SENGOKU TRANCE

Oda Nobunaga does not win battles with armies. He wins them from behind a set of decks.

Three rival warlords stand between him and the country, and each one is a stage: a track, a chart, and a man who raves back. Beat the chart, break the warlord. The Sengoku wars, refought at 145 BPM, played completely straight.

How to play

Four lanes run down the screen. Notes come at you from across the decks, and you hit each one as it crosses the line at the bottom.

key	lane
D	1
F	2
J	3
K	4

Arrow keys work too. ENTER confirms, R retries, H opens how-to-play, C opens the credits.

• A clean hit takes RESOLVE off your rival.
• A miss takes COMPOSURE off Nobunaga.
• Drive his RESOLVE to zero and he breaks — the duel ends there, in triumph.
• Lose all your COMPOSURE and you fall, and the set collapses.
• Survive the track with him still standing and it is a narrow win on points.

Timing is graded four ways: KIWAMI (極, perfect) inside 45 ms, SHIN (真) inside 90, KA (可) inside 140, and KUZURE (崩) beyond that. Combo builds a multiplier up to x4, and a miss resets it — so a duel is won by staying clean, not by hitting hard.

Calibrate first. The card on the title screen measures your own timing so the game judges you and not your hardware.

The three duels

桶狭間 OKEHAZAMA	Imagawa Yoshimoto	142 BPM
長篠 NAGASHINO	Takeda Katsuyori	146 BPM
本能寺 HONNŌ-JI	Akechi Mitsuhide	150 BPM

Each has its own track, its own chart and its own place. Okehazama runs in the rain, Nagashino behind a wall of gunsmoke, Honnō-ji with the whole hall on fire. Clear all three without a single miss and the last one ends differently.

Worth seeing

• The drop. The chart thins out through the build, you get a moment to breathe, and then everything comes back at once. It is the best part of every track and the hardest part of every chart.
• The stage behind the lanes. Nobunaga and his rival face each other across the decks under a great vermillion torii, with a crowd banked either side of the highway and a light rig that moves on the beat. They dance, they flinch when they are hit, and they break when their resolve is gone.
• The staged beats. Every duel opens and closes with a scene, spoken aloud and printed on screen. The chronicle keeps score in its own flat voice.
• The three places. They are the same architecture lit three completely different ways, and the last one is on fire.

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Play it with the sound on. Every track is a full psytrance arrangement written to the exact tempo its chart is authored in, and the game is largely about listening.