Sega just showed off the first footage of the new Sakura Wars game that was announced last year at the their annual Sega Fes event in Japan. For those of you that are unfamiliar with the series, Sakura Wars is an RPG franchise that was huge in Japan during the late 90s and early 2000s and was one of Sega's most popular franchises at the time. The games are set in an alternate-history Taisho Era Japan that combines strategy RPG gameplay, featuring steampunk style mechs, with adventure segments that have dating sim elements. This newest game takes place in 1940, about a decade after the previous games in the series, and stars a completely new cast of characters.

The creator of the Bleach manga series, Tite Kubo, is designing the characters this time around instead of Kousuke Fujishima, who designed the characters in past entries. Jiro Ishii, the man who directed and wrote 428: Shibuya Scramble, is writing the story and Kouhei Tanaka is returning once again to compose the game's soundtrack. The game is set to be released for the PlayStation 4 at the end of 2019 in Japan and Sega has already announced that the game will be localized and released in the West in Spring 2020.

I'm a big fan of the series and have been writing about Sakura Wars here and there since I joined Giantbomb in 2010. I saw the trailer stream live as it was announced and it looks to be pretty much everything I wanted in a sequel in terms of production values (it even looks like the game might be running on the Yakuza series' new Dragon Engine but that is just a personal guess). Honestly, not sure how I feel about the new character designs but everything else looks wonderful. It has been 9 years since the last mainline game, So Long, My Love, was released in the US and almost 15 years since the title was published in Japan so it is super awesome to see the franchise coming back in a big way.

Anyone else interested or excited about the new Sakura Wars?

Think I remember being in your previous thread when this was first announced, still excited for this game!

Not too thrilled about Tite Kubo being in charge of character design but I'll survive. The trailer definitely got me excited just from seeing the apparent step up in production values which might bode well for my hopes of more expansive maps to shake up the gameplay.

Cool! Don't really know much about the series but hey, I'm all for more JRPGs getting localized.

@imhungry: Yeah you did commented my blog post about the announcement. And yes, I'm not really digging the character designs either. The main leads look fine, if a little uninteresting, but a lot of the other characters in the group look kind of bad in my opinion. I was sort of hoping that if Kousuke Fujishima did not return to design the characters then maybe someone like Hidenori Matsubara would take over, who did the ingame designs and a lot of the promotional artwork for the series. Oh well, everything else looks amazing and maybe the designs will grow on me over time. Can't wait to see what the battle and adventure segments will look like.

@sparky_buzzsaw: If you want to learn more about the series I would highly recommend this video that summarizes the history of the franchise (although it is rather long).

Wasn't there only one other Sakura Wars game that actually made it over here? 2010, huh? Wow.

Honestly, the idea of a game that's half dating-sim, half mech strategy game sounds right up my degenerate alley, so I guess I'll be keeping an eye on this.

@arbitrarywater: Yup, only the fifth entry in the series, called So Long, My Love, was ever released in English courtesy of NISA. Sakura Wars is a lot of fun and if you like Valkyria Chronicles then definitely give it a look (although the gameplay split is more 75% dating-sim and 25% mech strategy game, at least in the older games).

Remember hearing about this last night and raising my arms with an excited "Yes!" I enjoyed "So Long, My Love" and the Sakura Wars TV anime.

I knew Tite Kubo sounded familiar to me. Realizing that he's the Bleach dude, those character designs started to make sense. I can't recall Fujishima ever making characters that...busty.

I can't wait to hear more of the music, especially the character image songs. I might have to keep an eye out for new Sakura Wars CDs.

Will have to keep an eye out for this one, it sounds right up my alley!