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News: Sakura Wars Debuts In America

Posted on : 02-04-2010 | By : | In : News

Hardware: ,

5

America has finally received a game from the long-running Sakura Wars series. It may have taken a decade or so longer than the fans had anticipated, but I’ve got a copy of the PS2 Premium Edition in my grubby little paws right now, and can confirm that, yes, this this release has actually happened, after years of false hope, wild rumors, and constant delays.

We’ve written about this game before, but for those of you who haven’t been playing along at home during the thirteen-year wait to see one of these games in English, here’s the short version: Sakura Wars is a strategy RPG series that started out on the Saturn and was one of the few landmark titles that Sega was able to develop for their ailing competitor to the original Sony PlayStation, and quickly grew to popularity in Japan because of its (then) unique combination of sexy, steampunk robots and sexy, talkative women, with game mechanics that rewarded the player for their ability to chat up girls with better units to use in the strategy RPG portion of the game. While it did well enough to get live theater performances in Japan, anime hadn’t yet hit any sort of popularity in America and at the time no one was willing to take the chance on what would be an incredibly niche product.

Times have changed, though, and Nippon Ichi’s American branch announced they were bringing over Sakura Wars 5 as Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love on both the PlayStation 2 and the Wii, and unlike all the other false starts over the years, I have physical evidence that the game is out in my native language. After all these years, it’s finally here.. While our younger audience probably fails to appreciate why Sakura Wars’ strategy RPG gameplay paired with visual-novel style focus on relationships was so shocking to gamers on this side of the Pacific back in the nineties, old men like myself (23 years old) remember when both strategy RPGs and dating sims were extremely niche genres, never mind a game containing both. Seeing a game in the series make it to market not only fulfills a personal dream of mine, it also shows how cosmopolitan the video game marketplace has become. So what are you waiting for? Grab either the PlayStation 2 or Wii versions now!

Expect us to review this at some point in the future, although given the site’s nature, we’ll probably have more to say about the pretty robots than the pretty girls.

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Comments (5)

It is true–patience is a virtue. It is great news to hear about it this finally making to the US.

I do hope to pick this up (and it’s also because I’m a Fujishiima fan as well).

AGH! I’m still waiting on my pre-order!
They just mailed in on the 31st!

Yeah, it is kind of hard to believe that this series is finally coming to the US. I have the Complete Box for Dreamcast, and love all the games, especially the third one which is easily a top 5 DC game, IMO.

Unfortunately I’ve heard nothing good about SW5. So, I guess this is like SRW coming to the US, but only the OG series. It’ll be cheap, it’ll be in English, so I’ll probably buy it, but there is no guarantee I’ll like it that much or even that I’ll finish it.

SW5 is great apart from the lame main character who isnt a patch on Ogami. The gameplay is utterly amazing, mixing the sky battles of Skies of Arcadia with the tactical battles of the amazing Valkyria Chronicles.

“Utterly amazing”? That would be a first for a SW game.

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