Sakura Wars Will Bloom Once Again

The Sakura Wars series was one of Sega’s biggest mid-tier hits for nearly a decade, until they decided to give it a rest at the end of the PlayStation 2 era. Sega’s development teams instead set off to work on other projects, some of which were new properties. Now that those experiments are over, and since interest in older mid-tier franchises has been renewed, the franchise is coming back.

Sega confirmed at last year’s Sega Fes that a new Sakura Wars installment was in development, and teased it over time to ensure the announcement would remain on the minds of fans and others interested in its setting. The prolonged teasing was due to its development taking longer than expected, after it was delayed from the last fiscal year to this current one. It took until Sega Fes 2019 a year later for the company to finally reveal it.

The new game has been tentatively called Project Sakura Wars for western territories, and is known as Shin Sakura Taisen in Japan. (That’s literally translated as “New Sakura Wars,” a naming style that wouldn’t work in the west without sounding odd.) This game will continue the trend of previous installments in being a Japanese RPG with romance elements, with a main male protagonist surrounded by several female characters.

The game will be set in a romanticized and very colorful version of 1940s Imperial Tokyo, ten years after a disaster that led to the destruction of the Imperial Combat Revue of Tokyo, and the Imperial Theater where the global defense force operated. It will also be set 12 years after the last game in the franchise, Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love, which occurred in the late 1920s. That would place this game in the early 1940s, during World War II in our time, meaning Sega isn’t kidding about the romanticizing.

The main character will be Seijuurou Kamiyama, the leader of the New Combat Revue in Tokyo at the mere age of 20 years old. He’ll lead the charge against the enemy Kouma, who were previously involved in the wars that led to the annihilation of the original Combat Revue units in Tokyo, New York, and Paris. He’ll be joined by five female characters, all of whom are members of the unit.

Sakura Amamiya sticks out the most, who’s part of the Combat Revue’s Floral Division and admires Sakura Shinguji, one of the key characters from the previous games — if not the key character. There’s also Hatsuho Shinonome, a shrine maiden of the Shinonome Shrine that’s been passed down from one generation to another. The youngest of the group is Azami Mochizuki, a 13-year-old prodigy who practices the Mochizuki Style of ninjutsu. The oldest female character in the group is Anastasia Palma, who made a name for herself as a theater actress in Europe at 19 years old. Perhaps the most mysterious one is simply referred to as Claris, a girl from Luxembourg who loves reading books. We’ll see just how romantic Kamiyama can get with some of them, especially Mochizuki.

Sega is currently being vague about the gameplay details, outside confirming that it will have adventure and battle aspects. The adventure sections let players explore the Great Imperial Theater and the streets of Ginza, to enjoy the story and strengthen the bond between the main and female characters. These were the only sections focused on in the trailer, done so to show just how much of a leap this installment’s presentation will be over its predecessors. The 2D portraits are gone, with beautifully-animated 3D models in their place, accompanied by nice-looking environments.

The battle aspects will — act surprised — involve battles, but there’s no clarification as to whether these will be more traditional JRPG battles or a fusion between turn-based and strategy RPG battles. There’s a better chance of it being the latter, similar to previous installments.

The Sakura Wars series previously ended with the fifth mainline installment in 2005, when several members of the development team went to work on the Valkyria Chronicles series. There’s a good chance that franchise is now going on hiatus after Valkyria Chronicles 4 made a minimal impact sales-wise last year, so the team members have returned to Sakura Wars. Several lead staffers from the previous games are back on board, but there’s one key absence: This is the first installment where Kosuke Fujishima isn’t providing the character designs. They’re instead from Tite Kubo, known for the Bleach manga series. Kubo’s style is clearly different from Fujishima’s, but not to the point that it won’t work well with the overall Sakura Wars aesthetic.

It’s also clearly evident that Kubo provided the character designs by how two female characters represent the “Titty Kubo” archetype. This is notably the first time he’s contributing character designs to a video game that isn’t a Bleach adaptation, and it sounds like he doesn’t want this to be the last.

Project Sakura Wars will release for PlayStation 4 sometime this winter in Japan, and in western territories in spring 2020. This will be the first Sakura Wars title to be localized by Sega. The first four games were only released in Japan, while the fifth was the first installment to come westward thanks to NIS America. Unlike NISA’s effort, though, this title will only have Japanese voices, with subtitles in several other languages.

It will be a while before the game releases, but expect more info to be released on an intermittent basis from here on.