Sengoku Basara is basically a more anime version of Dynasty Warriors which is a series that widely gets panned by many people because it’s just repetitive and mindless. Which it kind of is… Actually it entirely is that. When people write about game design they tend to write about how games allow us to explore worlds, narratives, characters. They talk about the importance of mastery, competition and learning. Which is all great, I love games that do those things…

But sometimes I want to shut off my mind too.

I’ve written about my enjoyment of Sengoku Basara in the past briefly, but I really do adore my time with it. And recently, showing it to a dear housemate of mine, alongside a number of other games I usually also consider kind of bad but enjoyable, there is some real value in these relaxing time sinks. He gets his mastery, learning, improvement and challenge from his tap dancing, he doesn’t need nor want that from these games. Despite constantly asking every time I see the menu to pick difficulty, he will consistently pick “easy” mode. Not because he can’t do normal, but because he wants to just breeze through, relax and enjoy the catharsis of beating up lots and lots of people.

I don’t think Sengoku Basara should be held up as an example of a modern masterpiece at all, but I do think sometimes we are too quick to dismiss a number of games from a design perspective, when in reality while these games have very different goals than we would normally consider good, you can’t deny they achieve what they intend. Simple button mashing with nice fun results that requires JUST enough attention to keep your mind busy, but not enough to be stressful or demand significant improvement. And in the case of Sengoku Basara with surprisingly little padding and very few addictive hooks other than levels, which feel very minimal at best.

Sometimes, a game can just be an enjoyable silly timesink just like a lot of random american action movies. And you can even get honestly great mindless action movies, even though no one would consider them the height of cinema, and this is just fine.

(of course, this doesn’t mean I don’t want all the high end games that are considered important, it’s just recognizing that there is something to learn from the “shallow games” too)