Only that many? I have no idea just how many games there are, but if that's a small number then that's unfortunate...
Judging by the tweets, despite making an announcement a week prior, they only downloaded games for three days before the shut down. I think they spent an entire day buying up tons of compatible phones.
It's 500 more games than there would have been, and I'm guessing the doors closed on J-Phones and EZweb years ago. Preservation and documentation requires people to step up and become experts - there's no magic internet fairy that'll do it all for you. I sat on this subject for years so I'm just as much to blame, but hey, there are other ways to waste brain cells.
https://vgmdb.net/album/93130 Something nasty, which is why I'm probably going to steer clear of it. This is a Sakura Taisen-related EP released in 2006 containing vocal tracks. What does it relate to? No idea. https://sakura-taisen.com/archives/goods/wavemaster8.html The first two Sakura Taisens are set in 1920s Tokyo. Then they focused on a (mostly) new cast in Paris, and in Sakura Taisen V, New York. So that's new characters, new songs, new... things. This CD post-dates the game but pre-dates the live shows, and might have music from both, or one, or neither. It's just the Sakura Taisen V cast singing things. They made six of these. サクラ大戦 レビュウ イン リトルリップ・シアター ～歌う♪大紐育♪～ Sakura Taisen Revue in Little Lip Theater: Utau ♪ Dai New York ♪ I've been dropping the ♪s since it's not valid English - no idea if I should be. Oh and for the record it's a really warped view of America.
snap back to reality oh there goes gravity Got the backlog down to ~20 Sakura Taisen DVDs and then this goes and ruins my day. The second Sakura Taisen OVA... on Video CD. A version intended for Singapore. Because Video CD is a thing in the far east, and Sakura Taisen is Sega's second biggest franchise after Sonic. And so follows rabbit holes. This is apparently a Hong Kong release. Official? Cant' say - there's only a picture of the front. And of course the first OVA has Video CD releases too. This one comes from Malaysia, and again, no idea if it's official, though I guess we'd still have to document it. How about this box set split over nine discs? Okay no more thanks. Oh yes there was a 30-disc box set wasn't there. That's why I've been hiding from this subject.
I'm sure there's lots of exceptions, but pirate VCDs generally came in plastic sleeves rather than proper cases.
I think this is the worst task I've given myself in nearly 12 years of Sega Retro. Maybe. I might be blocking some from my memory. サクラ大戦 新春歌謡ショウ 神崎すみれ引退記念公演「春恋紫花夢惜別」 Sakura Taisen Shinshun Kayou Show Kanzaki Sumire Intai Kinen Kouen "Haru Koi Murasaki Hana Yume Sekibetsu" Do you think it's a long enough title? Really easy to make mistakes when you have to translate so much, and I should know... because I keep making them. So what is the story with these stage productions? Well in the games, the characters perform revues, because the giant robots and demons are meant to be a secret. I'm not sure how much the games focus on this aspect, given the series is impenetrable for English audiences, but it was enough of a feature for Sega to actually bring it to real stages in Japan. These weren't broadway performances that went on for years though - the voice cast would be brought up on stage for a night or two a couple of times a year between 1997 and 2006. They got more elaborate with the introduction of the "Super Kayou Show" in 2002... I don't know how you'd describe it: This one is "actors playing the cast of Sakura Taisen, playing the cast of Journey to the West". You may know this as the 1970s TV series Monkey, or more likely, the foundations of Dragon Ball. Anyway the same "Japanese" cast did this for ten years, and then the documentation goes a little wonky. And that's because at this point, the Sakura Taisen games had established "troupes" in France and America... and the decision was made to use those casts instead. So despite suggesting they weren't going to have any more shows... they had more shows, including Sakura Taisen Budoukan Live: Teito-Paris-New York where you had all three sets of characters in one performance. And this went on until 2014 when they finally called it quits. Bearing in mind at this point it had been nearly a decade since the last important Sakura Taisen game. Also while I'm not totally sure how old the characters are meant to be, the some of the humans playing them are in their 50s, so the whole "talking to pretty girls dating simulator" starts to get a bit awkward. That and Sakura Taisen is set in 1920s Japan, and if you keep pushing forward in time... well. Apparently there is a newer set of shows with a prodominantly male cast rather than female. I'm not exploring that - chasing VHS cassettes and LaserDiscs is one thing but I really don't care about this subject.
jesus thats terrifying. I don't think I even wanna know what they were charging for this. Best of luck keeping up the strong pace.
Bear in mind that CDs were quite a bit cheaper than DVDs, so despite having a lower running time, 30 VCDs may have been cheaper than the equivalent in DVDs, or at least comparable.
Time to get off this crazy train: Category:Sakura Taisen (stage shows) The bulk of it is done. This page was big once and the series doesn't dominate anymore. There's a few weird DVDs and some CD singles I can't be bothered with, but yeah. That's not to say that Sakura Taisen is fully represented on Sega Retro. Far from it: - There's all these "drama CDs". I've been hesitant to start on these because there's a good chance they were aired on the radio at some point, and I have zero understanding on how radio works in Japan. - There's models. We have some, but that's because I like robots, less so Japanese anime girls. - This noise. There are Sakura Taisen trading card games which are probably quite elaborate. I wouldn't expect Pokémon levels of content, but no doubt there's more than you think. Oh and get used to scanning cards because there are thousands more to do. - And a whole lot of merchandise. And this site doesn't cover much before 2002 (and stops at 2018(?)), so it's by no means complete. But to be fair merchandise is something we're lacking across the board, so it's just as important to go after Sonic stuff at this stage - The physical venues. - Anything not-Japanese. And this is ignoring the fact half of my pages are little more than THIS EXISTS.
We really need to get a good (resident) Japanese translator... C'MON, GUYS ... SEGA IS MUCH MORE THAN SONIC...
Speaking of trading cards, it doesn't seem like we have any Craddass stuff on the wiki which seems to be a Sega/Bandai joint thing. This would include stuff like Bannou Bunka Nekomusume and Nadesico. Lots of cards to cover.
We missed this - this is "Sehagarion" (セハガリオン), a crossover between Sega Hard Girls and mobile game Super Robot Taisen X-Ω (that's "cross-omega"). 2017. Not to be confused with "Segarion" (セガリオン) from Sega's 2014 3DS game, Hero Bank
While looking for something completely different: "Grand Heat" (グランドヒート), unreleased Sega racing game! ... kinda. This was on display at the 2002 Tokyo Game Show, got quite a bit of coverage at the time but then disappeared from the release schedule. But you've probably played it. Or one of its sequels. Because it's Burnout. Sega were set to localise and release this in Japan, but it never happened. Maybe it was too late in the day? Maybe Sega fell out with Acclaim? Maybe something else? Burnout 2 made it to Japan (as "Burnout 2"), published by pre-merger Sammy by a strange coincidence, but Sega never touched the series again.
A new mystery to solve: Sega Mobile Friends, also known as "Sega Moba" was a service maintained by Sega between October 2001 and some point in 2013. It was a points system - play an arcade game, get points, use those points in exchange for gifts, all done through the wonders of Japanese feature phones. This was when Sega could charge money for a 118x114 image for use as a wallpaper. The service existed for years and I can't claim to understand it, however it is kind-of important, and there was a lot of exclusive merchandise that could only be obtained by spending these points. Such as... A Sega-branded toaster. and of course: Even more undocumented, limited time mobile games. This inadvertently helps us in another way too: https://web.archive.org/web/20011118220901/http://sega.jp/segamoba/ins.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20030622154941/http://www.sega.jp/segamoba/set.html By listing every arcade that used the service (Sega says about 300), this could answer some venue-related questions too. Oh and also... it has its own songs. Or as Google translate puts it, "You're mobbing! ?? I'm always mobbing! anywhere" https://web.archive.org/web/20080803035529/http://sega.jp/segamoba/song/index.html Sega replaced all this in 2013 with the Ponta system (which wasn't theirs).
Spot the difference: ... Oh of course, one's a second print... released two weeks later. So yes, this happens. It's not good enough to have one scan of Langrisser III Game Guide Book, apparently we need at least two. And I've seen this a few times now. I would be amazed if this happens in my lifetime.
Oh man, speaking of exactly this. Apparently we now need a scan of the Japanese re-release of Ecco the Dolphin. The cover artist got the number of stars wrong in the flavor text and the mistake wasn't noticed until after the fact. The one we need has a 5 in its front flavor text. "By the way, there’s actually a secret about the Japanese cover. The cover illustration shows him with five stars on his head, but the text says “atama ni nanatsu no hanten o motsu iruka” (“the dolphin with the seven stars on his head”). You only see that text on the early version; later printings corrected it." -Ryoichi Hasegawa in a 2004 interview.
I would have never caught that - usually when there's a cover reprint they change the part number, but not with Ecco it seems. It's not very scientific, but on ebay right now it's about a 50:50 split between "7 stars" and "5 stars" variants. Maybe more 7s, but neither version is "rare".
