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The story
This week’s Famitsu cover featured a newly drawn commemorative illustration celebrating Sakura Wars’ 30th anniversary, bringing together protagonists from across the series’ history — but the protagonist of “New Sakura Wars,” produced by Toshihiro Nagoshi, was notably missing. On 5ch, reactions ranged from “Maybe even Sega treats the new game as a black mark on its history” to pointed criticism of the production process (“Shouldn’t the character designer of the latest game normally be the one asked to draw it?”). Opinions also diverged over the lineage of character design across the series and how to judge New Sakura Wars’ sweeping overhaul of the game system.
This week’s Famitsu cover: a newly drawn illustration celebrating Sakura Wars’ 30th anniversary
All the past protagonists are present — except the one from New Sakura Wars
New Sakura Wars was developed under Nagoshi’s direction
Source: dengekionline.com / Read the original article here
What people said
Probably a black mark even for the person who drew the latest game.
Makes you wonder — looking back at how Zelda "rethought its conventions," what was different [that let it succeed]?
Zelda never touched the core of the game — beating enemies, using items, solving puzzles, that core loop stayed intact. New Sakura Wars, on the other hand, literally tore everything down.
Breath of the Wild had some fresh ideas, sure, but I felt like it was basically a natural evolution of Wind Waker and Skyward Sword.
Actually, why'd they even cast people like Ayane Sakura, Saori Hayami, and Maaya Uchida for New Sakura Wars in the first place?
Are they out of their minds?
Somebody calm down and think this through.
Actually, this one was drawn by Matsubara.
People mix this up a lot, but Kosuke Fujishima only ever did the original character concepts for Sakura Wars 1 through 5 — the actual character designs and most of the artwork you see were done by veteran animator Hidenori Matsubara.
They were resting peacefully in their graves, and then get dug back up only to be kicked while down and reburied…
Do these developers have no heart at all?
At least with Dai, they finally finished the anime all the way through this time, so that part was good. Everything else, though… well, the manga running right now is good too.
Dai's fine outside of the games — it's just on a completely different level from Sakura.
Fujishima's take on Sakura Wars art looks completely different from what people who actually played the games are used to seeing, so it's easy to tell right away.
He ended up basically in the enemy boss slot instead of the protagonist slot anyway — and on Athrun's side, not Kira's, no less.
After seeing how that whole thing played out, any sane creator would steer clear of this IP. They buried the brand in more ways than one.
Same with Takashi Yamazaki on Dragon Quest: Your Story — he turned it down because he didn't know Dragon Quest, but Horii and Square Enix pushed him into it anyway. Seems like a lot of these disastrous projects come down to screwups that have nothing to do with the creator's own talent.
That was for the main game's key character design, not the anime. The sub-designer's heroine for the anime was cute, though.
Not totally sure about this, but here's the Kubo one:
Anyway, does Famitsu only ever do otaku-pandering covers these days? That's probably why sales keep dropping. Couldn't they just stick the otaku stuff on a "cover 2" on the back instead? lol
Sega moves too fast on everything — guess they jumped on the political-correctness bandwagon too early as well…
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Sakura Wars is a simulation RPG Sega released in 1996. New Sakura Wars, released in 2019, was produced by Toshihiro Nagoshi and featured a sweeping overhaul of both the battle system and character designs. Across the series’ history, Kosuke Fujishima has handled the original character concepts, while much of the actual artwork has been drawn by veteran animator Hidenori Matsubara — and in this thread, opinions were split over which artist’s style the new illustration more closely resembles. The fact that “only the protagonist is missing” is simply a matter of this particular illustration’s composition; it’s easy to misread this as an official announcement that New Sakura Wars has been discontinued or branded a franchise embarrassment, which it has not been. As commenters pointed out with the example of Shinn Asuka being left out of a Gundam 50th anniversary illustration, such “omissions” in commemorative art can simply come down to production circumstances, so a definitive judgment should be avoided.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “Sakura Wars 30th Anniversary Commemorative Illustration Leaves Out Only the Protagonist of Nagoshi’s New Sakura Wars….”
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