Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings
Anime adaptation of Capcom's action game series, depicting a wildly over-the-top version of the Sengoku period. The series features Azuchi Castle as Oda Nobunaga's dramatic fortress, Osaka, Odawara (Hojo clan stronghold), and various other castles as battle stages. While heavily fictionalized, the castle names and their associated clans closely mirror history.
Castles featured
Osaka Castle
大阪城 · Osaka-jo
📍 Osaka — Kansai
Japan's most famous castle story wrapped in a 1931 concrete tower — the history is spectacular, even if the building isn't original.
Sendai Castle
仙台城 · Sendai-jo
📍 Miyagi — Tohoku
The mountain stronghold of the One-Eyed Dragon — where Date Masamune's equestrian statue surveys the city he founded, from ruins that speak of a castle that never needed a main tower.
Odawara Castle
小田原城 · Odawara-jo
📍 Kanagawa — Kanto
The castle that Hideyoshi could not storm — famous less for its tower than for the legendary city-swallowing earthworks and the indecisive council that became a Japanese proverb.
Ueda Castle
上田城 · Ueda-jo
📍 Nagano — Chubu
The castle that humiliated Tokugawa twice — Ueda's surviving turrets are modest, but the history of Sanada Masayuki's impossible victories makes it one of Japan's most compelling castle sites.
Azuchi Castle
安土城 · Azuchi-jo
📍 Shiga — Kansai
The most historically important castle in Japan — Nobunaga's revolutionary 1579 masterpiece that invented the Japanese castle as we know it, gone after three years, its foundations still visible under the trees.