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I've been obsessed with this game since 2008 and wanting to play with other people ever since, so I wrote this article last year as a callout for translators but couldn't get it finished in a way that could be published. So it goes to the codex instead :D
The tl;dr is the game's Street Fighter does real-time tactics via TCG; or an arcade version of Total Warhammer's battles.
It's on NDS with moonrunes only and the online could be fixed if a German paid me attention for 30 minutes.
If you have disassembly skills and would like to take a stab at patching the translation, please reach out to me in here, @pacoworks on twitter or /u/pakoito on Reddit.
------
In 2005 SEGA, the company known for giving a shot at games that should have never worked, found a premise 15 years ago that's gone unchallenged ever since: what if we brought Real Time Tactics to the arcades?
Entering the Taisen games:
Sangokushi (Romance of Three Kingdoms in China)
Sengoku (Warring States in Japan)
Eiketsu (Free For All)
So what is it playing a Taisen game like
In this top-down strategy game you build an army of Generals represented by 3-8 physical cards; and send them to destroy the enemy castle by staying near it. It sounds simple because it is. It's cool ancient warriors scoring touchdowns!
The two health bars of the opposing castles dominate the top of the screen and tell you who is currently winning. A timer with 99 Japanese seconds (~300 real-time seconds) also sits in between the bars. The castles also double down as the place where Generals go to heal or resurrect after falling in battle.
From there we get to the visualization screen: a 3D representation of the battlefield, in all its pixelated glory. A 3/4 camera tracks the action, automatically following key events such as unit movement, skill activatios or combats. It zooms into the action of the armies clashing, and pans out when everyone is back to their castles to recharge. A minimap gives a full overview of health, readiness and orientation for all units on the battlefield.
But that is all visual candy. The real game is played on your commanding mat.
In this mat you place the cards that represent your Generals. The mat is as big as the main screen, and your card's positions and orientations are individually tracked in it. Thus, you get the most comfortable controller possible: your hands sliding and flinging your units around the mat, telling them where they should be placed and oriented. No mouse APM, no touchscreen taps, just hands moving cards with finger and palm.
The match starts with a FIGHT! banner and a lound gong sound. These have been an staple ever since the first release.
Once in the match, the feeling is unlike anything you've played before, as the game gets going from the first second. You'll be moving your lines like a poker player shifting chip stacks. You'll flicker cards back to the castle to heal them while you're focused on the attack. You'll desperately _lean on the mat_ trying to reach for those archers you left behind half a battlefield away. You'll be guiding 5 cavalries, 2 in one hand and 3 in the other, to perfectly pincer your enemy's rear while the frontline keeps their spearman occupied.
If a unit makes it to the enemy castle and no opposing General engages them, the enemy castle and thus that player's health bar takes damage. Killing units won't win you the game, but not defending you castle will surely net you a lose.
Once your Generals manage to survive long enough to barely take down the enemy castle within the time limit, you're rewarded with a victory scene and move on to the next game.
The 3-5 minutes you get out of a match are exhilarating. It's the kick you get from a good Smash Bros game set, a MOBA match, or a good round in Valorant...minus all the toxicity. Pure arcade energy that leaves you wanting to put another quarter (or tap your player NFC card in 2023) and play one more game.
And that's only the tip of the iceberg. The game has a "mana" system where every unit has at least one active skill you have to activate with a BIG RED BUTTON on the machine. You also get a General or an Item with another skill that can be used once per game with a BIG BLUE BUTTON. Some Generals have setup abilities like a Sneak Attack on their first clash, or bringing a Fence or a Cannon into the battlefield. Others have passives such as regeneration, larger aura of influence, or being great at duels. In modern versions Generals have a Presence stat that can trigger damage to the enemy castle if they remain on the enemy field for long enough.
These skills and damage effects are beautifully animated, each with its own CGI scene, which - my only critique to the game - get repetitive after playing the same army for a while.
To keep the game balanced and with plenty of army variety, there exists a rock-paper-scissors system between archery-cavalry-pikemen, and stronger units take more of the 8 army building points you get. There are also siege units, weak to everything, and swordsmen who are neutral with everyone. Modern versions of the game include gunmen, elephants and even cannons.
Each unit type has one shared ability: cavalries are fast can charge after running around for a bit, pikemen deal DoT in the direction you point them, archers are ranged, gunmen can load and fire several times in a row, elephants smash through units, and siege is deadly if they reach the enemy castle.
Same as with your favorite gacha or your Heartstone decks, different armies excel at different strategies. Fan favorites are present: "go wide" with cheap and weak Generals buffed by a single Grand General, "burn" Mages with board-wipe skills and their bodyguards, "all-for-one" strategies where a General gets all buffs and proceeds to one-shot the castle, ninja armies where the enemy cannot see you, debuff-based armies... Sega has had plenty of time to experiment with metagames over the game's many iterations.
The game does not have an equal in the market. Other games do parts of it, mostly indie wargames and a house name such as Total War, but none manages to capture the arcade-ness of it and the charm of the individual Generals barking orders in perfect VA.
How big is this saga really?
Arcades are a dying breed in Japan. Hit by covid, SEGA sold most of its arcade division to GiGO in 2022. But, they kept the Taisen saga. The latest version of the game, Eiketsu Taisen (2022), has hundreds of locations all across Japan. It boasts local and online PvP on top of the PvE modes.
On any given afternoon, you can walk to these arcades and a handful of businessman, cigarette in mouth, will send their fully buffed Lu Bu or Nobunaga Oda out to tear through your starter deck without any mercy. On weekends, you can watch tournaments from the sideline.
The game has frequent one-off events where you can PvE against bossified versions of generals, and even tie-ins with other manga and anime IPs such as Kingdom.
SEGA keeps an official website that you can use to find arcades, keep track of your collection and trade cards with other players. It also tracks your progress and rankings in the global an regional standings https://www.eiketsu-taisen.com/
The community is very active on (what's left of) X/Twitter, as it's used for guilds and matches in the official site https://taisengumi.jp/. Tournaments and friendly games are scheduled daily, and there is an active competitive scene.
The saga also has great social media presence, posting top matches on youtube daily, for example this Godzilla vs Kingkong combat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVc-zl7xEzM or nailbaiters like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHUYPSdyywE
Lastly, the illustration in each new set get an accompanying artbook. For older versions, the community wrote fanzines including card strategies and annuarys of tournaments and winners.
What about the other games?
SEGA has always been very liberal about borrowing their licenses to other companies. In the case of Sangokushi Taisen, there has been a tie-in IP for some games that never took over the mainline ones. The most important ones are:
* Two Nintendo DS games (2007 and 2008), which I'll cover in another section
* A PC port called INFINITY ONLINE (2012): it was available only in China and lasted for a couple of years. Not a lot of info is easily accessible today.
* A TCG tie-in for Sengoku Taisen (2012): A decent game that never took off. It even got an English translation before being discontinued.
* SGST Mobile (Active): This version goes autobattler, with a focus on puzzle fights. Sadly all the game mechanics have been Skinner Boxed, from General acquisition to leveling individual armor pieces you can fit them with to give an extra 0.01% attack power.
* Blockchain-based PC Game (2024): This made the news as the first project where SEGA would tie-in Web3 technologies. Announced in early 2022 at the heyday of Web3, a late launch in early 2024 now that the crypto hype's all gone is not looking too great. Same as the Mobile version, it's an auto-battler version of the game.
Can I play right now?
In 2008, SEGA commissioned the Japanese developer Alpha Unit to develop two ports for Nintendo DS: Sangokushi Taisen (2007) and Sangokushi Taisen Ten (2008). They had all the bells and whistles: the latest revisions of the cards, a single-match mode, and a multi-episode campaign narrating the tales of Lu Bu, Liu Bei, Zhuge Liang, Cao Cao and the rest of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms crew. To pepper it all, local and online multiplayer without any restrictions.
https://kimimithegameeatingshemonster.com/2019/09/24/getting-it-right-by-doing-it-wrong/
The good
These two games are playable, today, on your favorite physical or virtual machine. I would love for other people to experience what a good game this is without having to travel to a smoke-ridden corner of an arcade in Osaka.
But! there are two blockers that I have been fighting and are the reason why I'm writing this article. With limited skills and time to solve these blockers, I fear the game will fade into subculture obscurity, and remain "that arcade card game everywhere in Akihabara" for unknowing tourists.
The ugly
The game uses WFC, a Nintendo technology for online games that was shut down in 2014. Since then two main emulators have kept the WFC communities alive: wimmfi and altwfc. Sadly, neither supports the game today.
* wimmfi uploaded a misconfigured file for the game that has not been updated in a decade.
* altwfc supports the game, but only in a private branch that is not being actively developed anymore.
So, being able to play online today would be just there if one or two people spent a few minutes on it. I've tried wimmfi's Patreon, official Forums and DMs in reddit; to no response.
The bad
Sangokushi Taisen Ten is in perfect Japanese, which most of us don't speak. Every menu, every card, and every skill are all very text-heavy and language-dependent. It is hard to build an army where you don't know what half of your cards do, or play a campaign without knowing the objectives. Sadly, OCR works poorly on the game due to the tiny simplified font they had to use to fit on the NDS screen.
Over the years I found some translated resources from SEA communities, machine-translated some myself, bought guide books, and even traveled to the arcades in Japan where some nice players taught me to play online on the actual machines. I know it is possible to have the important content translated.
But romhacking for Nintendo DS is a specialized skill, and this game is a rarity even amongst those. The game strings are locked and stored in a proprietary format that needs to be reverse-engineered. Last year one specialist was able to build a proof of concept that made me the happiest man of the day.
But there is more work to be done, the string extraction tool needs to be completed, the translation applied, and the whole package to be tested and released. The specialist is not available and there aren't many left from the NDS romhacking community who are willing to take a commision.
How do I get started then?
The recommend way would be finding a copy of Sangokushi Taisen Ten for Nintendo DS. They go for $10-$20 on the internet these days. It runs in Nintendo 3DS too.
Then, watching one of the tutorial videos in the official channel, and jumping into the Battle Training mode. A 100 challenging battles are awaiting you!
If you have disassembly technical skills and would like to take a stab at patching the translation, please reach out to me in here, @pacoworks on twitter or /u/pakoito on Reddit.
The tl;dr is the game's Street Fighter does real-time tactics via TCG; or an arcade version of Total Warhammer's battles.
It's on NDS with moonrunes only and the online could be fixed if a German paid me attention for 30 minutes.
If you have disassembly skills and would like to take a stab at patching the translation, please reach out to me in here, @pacoworks on twitter or /u/pakoito on Reddit.
------
In 2005 SEGA, the company known for giving a shot at games that should have never worked, found a premise 15 years ago that's gone unchallenged ever since: what if we brought Real Time Tactics to the arcades?
Entering the Taisen games:
Sangokushi (Romance of Three Kingdoms in China)
Sengoku (Warring States in Japan)
Eiketsu (Free For All)
So what is it playing a Taisen game like
In this top-down strategy game you build an army of Generals represented by 3-8 physical cards; and send them to destroy the enemy castle by staying near it. It sounds simple because it is. It's cool ancient warriors scoring touchdowns!
The two health bars of the opposing castles dominate the top of the screen and tell you who is currently winning. A timer with 99 Japanese seconds (~300 real-time seconds) also sits in between the bars. The castles also double down as the place where Generals go to heal or resurrect after falling in battle.
From there we get to the visualization screen: a 3D representation of the battlefield, in all its pixelated glory. A 3/4 camera tracks the action, automatically following key events such as unit movement, skill activatios or combats. It zooms into the action of the armies clashing, and pans out when everyone is back to their castles to recharge. A minimap gives a full overview of health, readiness and orientation for all units on the battlefield.
But that is all visual candy. The real game is played on your commanding mat.
In this mat you place the cards that represent your Generals. The mat is as big as the main screen, and your card's positions and orientations are individually tracked in it. Thus, you get the most comfortable controller possible: your hands sliding and flinging your units around the mat, telling them where they should be placed and oriented. No mouse APM, no touchscreen taps, just hands moving cards with finger and palm.
The match starts with a FIGHT! banner and a lound gong sound. These have been an staple ever since the first release.
Once in the match, the feeling is unlike anything you've played before, as the game gets going from the first second. You'll be moving your lines like a poker player shifting chip stacks. You'll flicker cards back to the castle to heal them while you're focused on the attack. You'll desperately _lean on the mat_ trying to reach for those archers you left behind half a battlefield away. You'll be guiding 5 cavalries, 2 in one hand and 3 in the other, to perfectly pincer your enemy's rear while the frontline keeps their spearman occupied.
If a unit makes it to the enemy castle and no opposing General engages them, the enemy castle and thus that player's health bar takes damage. Killing units won't win you the game, but not defending you castle will surely net you a lose.
Once your Generals manage to survive long enough to barely take down the enemy castle within the time limit, you're rewarded with a victory scene and move on to the next game.
The 3-5 minutes you get out of a match are exhilarating. It's the kick you get from a good Smash Bros game set, a MOBA match, or a good round in Valorant...minus all the toxicity. Pure arcade energy that leaves you wanting to put another quarter (or tap your player NFC card in 2023) and play one more game.
And that's only the tip of the iceberg. The game has a "mana" system where every unit has at least one active skill you have to activate with a BIG RED BUTTON on the machine. You also get a General or an Item with another skill that can be used once per game with a BIG BLUE BUTTON. Some Generals have setup abilities like a Sneak Attack on their first clash, or bringing a Fence or a Cannon into the battlefield. Others have passives such as regeneration, larger aura of influence, or being great at duels. In modern versions Generals have a Presence stat that can trigger damage to the enemy castle if they remain on the enemy field for long enough.
These skills and damage effects are beautifully animated, each with its own CGI scene, which - my only critique to the game - get repetitive after playing the same army for a while.
To keep the game balanced and with plenty of army variety, there exists a rock-paper-scissors system between archery-cavalry-pikemen, and stronger units take more of the 8 army building points you get. There are also siege units, weak to everything, and swordsmen who are neutral with everyone. Modern versions of the game include gunmen, elephants and even cannons.
Each unit type has one shared ability: cavalries are fast can charge after running around for a bit, pikemen deal DoT in the direction you point them, archers are ranged, gunmen can load and fire several times in a row, elephants smash through units, and siege is deadly if they reach the enemy castle.
Same as with your favorite gacha or your Heartstone decks, different armies excel at different strategies. Fan favorites are present: "go wide" with cheap and weak Generals buffed by a single Grand General, "burn" Mages with board-wipe skills and their bodyguards, "all-for-one" strategies where a General gets all buffs and proceeds to one-shot the castle, ninja armies where the enemy cannot see you, debuff-based armies... Sega has had plenty of time to experiment with metagames over the game's many iterations.
The game does not have an equal in the market. Other games do parts of it, mostly indie wargames and a house name such as Total War, but none manages to capture the arcade-ness of it and the charm of the individual Generals barking orders in perfect VA.
How big is this saga really?
Arcades are a dying breed in Japan. Hit by covid, SEGA sold most of its arcade division to GiGO in 2022. But, they kept the Taisen saga. The latest version of the game, Eiketsu Taisen (2022), has hundreds of locations all across Japan. It boasts local and online PvP on top of the PvE modes.
On any given afternoon, you can walk to these arcades and a handful of businessman, cigarette in mouth, will send their fully buffed Lu Bu or Nobunaga Oda out to tear through your starter deck without any mercy. On weekends, you can watch tournaments from the sideline.
The game has frequent one-off events where you can PvE against bossified versions of generals, and even tie-ins with other manga and anime IPs such as Kingdom.
SEGA keeps an official website that you can use to find arcades, keep track of your collection and trade cards with other players. It also tracks your progress and rankings in the global an regional standings https://www.eiketsu-taisen.com/
The community is very active on (what's left of) X/Twitter, as it's used for guilds and matches in the official site https://taisengumi.jp/. Tournaments and friendly games are scheduled daily, and there is an active competitive scene.
The saga also has great social media presence, posting top matches on youtube daily, for example this Godzilla vs Kingkong combat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVc-zl7xEzM or nailbaiters like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHUYPSdyywE
Lastly, the illustration in each new set get an accompanying artbook. For older versions, the community wrote fanzines including card strategies and annuarys of tournaments and winners.
What about the other games?
SEGA has always been very liberal about borrowing their licenses to other companies. In the case of Sangokushi Taisen, there has been a tie-in IP for some games that never took over the mainline ones. The most important ones are:
* Two Nintendo DS games (2007 and 2008), which I'll cover in another section
* A PC port called INFINITY ONLINE (2012): it was available only in China and lasted for a couple of years. Not a lot of info is easily accessible today.
* A TCG tie-in for Sengoku Taisen (2012): A decent game that never took off. It even got an English translation before being discontinued.
* SGST Mobile (Active): This version goes autobattler, with a focus on puzzle fights. Sadly all the game mechanics have been Skinner Boxed, from General acquisition to leveling individual armor pieces you can fit them with to give an extra 0.01% attack power.
* Blockchain-based PC Game (2024): This made the news as the first project where SEGA would tie-in Web3 technologies. Announced in early 2022 at the heyday of Web3, a late launch in early 2024 now that the crypto hype's all gone is not looking too great. Same as the Mobile version, it's an auto-battler version of the game.
Can I play right now?
In 2008, SEGA commissioned the Japanese developer Alpha Unit to develop two ports for Nintendo DS: Sangokushi Taisen (2007) and Sangokushi Taisen Ten (2008). They had all the bells and whistles: the latest revisions of the cards, a single-match mode, and a multi-episode campaign narrating the tales of Lu Bu, Liu Bei, Zhuge Liang, Cao Cao and the rest of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms crew. To pepper it all, local and online multiplayer without any restrictions.
https://kimimithegameeatingshemonster.com/2019/09/24/getting-it-right-by-doing-it-wrong/
The good
These two games are playable, today, on your favorite physical or virtual machine. I would love for other people to experience what a good game this is without having to travel to a smoke-ridden corner of an arcade in Osaka.
But! there are two blockers that I have been fighting and are the reason why I'm writing this article. With limited skills and time to solve these blockers, I fear the game will fade into subculture obscurity, and remain "that arcade card game everywhere in Akihabara" for unknowing tourists.
The ugly
The game uses WFC, a Nintendo technology for online games that was shut down in 2014. Since then two main emulators have kept the WFC communities alive: wimmfi and altwfc. Sadly, neither supports the game today.
* wimmfi uploaded a misconfigured file for the game that has not been updated in a decade.
* altwfc supports the game, but only in a private branch that is not being actively developed anymore.
So, being able to play online today would be just there if one or two people spent a few minutes on it. I've tried wimmfi's Patreon, official Forums and DMs in reddit; to no response.
The bad
Sangokushi Taisen Ten is in perfect Japanese, which most of us don't speak. Every menu, every card, and every skill are all very text-heavy and language-dependent. It is hard to build an army where you don't know what half of your cards do, or play a campaign without knowing the objectives. Sadly, OCR works poorly on the game due to the tiny simplified font they had to use to fit on the NDS screen.
Over the years I found some translated resources from SEA communities, machine-translated some myself, bought guide books, and even traveled to the arcades in Japan where some nice players taught me to play online on the actual machines. I know it is possible to have the important content translated.
But romhacking for Nintendo DS is a specialized skill, and this game is a rarity even amongst those. The game strings are locked and stored in a proprietary format that needs to be reverse-engineered. Last year one specialist was able to build a proof of concept that made me the happiest man of the day.
But there is more work to be done, the string extraction tool needs to be completed, the translation applied, and the whole package to be tested and released. The specialist is not available and there aren't many left from the NDS romhacking community who are willing to take a commision.
How do I get started then?
The recommend way would be finding a copy of Sangokushi Taisen Ten for Nintendo DS. They go for $10-$20 on the internet these days. It runs in Nintendo 3DS too.
Then, watching one of the tutorial videos in the official channel, and jumping into the Battle Training mode. A 100 challenging battles are awaiting you!
If you have disassembly technical skills and would like to take a stab at patching the translation, please reach out to me in here, @pacoworks on twitter or /u/pakoito on Reddit.
Last edited:
