PS4 exclusive Shin Sakura Taisen released on December 12 in Japan. The game is temporarily titled Project Sakura Wars in the west and will launch here in Spring 2020. We've played through the demo, so now we have done a similar Let's Play video for the first chapter of Project Sakura Wars, live translating on it: the go. Here are some tidbits on the game we'd like to share before presenting you the full video.

Just like in past games in the series, Project Sakura Wars doesn't let you save at any time; instead, it uses an autosave triggering after each dialogue or event. You can only manually save during the Eyecatch menu, which is accessible just before the chapter's battle and at the beginning of a new chapter. This might sound frustrating, but it isn't the case at all. The game is made this way so players can't cheat the LISP system, the dialogue choices. You can't pause during a dialogue choice either, as it'd defeat the purpose of the choices being timed. This is all to make the experience feel more realistic and natural. But it also means I sometimes don't have the time to translate all choices. There seems to be a pattern though, with the right choice being most of the time either a mean or perverted choice.

There are more unvoiced scenes that I expected. All the main story scenes are voiced so it's ultimately not a problem, but it's my sole disappointment so far. The game will probably still end up being one of my favorites of 2019. Unvoiced scenes still have some good direction and screenplay, which makes the lack of voices even more disappointing. The characters are constantly in motion, as Sega explained the characters express themselves with their body movements to be in touch with the theater theme of the Sakura Taisen series. I've voiced these scenes, live translating the dialogue as best as I could. I regularly use the pause button though so I have enough time to translate.

Another interesting aspect is how the game prevents you from skipping cutscenes unless you've already seen them. Sega did this on purpose so players don't rush through the game just to spoil others, and I think it's a good idea. Speaking of which, Sega also published spoilers guidelines for Shin Sakura Taisen. It basically asks to refrain from streaming the game past chapter 5 to avoid spoilers. Sharing functions are also blocked after that point. These guidelines will probably be relaxed after a few weeks.

Anyway, you can find the video below. It took me around three hours to play through the first chapter, and it was surprisingly great. Even as a fan of the series I certainly didn't expect to get this hooked into the game right from the beginning. The story developments are pretty surprising, and despite showing a lot before the release, Sega actually didn't spoil much.

We'll be publishing more Let's Play videos for Project Sakura Wars soon as we make our way through a few more chapters of the game. We're also planning to do similar videos for another current Japan-exclusive, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, so stay tuned to DualShockers for that.