Sakura Taisen 3: Is Paris Burning? (Dreamcast)

I'd always held some interest in Sakura Taisen the gal-game/robot SRPG series.  Eventually one did come to America, but it's the one that takes place in Japan's insane version of turn of the century America.  Also the girls your supposed to hold interest in look terribly boring.  So I ignored it in favor of this Dreamcast copy of 桜大戦３：～巴里は燃えているか～.  I think I got it when a friend was abandoning Japan.  He had also given me 2 broken dreamcasts and a saturn.  I never did get those dreamcasts to work or get a working dreamcast.  It's only back in the states on my US Launch dreamcast that I finally have a chance to find out if Paris IS burning.

It took me way too long to figure out 巴里 was "parii", Paris.  About 1/3rd of the vocals are actually voiced and so when I wasn't hovering over my DS looking up kanji I was thankful to hear ultra obscure stuff spoken.  This game is full of that.  It actually uses Japanese words for everything.  No "faito", "potion" etc.  Even their word for "mech" is a pile of kanji.  I appreciate this, in that it actually adapts something to Japanese instead of just using tons of katakanized English.  However it was a headache when words like "mechanic" were composed of about 5 kanji. 

Sakura Taisen is set up like anime TV shows (and most of the characters fall smugly in anime tropes).  The girls I had met were a Nun that carried around a machine gun and was a ditz and clutz.  About once an episode I had to get her out of jail because she had her machine gun out in public.  The stuck up strong blonde girl who I could absolutely never say the right thing to.  The moe~ 12 year old magician that thinks everyone has a good heart.  A Japanese ex-pat with a sad past.  And a 1000 year old women who can set fire to anything with the power of her mind, who switches between total bitch and come-hither.

I just got her into my party and everytime I said something positive to her, it pissed off the rest of my team.  So she was obviously both the "obvious, awesome" option and "GODHAND" mode. Because when the girls are pissed off at you they do worse in battle.  The battle I was just in I was no doing so well, because awesome girl was mildly positive and the rest were "you are sleeping on the couch."

So I guess I give up on the game.  It's not that entertaining to play through.  In fact it was frustrating, because a lot of the "choose what to say" actions are timed based, and that doesn't exactly give me enough time to look up a kanji I don't understand.  Other times it asks me to walk around town wasting time.  Then some of the other choice actions require I determine how strongly I say/do something. 

Man that pyro eternal girl is ultra cool sounding.  Why can't I play her in like, an action game.  She sets the Mona Lisa on fire to prevent a scorpion-woman from defacing it.  "Shit, she was going to do it anyways."  She was going to make the boring combat sections become impossibly harder though, I could tell.