When March 29, 2002 finally arrived, plenty of ZEPS 4 owners already knew exactly what they wanted to buy.
ZAGE's two surprise March releases had arrived.
Sengoku Basara.
Gotcha Force.
And just as Zaboru had joked in the trailer, there genuinely were insane players who had already burned through most—or somehow all—of the twelve ZEPS 4 launch games released back in February. Add Trails in the Sky the 3rd and Medal of Honor 2 earlier that month, and logically people should have had more than enough games to play.
Apparently gamers didn't understand the concept of enough.
Many were already hungry for something new, and the two-day gap between the surprise trailer and actual release meant there was barely enough time for hype to cool down.
For Japanese gamers in particular, Sengoku Basara immediately stood out.
People had seen Date Masamune wielding six swords.
They had seen Tokugawa Ieyasu punching soldiers.
They had seen Honda Tadakatsu apparently reject humanity and become a damn war machine.
Now they could finally play it themselves.
And the game ZAGE released was far larger than the trailer suggested.
Zaboru's foundation for this version of Sengoku Basara came primarily from Sengoku Basara 2 that he remembered from his previous life, but simply recreating that game had never interested him. As usual, he took the parts he liked, removed limitations he disliked, borrowed improvements from later entries, and then let Team IZAN build beyond them using ZEPS 4 hardware.
One of the first things he changed was the special-skill system.
The old version he remembered had a restriction he always considered unnecessarily limiting: players could only equip two special skills at a time.
Zaboru hated that.
Sengoku Basara was supposed to make the player feel ridiculous.
Powerful.
Flashy.
The characters weren't supposed to possess ten interesting techniques while the player was forced to choose only two of them before entering battle.
So ZAGE expanded the system.
Every character could now carry four special techniques directly into combat, mapped around the controller through combinations involving Triangle, directional Triangle, R1, and L1 + Triangle. The result immediately made combat considerably more flexible. Instead of repeating one reliable technique whenever a crowd appeared, players could build small combinations around four different abilities.
But Zaboru didn't remove customization either.
Players could still enter the character menu and change which special skills occupied those inputs. Two people using Date Masamune could therefore play him differently depending on what techniques they selected. One could emphasize wide attacks for deleting crowds, while another could focus more heavily on mobility, launchers, stronger single-target attacks, or whatever combination fitted their preferred style.
That became more interesting because the characters continued gaining techniques as they leveled.
Approximately every few levels, another skill or improvement became available, with the final major skill unlock coming around Level 33. By the time a character was properly developed, their moveset was considerably larger than what they possessed at the beginning.
Players quickly learned that leveling wasn't simply about increasing statistics.
A character at Level 30 genuinely had more toys to use than the same character at Level 5.
Team IZAN had also expanded normal attack strings, follow-ups, movement options and character-specific mechanics. Zaboru wanted every warrior to communicate their personality through gameplay before the player even paid attention to the story.
Date Masamune wasn't merely Date Masamune because his name appeared above the health bar.
He had to feel like Date Masamune.
The same applied to everyone else.
Weapons received similar treatment.
Every playable character had multiple weapons that could be discovered, purchased or earned through progression. Some simply provided stronger statistics, but others favored different properties enough to change how players built their character.
Then there were the joke weapons.
Zaboru refused to explain those before release.
There were strange weapons hidden behind specific objectives, unusual difficulty requirements, shops and other obscure conditions. Some were deliberately ridiculous. Others referenced things outside the immediate setting.
Finding them became part of the fun.
Costumes were expanded too.
Characters could unlock alternate outfits through progression and challenges, giving long-term players another reason to keep using their favorites even after completing their main scenario. Some were variations on their original design, while others leaned even further into the absurd personality ZAGE had built around them.
The story received considerably more attention than Zaboru's original-life version as well.
ZAGE still treated historical accuracy as reference, not law.
This was fiction.
Nobody at ZAGE was pretending that Honda Tadakatsu actually had mechanical boosters attached to his body.
The writers researched the historical figures, relationships, conflicts and regions, then asked themselves a much more important question for this game:
How could we turn this into the most entertaining version possible?
That philosophy allowed Team IZAN to rearrange events, exaggerate relationships, alter encounters and create character arcs specifically for the game.
One character Zaboru particularly wanted improved was Tokugawa Ieyasu.
In the Sengoku Basara 2 he remembered, Ieyasu was still represented as a younger character and had nowhere near the identity he later developed. It wasn't until later that the older, fist-fighting version became considerably more memorable.
Zaboru didn't want to wait.
So ZAGE's Ieyasu was established as an important character immediately.
He fought primarily with his fists, using footwork, heavy punches, counters and explosive close-range attacks. Compared with the sword-heavy cast surrounding him, the sight of one famous Japanese warlord simply walking onto the battlefield and deciding his hands were enough immediately gave him personality.
Then there was Miyamoto Musashi.
Zaboru remembered the original Basara interpretation of Musashi being largely a joke character—rough, ridiculous, throwing rocks around and generally acting nothing like what players would expect from the legendary swordsman.
He actually found that funny.
He simply didn't want this Musashi to be only a joke.
So ZAGE kept him as a more unusual additional character, but dramatically rebuilt his gameplay.
Miyamoto Musashi became one of the strongest unlockable fighters in the game.
He properly utilized his famous two-sword style, combining one longer blade with a shorter weapon and switching between aggressive chained strikes, counters and powerful finishing attacks. He still had an unusual personality and retained enough humor to fit Basara, but once players actually unlocked him and entered a battlefield, the joke ended very quickly.
Musashi was absurdly strong.
And unlocking him wasn't something the game handed out immediately.
Players had to progress far enough through the game and satisfy specific requirements before he became available.
Naturally, that made people want him even more.
By the first day, players were already discovering just how different Sengoku Basara felt compared with ZAGE's other major action series.
The obvious comparison was Devil May Cry.
Both were fast.
Both were stylish.
Both allowed ridiculous combinations.
But the feeling was completely different.
Devil May Cry focused heavily on stylish individual combat, technical execution, juggling enemies, switching approaches and maintaining control against smaller but more dangerous groups.
Sengoku Basara was anime battlefield insanity.
The player could rush into dozens of soldiers and send half of them flying.
Attacks filled enormous portions of the screen.
Special techniques created lightning, fire, shockwaves and exaggerated visual effects.
Named officers appeared in the middle of armies like boss encounters surrounded by chaos.
Sometimes the battlefield looked less like a historical war and more like an anime opening sequence that had somehow become playable.
Players loved it.
More importantly, the cast didn't blend together.
The ninja-type characters immediately became popular among players who preferred speed.
Kotaro Fuma moved with incredible agility, quickly repositioning himself around enemies before they had much opportunity to react.
Sarutobi Sasuke mixed ninja movement with tricky attacks and a personality that made him immediately recognizable.
Kasuga similarly emphasized quick movement, elegant attacks and flashy techniques.
Players who wanted something heavier had completely different options.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi felt brutally powerful. His attacks carried enough weight that even basic strikes felt like they should hurt.
Takeda Shingen attacked with overwhelming force and carried himself exactly like the larger-than-life warlord the game wanted him to be.
Shimazu Yoshihiro similarly appealed to players who wanted to swing something heavy and watch enemies regret standing nearby.
Then there were characters who couldn't be cleanly categorized at all.
Nagamasa Azai, for example, somehow treated being a Sengoku warlord like he was also the protagonist of a tokusatsu series.
Players watched him make dramatic poses and movements that looked suspiciously like a henshin sequence before throwing himself into battle with complete seriousness.
Nobody knew whether they were supposed to laugh or think he looked cool.
Most did both.
Then there was Honda Tadakatsu.
The man barely needed explanation.
The first time players encountered him properly, the reaction was almost universal.
"WHY IS HE ACTUALLY A ROBOT!?"
Technically, ZAGE described him more like an absurdly armored mechanical warrior.
Nobody cared.
The internet had already decided.
HONDA TADAKATSU = CYBORG.
And then there was the character foreign players became obsessed with almost immediately.
Date Masamune.
The One-Eyed Dragon.
Blue armor.
Six swords.
Ridiculous confidence.
And English.
Or something vaguely resembling English.
Masamune repeatedly threw English phrases into his dialogue, but his pronunciation was so aggressively Japanese that foreign players started affectionately calling it Engrish its a word that Zaboru often uses after all..
The most memorable one needed no explanation.
"LET'S PARTY!"
An American player could be surrounded by hundreds of Japanese soldiers in a wildly fictional Sengoku battlefield, understand almost none of the spoken Japanese, and then suddenly hear Masamune shout broken English before charging forward with six swords.
It somehow worked perfectly.
Posts immediately appeared online.
"I DON'T KNOW WHAT THIS GUY IS SAYING BUT HE IS MY MAIN."
"DATE MASAMUNE JUST YELLED LET'S PARTY AND KILLED LIKE 40 PEOPLE."
"WHY DOES JAPANESE HISTORY GO THIS HARD?"
Which, ironically, was almost exactly the reaction Zaboru had predicted during his argument with Yuna Kamijo.
Players began searching the names.
Some genuinely seemed surprised when they discovered Date Masamune had been a real person.
Honda Tadakatsu too.
Tokugawa Ieyasu obviously had greater international recognition, but many players who had barely cared about the Sengoku period suddenly found themselves reading short biographies simply because they wanted to know what ZAGE had exaggerated.
Meanwhile, people quickly discovered there was a ridiculous amount to do.
At launch, the game contained around thirty immediately accessible playable characters, already an enormous roster for an action game with genuinely different movesets.
And that wasn't the complete cast.
There were roughly ten additional characters that could be unlocked as players progressed. Some became available through story completion, others through specific requirements, and several could then be purchased through the game's internal currency system once their conditions had been satisfied.
That meant discovering characters became its own progression loop.
Finish one campaign.
Unlock somebody.
Try them.
Discover another route.
Unlock another weapon.
Gain new skills.
Find a costume.
Repeat.
Very quickly, however, players encountered a problem.
There were simply too many characters to seriously develop everyone.
Someone could experiment with thirty or forty fighters, but fully leveling every single one, collecting their weapons, learning their skills and understanding their combat flow required an enormous amount of time.
So players started choosing mains.
One or two favorites.
Maybe three for the truly obsessed.
That became even more important once players entered the online modes.
Because Sengoku Basara online was chaos.
ZAGE allowed up to four players in cooperative battles through ZAGE Network.
But the developers had understood immediately that simply putting four human players into a normal single-player stage would destroy the difficulty.
Four properly developed Basara characters could erase an ordinary battlefield in minutes.
So online play dynamically became more aggressive.
Enemy density increased.
More normal soldiers appeared in combat areas.
Elite units became more common.
Named officers gained additional durability.
Bosses became stronger and more resistant to being endlessly stunned by four players attacking simultaneously.
Some encounters even changed enemy placement depending on player count.
The goal wasn't simply to make everything possess absurd amounts of health.
ZAGE wanted four players to feel like the battlefield itself had become larger in response to them.
And it worked.
One player could be fighting an officer on the eastern side of a castle while another defended an objective, with the remaining two pushing through an entirely different group of enemies.
Then everyone could regroup when the major boss appeared.
The screen became ridiculous.
Effects everywhere.
Soldiers flying.
People shouting.
Someone using a special move.
Masamune yelling something in English.
Honda Tadakatsu arriving and turning the entire battle into a mechanical disaster.
Exactly what Basara should be.
ZAGE even created co-op-specific missions and stages that couldn't be accessed in ordinary single-player play. These scenarios were designed around multiple participants from the beginning, sometimes splitting the team between objectives before bringing everyone together for a larger encounter.
That decision gave people an actual reason to use online mode instead of treating it as nothing more than the normal campaign with extra players.
Within days, groups formed around specific character combinations.
Speed characters for rushing objectives.
Heavy characters for officer killing.
Crowd-clearing characters for enormous enemy groups.
Then there were four friends who simply selected whoever they liked and caused complete nonsense.
Nobody cared.
It was fun.
By the end of the game's first week, Sengoku Basara had already become one of ZAGE's strongest new March releases.
Japanese players enjoyed seeing history turned into unapologetic action insanity.
Foreign players loved discovering characters they had never heard of.
Action fans loved the combat.
Completionists had dozens of weapons, skills, costumes and characters to chase.
Online players had already found another game capable of consuming hundreds of hours of their lives.
And most importantly, the game's identity was unmistakable.
It wasn't trying to apologize for how ridiculous it was.
Sengoku Basara knew exactly what it wanted to be.
Stylish.
Fast.
Absurd.
Anime as hell.
And somehow, through all that insanity, plenty of players were learning the names of actual Japanese historical figures anyway.
Exactly as Zaboru had predicted.
But Sengoku Basara was only one half of ZAGE's March 29 release.
Because while Basara gave players famous warlords turned into anime monsters...
The other game gave t
hem tiny robots fighting underneath kitchen tables.
And somehow, Gotcha Force was becoming just as addictive for completely different reasons.
To be continued.
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