It is the day where 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim activates and deploys, a product that would have been a challenge under normal circumstances, but turned into a colossal undertaking considering everything that has transpired.
A thread.
I actually had the honor of visiting Vanillaware some time ago when the title was still in production, and the illustrious George Kamitani himself gave me a product overview of we'd ultimate be delivering.
I have to admit, at the time I didn't quite understand it...
Which meant it would be difficult to clearly communicate to users what it was. This held in true in Japan, and has also held true for the West. It's something you play and then understand, not the other way around.
As part of our grassroots efforts to promote SEGA and Project DIVA, Aaron had roped me into this initiative we called the DIVA Tour, a list of anime cons we went around to in 2013 and 2014, with panels and makeshift PDF1 booths.
One of the the cons we had signed up for was Kami-con in Birmingham AL. Neither of us knew anything about it, just that it was pretty local and in the South. I'm from the South, and Aaron is from the Midwest, so it was going to be a light weekend of interacting with fans.
Sakura Wars has always been one of those "would it be nice..." localization dream projects within the organization, but the opportunity has just never really presented itself nor honestly made sense to spin up. When development decided to spin this one up, we knew it was time.
Props to our dev team for taking on this daunting project, congrats to our Localization and QA staff (both internal and external) on their work on the project, and to our marketing/PR staff for getting out there and promoting this classic franchise!
Persona 5 Royal launchs today! Such a monumental undertaking all for our teams across the world. It's a culmination of two separate projects, and I'm so proud of the team that put it together.
This involved teams in Japan, Korea, the US, Italy, the UK, and Canada to create not only a massive game with more than 4 million JPCs of dialog and text, but get that into five languages (I'm not counting the Asian language version, that's a whole different beast).
While our internal team has always taking an artisan approach to Loc, their focus, capabilities, and tools have evolved over the past three years turning them into a mean J2E machine. The way the project played out internally is proof of that.
When we set the Yakuza Remasters in motion, I told the team that we unfortunately didn't have the time to reloc them from scratch and to focus on aligning with the post-Y0 styling and fixing inconsistencies. I gave them some pretty gnarly speed targets to keep it on track.
Well they did it. 6 million JPC later, we find ourselves with every mainline Yakuza title, in English, on one platform, worked by the same group under the same philosophy. That's probably over 10 million JPC done since 2016.
Considering where the series was in 2015, when we were in the middle of a massive corporate shift, moving offices while trying to ship Y5, everything has come so far.