On December 1st, Sega Games and Mynavi Creator held a seminar for mid-careers candidates for Sega Games positions, as in for those who have over a year of experience in the game industry. Mynavi Creator is a subsidiary of Mynavi, a human resources company. This subsidiary, in particular, provides referrals for human resources needs in creative fields, such as web or game designing. On December 21,Famitsupublished a report of the seminar.
The seminar touched upon many subjects, including Sega’s current activities overseas. For example, it stressed out how thanks to its overseas studios like Atlus USA localizing theYakuzagames, the series became one of Sega’s strongest brands.
As for why they held this seminar in the first place, Sega is currently hiring for the following positions: Game Planner/Designer, Game Producer, Game Programmer, and Game Designer. According to the Famitsu report, this fresh blood is mostly needed forPhantasy Star Online 2. The game reached its sixth anniversary in July, and this December, I’ve reached my first anniversary since when I quit, after reaching more than 1400 hours on my playtime counter. I won’t have the time anytime soon, but I will probably write some kind of review one day, after going back on the game, and see if the problems which made me quit are still there or not.
Going back to the subject, a talk session was held at the end of the seminar, with multiple important figures at Sega:
Each of them spoke about their own studio. Satou-san detailed how Sega CS1 includes Yakuza Studio, how they focus on “entertainment for adults, with photorealistic graphics and solid stories”, but how they’re also in charge of series likeMonkey Ball. Even inside Sega itself, some people are scared of Yakuza Studio because they’re all scary-looking guys, but everyone there is nice according to Satou-san.
He also revealed a secret aboutJudgment, the latest game of Yakuza Studio: As you may know, most characters in the game were modeled and voiced by real-life actors,using motion capture and face capture.Judgment’s protagonist, Takayuki Yagami, is acted by popular actor Takuya Kimura. Turns out, many of the nameless, non-important NPCs in the game were actually modeled after Sega employees, for fun.
Nakamura-san presented his studio as well, Sega CS2, also known as the Sonic Team, and how it handlesSonicgames and thePuyo Puyoseries. It’s always worth noting that while I don’t doubt its talent, the current Sonic Team is quite different from the past. Among other things, its founder Yuji Naka left the studio for more than a decade now.
Nakamura-san also shared that his studio is currently working onNew Sakura Wars,orShin Sakura Taisen, the tentative title for the nextSakura Taisengame. More precisely, the team working on the game is the team who handles theValkyria Chroniclesseries, as they were recently integrated to CS2. Previously, this team was affected to Sega CS3, which in the past used to be called Overworks, and has always been handling games primarily targeting the Japanese market.
This makes perfect sense and isn’t surprising at all. Many are those, myself included, who considerValkyria Chroniclesas a spiritual successor toSakura Taisen,and to Overworks’Skies of Arcadiaas well. All three IPs share some big names in their credits.
Seeing how fantasticValkyria Chronicles 4turned out,this is great news to hear, and I’m looking forward toNew Sakura Warseven more than ever. The game should release for latest home consolessome day after July 29, 2025.We’ll get a first look at the game soon according toSega’s Toshihiro Nagoshi.Currently, on these last days of December 2018, theSakura Taisenfranchise is also having anart exposition in Japan.
