This Week in Retro: Sengoku [1991] (Patreon)

February 12, 1991: Swapping bodies & snapping swords in Sengoku

by Diamond Feit

This just in: Video games are amazing. They can be plotless or contain a rich narrative on par with any tome. They can be deeply detailed, requiring players to adjust hundreds of variables during play; or they can be rigid, linear experiences with minimal player input. Best of all, even though the technology games are built upon can become dated, actually playing games is a timeless activity. Cartridges and consoles all eventually degrade, but the games we grew up playing will outlive us all.

If I sound extra pensive, it's because our subject this week is, at first glance, a forgotten work. Sengoku debuted on the NEO•GEO 30 years ago, and few people have played it in the past 27 years. An early NEO•GEO beat-em-up, it lacks the depth or sheer fun factor of its peers. It was a two-player game released at a time where four-player arcade brawlers had already become the standard, and its lack of recognizable characters (coupled with its non-English title) meant it wasn't likely to draw too many curiosity buy-ins from random passersby at the arcade.

For me, however, Sengoku represents my early fascination with both the NEO•GEO and the nation it hails from. It is enigmatic; it is eye-catching; and it is unambiguously Japanese.

Sengoku was not the first beat-em-up on the NEO•GEO, but it was certainly the best one available for the system in 1991. (Ninja Combat was a launch title, and that's the nicest thing I can say about it.) The moniker "beat-em-up" hardly seems appropriate, though, for Sengoku contains far too many magical weapons and power-ups to neatly fit into that category. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a beat-em-up. River City Ransom is a beat-em-up. Sengoku is a mash-em-up: A blend of historical fantasy, swordplay, Japanese theater, and ’80s action movies, all built around hitting the A button as fast as possible.

Sengoku opens with a text crawl that tells the tale of a 400-year-old warlord who has returned to conquer the world... and that's all the context offered for the events that follow. It’s not enough; the first stage begins in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the initial enemies are pint-sized ninja. As soon as they are dispatched, the player (or players) are immediately whisked into the sky where they walk on the clouds, while battle flags from Japan's medieval period are seen in the distance. Long-dead skeletons appear and transform into flesh-and-bone swordsmen. Is this the afterlife, or the past? The manual for the NEO•GEO home edition describes the game's two planes as "real world" and "other world," so the answer to that question is a definite "maybe."

As warriors from Japanese history continue to attack (even emerging, inexplicably, from a giant skull), the player is again teleported back to the modern Earth—which still lies in ruins—to encounter more enemies. After a few more warps up and down—backwards and forwards in time? Or merely space?—the hero(es) stand atop a herd of wild horses in order to fight the first boss: Another ninja. He threatens the player in Japanese first, and when defeated, exclaims, "I missed!"

Starting with the herald of the beat-’em-up genre, Double Dragon, it had already become commonplace by 1991 for these kinds of games to firmly establish a grounded setting for the players to advance through. Using maps or interstitial transitions, games would typically demarcate a clear sense of progress from points A to B to C, until arriving at last at  the end. Sengoku tosses aside this tradition in favor of constant, jarring leaps upwards and downwards, never offering the players even a moment of normalcy.

Similarly, enemies in beat-’em-ups typically walk onto the screen from outside of view, or occasionally burst through a wall for a bit of shock value. In Sengoku, enemies often run into the foreground from the background (showing off the NEO•GEO's fabulous sprite-scaling tech in the process), but they just as often phase in from nothingness. Sometimes they are standing around incognito, as if part of the background itself, only to emerge and fight. Sometimes they arrive on beast-drawn chariots. Sometimes they defy gravity and approach on the ceiling before sprite-warping to the floor. Some of the enemies are not even humanoid. There is no rhyme or reason here, and players must be ready for anything.

If there’s any consistency to be found in Sengoku, it is the game's unabashed Japanese-ness. In an era when many games developed in Japan were stripped of their cultural origin for export, Sengoku makes no such concessions. The title itself is nearly unlocalized: In Japan, it is called Sengoku Densho (or "Legacy of Sengoku"), because the heroes are supposed to be descended from samurai who defeated the evil warlord in the past. (I should clarify that sengoku refers to a period of Japanese history when the nation's future was very much unwritten as domestic conflicts raged across the archipelago; Akira Kurosawa's most famous epics are set during the sengoku era.)

The heroes of Sengoku, by the way, are a biker guy and a cowboy. Biker Guy sports a red jacket and (deliberately, I assume) looks like Kaneda from Akira, but Cowboy… well, he's got long blonde hair, he's wearing a bright blue vest with no shirt (despite what the U.S. cover art depicts above), and his purple pants—which match his purple hat—are fringed. As a homophobic teenager in the 1990s, I read both these characters as gay and laughed at them for it. As a bisexual adult in 2021, I read both these characters as gay and love them for it; they are high on my list of Halloween costume goals. If I can't pull off "obscure SNK protagonist" in the city where SNK still exists, who else is going to do it?

Besides the original Japanese dialogue and armies of distinctly Japanese characters, we must also address the very Japanese music of Sengoku. While some stages use rockin' NEO•GEO tunes that are the essence of 1991, other stages trade synthesizers for traditional instruments and rhythmic chanting. According to the soundtrack, these songs are titled "Mugen Noh," a subset of the ancient Japanese theatrical tradition of Noh.

Noh plays use minimal set dressing. Actors deliver dialogue in a distinct, drawn out manner. Every motion on stage is slow and deliberate. I knew none of this in 1991, of course, but I have since graduated college with a degree in Japanese studies and have seen Noh performed. Mugen Noh tells stories of the supernatural, and according to Wikipedia, "action may switch between two or more timeframes from moment to moment." Have I cracked the case? Is Sengoku all a performance, like Super Mario Bros. 3 or Altered Beast? Noh plays have been described as "dreamlike" (in part because the audience tends to fall asleep; have I mentioned how slowly the actors speak?). "Dreamlike" certainly applies to Sengoku… though it is never "boring."

By default, the player characters in Sengoku are unarmed, and while punches and kicks are good enough to slap away the small fries, they're not very effective against the many sword-wielding enemies who appear. A well-timed melee strike can grab an opponent's sword mid-swing and break it, but I wouldn't count on pulling that off. To offset this, defeating enemies in Sengoku spawns small orbs of different colors. These orbs empower the player to wield a variety of swords for a limited time, and managing sword pickups goes a long way towards making Sengoku feel beatable.

There's also Sengoku's unique gimmick of support characters: at fixed points during the journey, the heroes enlist the help of a ninja, a samurai, and a "ninja dog." Players can tap a button to swap characters at any time, but these alternate forms can only be used for 60 seconds because they are so much stronger, they feel like heroes from another game entirely. As with the orbs, learning when and where to switch characters is key to getting further in the game.

Even with all these tricks, Sengoku is an arcade game from 1991, and it wants your money. Players get three lives and six hit points per life, but a powerful attack can take away multiple hit points, and life refills are few and far between (collecting 10 random green orbs restores just one hit point). In SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1, a NEO•GEO collection for PlayStation 2, PSP, and Nintendo Wii, there is a special reward for completing the first stage on Easy difficulty without dying. I’ve beaten the game multiple times, but I am no closer to completing this task. Most playthroughs, I'm lucky if I don't use a continue on the first stage.

There's also the extreme challenge of the final battle: Sengoku is one of those games that turns into a different game when the last boss appears. Any player patient enough (or wealthy enough) to reach the finale will be tasked with fighting the resurrected warlord while flying through the air. Players automatically get special swords for this battle, and swapping characters is disabled. As far as I can tell from my research, the only strategy in this fight is to hammer that A button to hit the warlord as many times as possible before he kills you and hope that he runs out of life before you run out of coins.

Unique mechanics, distinct cultural trappings, and queer icons: Sengoku left a strong impression on early NEO•GEO fans and was even ported to other consoles back in the 1990s. Along with its two sequels, it was later released for PlayStation 2 and Windows as Sengoku Anthology, and all three games would appear on Virtual Console for the Nintendo Wii. Today it is sold a la carte via Hamster's Arcade Archive series on a variety of platforms.

Sengoku is a game that always stuck with me, because despite lacking the replayability of the many, many NEO•GEO fighting games that would follow in its wake, it was an early example of what I loved about the NEO•GEO (and SNK): Sengoku has personality. Sengoku is overflowing with ideas. Sengoku looks and sounds unlike any of its non-NEO•GEO contemporaries, and even compared to other NEO•GEO games, it's waving its made-in-Japan-flag harder than any other game on the system at the time. Later SNK creations like Samurai Shodown and The Last Blade would harness Japanese history and mythology into better games, but Sengoku went there first... and it went there proudly.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan and is an active Twitter user.