Ikemen Sengoku is historical fictional with time-travel and weirdly romantic, time appropriate murderers. You're a young woman who recently moved to Tokyo and just landed your dream job in fashion design. While visiting a local memorial for Oda Nobunaga, a freak storm starts, and somehow you get sucked into a wormhole along with a stranger you met at the memorial. Now standing in a burning building, you manage to rescue the famous warlord, Nobunaga, and he wants you to rule the world with him.

Understandably, that's a lot to ask, and you're not even sure where you are or why, so you run away from the crazy guy claiming to be from 500 years in the past.

Let me tell you, Mai (MC) is my girl. She is so funny. She is so relatable. She is thirsty and awkward and just trying to make it through her time in the Sengoku period. I have heard that the English version has changed her personality a lot, and I'm okay with that. That's really the point in localizing content, to make it vibe with the audience. And Mai does that. After playing the OG prologue, I downloaded all the Ikemen games because of Mai. She was the best MC I had read up to that point.

You really don't have to know anything at all about Japan or the Sengoku period to enjoy this work. In fact, it might be better to not know anything, that way you won't cringe at the modernization and fictitious ways they portray history. I skipped over IkeVamp and picked up IkeSen because historical figures as vampires was not a comfortable idea for me, but that changed when I started reading IkeSen and since then I've done every Ikemen game released. Haha.

The key is to not take it too seriously, like everything that's supposed to be entertaining.

What You Get from SenEn

Sengoku Eternity will start with three full released routes from the OG game and three new characters from this app. As the app continues to get updates, already released routes from the previous game will be added, along with new routes that haven't yet been released (sequels to OG routes). I've dug up the old route release pictures and will post in order of my favorites.

Starting with Uesugi Kenshin! Ah, my first heterocrhomia love.

Kenshin is a fan favorite, though he hasn't won an election (that I know of). He's the pretty one that loves fighting, and he has a lot of trauma that he's not willing to work through. That's what wins me over, when they're utterly pathetic in some regard. He is yan-lite, if that's your thing. I mean, I'd call him a full on yandere, but there are a lot of connotations with that that people assume will happen, and none of those are Kenshin.

The summery is very accurate. MC does a lot of growth in Kenshin's route, and I love her in it. If you want to see the unflappable being shocked into speechlessness, this is your route. Kenshin is gap moe in so many ways, and now that I think about it, a lot of IkeSen guys are gap moe in some way. They like to write their guys as complete characters, and I appreciate that.

Ah, Date Masamune, what a scoundrel. We love a man with an eyepatch. Fun fact: Masamune is the only election winner other than Mitsuhide (iirc) for English. I didn't expect it either!

Okay, so, Masamune is voiced by the same seiyuu that does Leon Dompteur (IkePri), and it's funny to me that their routes are similarly chaotic and fun. Very different types of chaos, but very similar types of fun. I don't know what they mean by sexy being 7, he's so down bad he's making the moves as soon as he meets MC. Granted, the drama is also high and the romance is killer, but the ratings seem a little off to me.

Like every man from this time period, Masamune has a past. If you like complicated characters with trauma beyond your ability to process who have learned to cope in unhealthy ways, this is your route. Technically, that is most routes in IkeSen, so I hope you're good with some really broken guys. The good news is that MC doesn't play therapist in most cases.

Of course, Oda Nobunaga, Cybird's golden boy is on initial release. While poster boy, he actually doesn't win elections, but is still well loved.

He's okay, for me. Like, look, I don't really have anything bad to say about Nobunaga, but Mai is not at her best in his route, imo. She's realistic in her absolute freaking out about the situation, being thrust into a world full of war and lacking every modern convenience she's every known. I get it. But she gets very preachy about "killing is bad" and while realistic for a person from the modern day, she's lecturing a warlord who literally fought the entire continent of Japan in order to unify it.