Reviews

Apparently based on a popular video game franchise in Japan, Sakura Wars focuses on six girls from different nations teaming together to combat demonic threats using their spiritual abilities to pilot mecha. It appears part of the anime's influence comes from a popular all-girl theatrical group in Japan called the Takarazuka Revue, considering the girls occasionally perform drama performances in theatrical plays as a means to hone their spiritual powers. The series offers enough depth on all the girls to explore their personalities and backgrounds, devoting episodes to focus on aspects of each character. While their characters are somewhat cliched, they are still a likeable bunch and undergo differing degrees of growth throughout the show's run such as Sakura learning to gain confidence in her skills, Sumire learning to value Sakura as a teammate and Iris learning to trust use of piloting the mecha.

However, the battle with Aoisatan and his group are too cliched and shallow to get attached to and is the major weakness I found with the series as a whole. The whole thing plays out as a traditional "good vs evil" battle with Aoisatan desiring the destruction of Tokyo for rather shallow reasons when more of his past is revealed and his allies don't get much in the way of fleshing out as their only roles are to serve as obstacles in Sakura and her group's efforts. The series plays out the typical cliches you can expect of this storytelling approach where the team get random power-ups and get conveniently saved in the nick of time in situations where the odds seem dire in their efforts.

In terms of presentation, Sakura Wars is somewhat standard for a early 2000s TV anime, but has its high points. It sports beautifully drawn scenery shots of 1920s Tokyo with character designs looking well designed and pleasing on the eyes with subdued color tones. The series employs a steampunk-like style in depicting the technology and mecha used by Sakura's group which work well with the anime and is a unique style that sticks out from many anime titles of the mecha genre. Animation is a bit subpar with some use of CG animation that is poorly rendered and sticks out like a sore thumb, with action sequences not being too engaging since the choreography plays out in a typical style and occasionally employ shortcuts.

The soundtrack to this series certainly sticks out enough, consisting of musical-style lyrical tracks and traditional insert music playing along to the time period of the series. It works nicely with the historical setting of the series and the theatrical theme that gets employed in some episodes, but there were no particular tracks that stuck out for me to make the series memorable.

Overall, my reception to Sakura Wars is rather mixed. While having some nice fleshing out of characters and the Takarazuka-like premise being a rather unique one for an anime title, it still sticks to conventional territory to a good extent with the mecha anime approach it takes and the good vs evil approach it does with its storytelling. I think I would have liked this anime more if it was more focused on the Takarazuka-like performances and character developments/ bonding than trying to mix it up with the mecha genre.