Sakura Wars Online

» see sakura-taisen.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Sega announced it was leaving the hardware business on 31 January 2001. Eleven months later, on 20 December, it put two new Dreamcast discs in Japanese shops. Sakura Wars Online came in a version subtitled The Long Days of the Imperial Capital and a version subtitled The Elegant Days of Paris, sold at the same time for the same price, and the two of them were entrances to one shared place rather than two games. A standard disc was 5,800 yen. The limited editions ran to 8,800 yen and came with hardware: a Sakura Wars branded keyboard with one, a panel clock with the other.

What made it work was a Sega service called open dice, whose official site had opened on 26 June 2001. Open dice was a network layer that sat under several Sega titles and let players on a Dreamcast, a Windows PC and a PlayStation 2 sit in the same room and compete against each other. That is a striking thing for a company to be building in the same year it stopped making consoles, and it is why a Dreamcast game could still be online in late 2005.

My December 2001 was a 56k modem in Turkey and a PC. A console that dialed a Japanese phone line to reach a Japanese lobby full of Japanese voice acting had no route into Ankara at any price, and the Dreamcast itself barely showed up in Turkish shops to begin with. So this one is reconstructed out of the archives of a company that has left its own product pages up for two decades.

~ the case file ~

~ what you did in there ~

It was not a battle game. You moved a character around a virtual city, ran into the Sakura Wars cast and into other players, and then sat down to play things: hanafuda, poker, a card game about accumulating wealth, mahjong. You could pick a favorite character and walk around with her following you. Valentine's Day and birthdays triggered scenes that only happened on those dates.

Sega ran events on top of it, voice actor appearances and tournaments held inside the game rather than announced for somewhere else. There was also an offline mode where you played the same table games against the computer, which turned out to matter later.

~ nine in the morning ~

Open dice ended on 30 November 2005 at 9:00. Every title that depended on it lost its online half the same morning, including all four entries in the Atsumare! Guruguru Onsen series, which had been Sega's other reason for keeping the network alive.

The notice Sega published drew a line through the save file. Offline save data could be backed up and kept. Online save data could not be preserved, and was not. Whatever your character had accumulated in the city over four years was tied to a server rather than to the memory card in your hand, and it went when the server did.

~ what got buried with it ~

The discs are still discs. Put one in a Dreamcast today and you get a working single-player card game with famous characters in it, which is a strange kind of survival: the product outlived the thing that made it a product. What died was the specific proposition that a console you could no longer buy, from a company that no longer made consoles, was worth keeping connected for four more years.

Sega has never taken the page down. The archive section of the official Sakura Wars site still lists both editions, both keyboards, and the sentence about nine in the morning on 30 November 2005.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »