Good evening, Combat Revue fans; it’s been a while since I’ve talked about this, but we finally have an update on the Sakura Revolution Archive Project. Our team has been working tirelessly since April 22, when we first announced efforts to archive every last scrap of Sakura Revolution. The team of four of us: LettuceKitteh, Princess Ozaline, Skeith, and myself, set out to preserve the adventures of these lovable, adorkable characters before it was too late. We had a couple of small updates since then, but, well… we kind of went dark as we focused on the task at hand.

I’m pleased to announce that the silence ends today. As of August 29, we’ve achieved our initial goal of archiving the entirety of Sakura Revolution’s main scenario, and we’re just working through the last odds and ends. Every single dialogue box, every amulet, every single piece of promotional art, every single trailer, even the official Sakura Revolution website have been saved, cataloged, and archived in our team’s personal cloud.

Heck, we even have a complete collection of loading screen comics, if that’s what you’re looking for! The entire archive clocks in at a massive 58.4 gigs of content (and counting!), with literally thousands of in-game stills, hundreds of art pieces, gameplay videos, streaming events, and much more.

In addition to the archival work we’ve already done, our team is working with a party, so that we may archive their gameplay videos as part of the collection. In addition, we’ll be reconstructing a few additional mirrors of the Sakura Revolution website, which we were able to capture before the final updates went live on July 20, 2021.

In addition, we’ll be working to capture the last few scraps of dialogue—alternate choices and a couple of special in-game events that we can now access thanks to the offline version.

There’s still a bit more to do, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

Our Next Steps

Going forward, our goal will be to get everything out to you in a multi-pronged approach. Upon completion of our final archival tasks, we’re going to be working with The Internet Archive to get everything in our possession over to them for safekeeping.

At the same time, though, we’ll also begin hosting an archive of the story screenshots on the site; we’ll be publishing regular updates to the Archive, which will feature galleries of each sub-chapter, arranged for you to look through. This will be accompanied by an embed of one of JJ’s gameplay videos. We don’t have a schedule yet, but we’ll be trying to publish at least one update every other week.

I’d like to take a moment, though, to thank the amazing archive team; they all rose above and beyond, putting in literally hundreds of person-hours to help build the archive, poring through files to ensure that we have everything, and even going as far as to reach out to folks in the community to fill out collections where we discovered missing entries. I honestly couldn’t have asked for a better group of comrades-in-arms for this undertaking. It’s been an honor and a pleasure to take this journey with them.

So, I’d like to take a moment to express my sincere gratitude to LettuceKitten, Ozaline, and Skeith for their hard work, and their tireless dedication to getting everything saved and archived. But also, thanks to all of you who believed in us and sent words of support over the past several months. This has been a grueling, melancholy, often crushing experience, and your words of encouragement have really helped us keep going when things seemed to be at their darkest.

And, of course, thank you to Sega and Delight Works, for creating a mobile game that was truly special; one which carried the spirit and charm of Sakura Wars, and ran boldly forth in a direction many of us didn’t know we wanted to go.

We went, we fought, we won… The dorks have been saved, and we’ll keep doing our best to keep the memory of this charming slice of Sakura Wars history alive.

After all, so long as someone remembers, the characters can live on.

Taku Kihara, Producer