Sengoku Basara Samurai Heroes Coming To US

Capcom announced at the Tokyo Game Show that they have a new title coming out in 2010 for Western audiences titled “Sengoku Basara Samurai Heroes,” which will be hitting the Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii. Set during a tumultuous period of Japanese history, Sengoku Basara Samurai Heroes allows players to take up the swords of more than a dozen fierce samurai warriors in huge battles against hundreds of opponents. Players will be able to unlock playable characters, as well as supporting generals who will make it easier to command and lead armies, with the ultimate goal of re-writing history to rule all of 16th century Japan. The action is fast paced and stylish, taking combat cues from producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi’s other big series, Devil May Cry. The game’s main campaign will be the same on the Wii and Playstation 3, with the addition of online co-op for the Playstation 3.

Sengoku Basara had already built a strong following in Japan by the time Samurai Heroes appeared at Tokyo Game Show, thanks to the numbered mainline entries plus a Heroes spin-off, and a Sengoku Basara anime adaptation had also debuted earlier that same year, expanding the property well beyond its original games. Samurai Heroes represented one of Capcom’s more concerted pushes yet to bring that established audience to Western console owners, following the original Sengoku Basara’s earlier Western release under a different title, which had introduced English-speaking players to the series’ loose, heavily stylised take on Japan’s Sengoku period without carrying the Basara branding.

The Sengoku period itself, a lengthy stretch of civil war among rival Japanese warlords, has long supplied source material for the genre Samurai Heroes belongs to, one built around large-scale, one-against-hundreds battlefield combat. Where Basara’s take differs from other games in that space is in leaning further into exaggerated character designs and over-the-top special attacks rather than aiming for historical grounding, drawing several of its playable warriors from real historical figures reimagined with a heavier dose of stylisation and spectacle.

Producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi has moved between several of Capcom’s action franchises over the years, and the Tokyo Game Show announcement drew an explicit line between Samurai Heroes’ combat design and Devil May Cry’s, promising the same kind of stylish, combo-driven action applied to Basara’s much larger, army-scale battlefields. The addition of supporting generals who ease army command, alongside the option to unlock further playable characters, was pitched as a way to keep the action approachable for newcomers while still giving longtime fans of the series more warriors to master.