Last year in Japan, the
Sakura Wars series had an art exposition event titled “Sakura Taisen Art Festival 2017”, selling exclusive goods and exposing art by Hidenori Matsubara, the main illustrator of the series along with Kousuke Fujishima. The event will be coming back again this year as “Sakura Taisen Art Festival 2018”.
It will be held from December 21 to 26 at Gallery Epicute in Chiyoda, Tokyo, and from December 27 to 29 at Akihabara UDX’s 4th Floor UDX Gallery.
Just like last year, some of the art pieces by Hidenori Matsubara will be on sale, and exclusive goods will be sold at the venue as well.
Furthermore, two talk show events were announced. The first one will be with Matsubara-san and held on December 24. Matsubara-san will go over his work on
Sakura Wars and comment some of his pieces. Anyone will be able to attend. An autograph session will be held once the talk show is over, but only the first 100 people who bought the “Sakura Taisen Original 2019 Calendar”, sold at the event starting December 21, will be able to get an autograph.
The second talk show will be held on December 30 at Akihabara UDX ‘s 4th Floor UDX Theater, with all five voice actresses of the Paris Kagekidan girls from
Sakura Wars 3:
- Noriko Hidaka/Erica Fontaine
- Saeko Shimazu/Glycine Bleumer
- Etsuko Kozakura/Coquelicot
- Kikuko Inoue/Lobelia Carlini
- Yoshino Takamori/Hanabi Kitaoji
Only 100 people will be able to attend the talk show, by winning a lottery. You’ll get one lottery ticket for each purchasable exposed illustration you buy, or for each 3000 yen(tax included) worth of goods you buy.
I don’t think they’ll reveal anything about
New Sakura Wars/Shin Sakura Taisen during the event, but if they do, you can be sure you’ll hear about it here. They might hint at whether their characters will return or not if they announce that they will record for the game or started recording.
Fifty pieces will be exposed in total during the event. You can find below samples of some of the pieces that’ll be exposed and the goods scheduled to be sold: the calendar, postcards, shikishi, coasters and capsule toys. I don’t think anyone reading this and actually planning to go to the event won’t notice by themselves when checking the
official sitebeforehand, but keep in mind that the coasters and capsule toys will only be sold starting December 27 at Akiba UDX. Lastly, if you attend the event in cosplay starting December 27, you’ll get for free a badge featuring Ratchet Altair.
New Sakura Wars/Shin Sakura Taisen was
announced back in April. The game will be for
the latest platforms and will be released who knows when but
after March 2019. You can read a few comments
by Sega’s CEO here. According to
Sega’s Toshihiro Nagoshi, we’ll get a first look on
New Sakura Wars soon, and it’ll look so good it’ll surprise us. Meanwhile, there’s a new
Sakura Taisen mobile game currently in activity in Korea, and
China is getting one too.
