News: Sakura Wars 5 English Screenshots Released
Posted on : 25-11-2009 | By : Tollmaster | In : News
Hardware: Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 2
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Niche gaming news site SiliconEra posted a veritable deluge of Sakura Wars screenshots, this time with English text. We don’t have a solid release date for Sakura Wars’ release date yet other than a vague “Winter 2009/2010″, but the English screenshots imply that the localization is coming along nicely.
The official site for Sakura Wars has been updated fairly regularly, and unlike a few other Nippon Ichi America official sites, it seems to be written by someone with a good grasp on English, so feel free to give it a read. If you’re interested in a strategy RPG with beautiful girls and stubby mecha, it’s probably worth at least a look (fans of beautiful mecha and stubby girls need not apply). Keep in mind the game we’re getting as “Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love” is really Sakura Wars 5 in Japan, as the West have never before received a localized version of the game, and presumably Nippon Ichi America doesn’t want customers getting scared off by the lack of the other four installments. It’s kind of like how America’s Final Fantasy 3 was really Japan’s Final Fantasy 6.
I’m still mad they didn’t choose the PS2 remake of the first one. It would have tied in perfectly with the already available English versions of the TV series, the three OVA series, the theatrical feature, and the manga series. I blame the marketing scum. Ignoring the already established core fanbase and trying to sell their game to people who aren’t interested in it in more than a passing kind of way seems to be their trademark move these days.
Oh well, I guess I’ll have to continue listening to Sakura Taisen OVA watchers who lament that the plot seems to require background knowledge from the never translated videogame of the same name.
I’m a bit of a Nippon Ichi fanboy myself, so by my nature I like to defend them whenever I can, so you should know that up front. Still, I don’t think Nippon Ichi America chose Sakura Taisen V over any of the others on purpose–either it was a financial decision or a rights decision. I’d imagine Sega is either a bit more careful about the rights to the primary games in the series or the more recent installment was easier to hand off for localization–maybe in the latter case the team and source code were still together and fresh for adapting the localization (it’s always sounded like Nippon Ichi America sends off their translations to an outside agency in interviews, rather than touching any code themselves).
Or maybe Sega just didn’t want to hand off a potentially rich franchise to a small company, and wanted instead to let them test the waters with a more recent, but less important, installment. Or they didn’t trust them with something potentially important. Nippon Ichi America seems to be the “low risk, low return” of localization companies, and Sega might have wanted too much money for something that COULD make money, but was also a somewhat risky endeavor from NISA’s perspective.
Or maybe the original Sakura Taisen rights are tied up because of the anime releases, in a fashion similar to how the various rights holders to anime in America prevent Super Robot Wars games from making it to America.