A Japanese game with character portraits and text boxes does not a VN make.

I've said I want to write more on this general subject, so I'll save the really deep discussion for later. But let's do a brief deep dive on why this classification rankles me with 90s games and it's because it misportrays the historical context these games existed in at launch.

Sakura Taisen originally came out in 1996, a year in which the visual novel genre is so in its infancy, it's not wholly recognizable aesthetically by today's standards. The terminology itself barely even exists, confined largely to a trademark owned by one Japanese dev, Leaf.

What are Japanese "novel games" more broadly in 1996 at this point? They're an offshoot of the adventure genre, specifically "sound novels" pioneered by the likes of Chunsoft, which, indeed, consist largely of text, backgrounds, and ambient sound, as seen in Otogirisou below.

Yes, VN as a term exists in 1996 in a limited capacity, but what it is at this point is a very nascent elaboration on the presentation of Chunsoft's games. There are actual character portraits, true, but the prose, rhythm, and framework of these games is still very derivative.

All of this is to say that, at this point in the timeline, when so few games that would solidify the structure and flow of visual novels as western players recognize them had yet to be released, visual novel as a term is more a single developer's brand than a useful demarcation.

Knowing all that, yes, Sakura Taisen has a lot of talky bits and the actual strategy mechanics are sparse. But its storytelling, both aesthetically and compositionally, isn't really drawing upon the style or execution of contemporary novel games in any meaningful sense.

Genealogically, Sakura Taisen shares a lot more in common with other Japanese PC adventure games and their offshoots. These games were indeed becoming talkative, but often also had other gameplay systems informing them and genre hybrids were common, including with strategy games.

Moreover, while Chunsoft was seeing success with its sound novel games, especially in the wake of Kamaitachi no Yoru, games of that style weren't really becoming so ubiquitous as to attract serious attention from the biggest Japanese dev houses. What was by 1996 was galge.

Galge, a term that can be applied to games of various genres with, predominantly women-led casts, were largely once the preserve of PCs as well. That is, until Konami came along with a little game called Tokimeki Memorial, whose design chops helped the galge become mainstream.

https://medium.com/@freelansations/25-years-with-an-invisible-elephant-in-the-room-6e5402c93960 Tokimeki Memorial's impact on the Japanese game industry cannot be overstated. No history of 90s Japanese games is frankly complete without it. I'll spare the details here, but for new folks, I've written at length on the subject of its legacy here.

While Tokimemo and Sakura Taisen share relatively little in common mechanically, the important thread between them is Tokimemo showed galge could do big, mainstream, cross-media business. When a company like Konami has such a big hit, others take notice and Sega certainly did.

In a time where many other dating sims and console-friendly galge more broadly were still struggling to find their own footing, ST was among the first franchises from other big players to really capitalize on that potential and show this galge thing was no flash in the pan.

In that sense, Sakura Taisen is very much so a response to all sorts of Japanese industry trends and paradigm shifts. It owes a lot of its existence to its predecessors in the PC and adventure game spaces while still absolutely being groundbreaking in setting and execution.

But the dialogue it's having isn't really with the relatively few novel games that actually existed in 1996. Novel games, while an important development in their own right, were still budding and didn't always have the design language games like ST needed to solve their problems.

Japanese devs were certainly paying attention to them and the farther you get from the 90s as those seminal VNs do come out, the more those influences on other games are discernable. I would argue the relationship is still at times overblown, but is more prescient with time.

But for ST, the point of reference structurally really did lie in adventure games and the assorted hybrids. As a genre that had been growing for nearly 15 years by that point, its storytelling and presentational techniques were in a much more mature place to be applied elsewhere.

As an aside, it's important to emphasize that VN as a term isn't really as widespread in Japanese-speaking circles as foreign ones and I believe it's because Japanese players have more established boundaries for what qualifies as a novel game vs. an adventure game or other genre.

Games that are often discussed in the same breath in western circles under the VN banner tend to either be regarded as not closely related or only having passing similarities. Few Japanese players would say Phoenix Wright and Clannad are games of the same genre, for instance.

And if I sound huffy over western critiques labeling games like ST as VNs, this is ultimately why. Because it doesn't line up with how that history is understand natively. Many older games players abroad classify as VN I've never once seen called such in Japanese, including ST.