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The English Sakura Wars community has always been one of the most devoted and dedicated around. From taking their time to translate entire video games to making entire stage shows and manga be available in multiple languages, this community has always gone above and beyond. On March 17 2026, one fan has even revealed that they went to great lengths to find and preserve what was believed to be lost media related to the series.
During the height of Sakura Wars‘ popularity in the early 2000s, Sega had intentions of expanding the franchise an MMO (Not to be confused with Sakura Wars Online, a multiplayer minigame collection which was not an MMO). This MMO would never surface and has since an obscure part of the franchise’s history with very few fans knowing of it.
This lost MMO was announced in the July of 2006 at a showcase called ChinaJoy, but was later canceled in the June of 2007 due to Sega’s decision to stop developing games for the online Chinese gaming market. Very little was known about this game aside from one interview with the series creator Ohji Hiroi and singular screenshot which leaked in 2019.
While this game seemed fated to be completely lost to time, a member of the Sakura Wars fan community who goes by the name of Kanna’s Nr.1 Fan recently discovered and scanned thirty pages of concept art for the game which details the various characters whom players would have met in this title.
According to Kanna’s Nr.1 Fan, she was browsing various Sakura Wars listings on Yahoo Auctions and spotted these design sheets on the page of a seller who typically sells a high quantity of anime material, including other official Sakura Wars material such as animation cells. She was thankfully not outbit and purchased them for 16,500 Yen.
The 30 character design sheets that Kanna’s Nr.1 Fan purchased showcase not only the character previously seen in the 2019 screenshot leak but also many other characters that would have formed the cast of this MMO. While the roles these characters would have played in the game are unknown, they resemble the type of archetypes seen in the mainline Sakura Wars games enough for fans to take some educated guesses.
While the amount of art that has been found is invaluable, it has also been determined that there is some art which is currently still lost. The numbers on the character design sheets have a gap between CHA_02 and CHA_05, with one of the characters that art has been found for being presumably CHA_03 or CHA_04, that means there is still at least one character missing (presumably a member of the Main Division of the game).
Perhaps one of the most interesting pieces of information we have about this lost MMO are the designs and names of two of the characters: Yang Xiaolong and Huang Yui. Fans of the franchise may recognize those names from 2019’s Shin Sakura Wars franchise, as it appears these two characters would later be reused for that game’s Shanghai Division (albeit with edited designs).
Another interesting detail on several of these design sheets is how AIC, the studio which would later animate the Sakura Wars: New York, New York OVA is credited in top right corner of several of these design sheets, meaning this art was produced at that studio.
It is currently unknown how far in development this MMO was, but considering the amount of art available and the previous leaked screenshot having both a 3D models and environment slightly visible, active development must have begun at some point before cancelation.
All 30 pieces of character art from this MMO have been scanned and uploaded to The Internet Archive by Kanna’s Nr.1 Fan for the entire fanbase to view as they please.
