Clearing up misinformation about Nagoshi's Contributions to Sakura Wars (2019) and its tumultuous production
Since there has been a lot of discourse about Nagoshi, there has also been some talk about his controversial contributions to Sakura Wars and because some of the takes can be rather misinformed due to language barriers, I wanted to give some more context to the tumultuous production of the game.
Several ideas for new Sakura Wars game were being pitched to Sega executives on a yearly basis by a former series producer, but only got accepted once it was voted as the number 1 IP Sega-fans want to see a revival of at SegaFes 2016. (Source)
Afterwards Nagoshi became Executive producer on the project. However even before the release of the game, Nagoshi made several controversial statements, that lead to some outroar by long-time fans of the series:
First of all, he said he had little interest in appealing to long-time fans, despite them voting for a revival, since they were starting to get old and not a viable enough source of income. He also proudly boasted about how controlling of the team he was and that, had the game gotten too close to the original he would have cut funding or just straight up cancelled it. He also very infamously said that he "wanted to destroy Sakura Wars", and was the one responsible for many unpopular decisions such as the change from strategy to action combat, "Because Yakuza has action and that one is popular, so Sakura Wars should have action combat too" (Source)
Outside of that, there are even more examples of his controlling attitude and fundamental lack of understanding and care for the series.
Most infamously: Oji Hiroi, the series creator, revealed that when Sega approached him about the revival in its early stages and there was a disagreement between them, he was straight up banned from ever working on the series again and force to sign an NDA by "a certain Sega executive who has since left the company", though he of course didn't drop any names. (Source: MadeMode, Jan 28th 2024)
Then there is the main writer of SW (2019), Jiro Ishii, who also heavily implied that he wasn't very happy about Nagoshi's handling of the series in this tweet he made right after Nagoshi's departure from Sega was announced (Source)
Outside of that long-time series producers and directors Takaharu Terada and Akira Nishino also expressed frustration of constraints during development, leading to an "incomplete and underdeveloped" combat system, a lot of ideas, concepts and even episodes being cut, as well as being unable to rescue the old cast from "Ultra-Hell", more on that later. (Source: CONTINUE Vol.88)
There was also a general disappointment that many of the people who had dedicated years of their life to this series and still cared about it deeply, like series artist Hidenori Matsubara, who is still holding art-exhibitions, and drawing new official art to this day, or previous Lead writer for the games Satoru Akahori, who was writing new stories for the series as recently as 2025, weren't even considered to be brought back, leading to the feeling that they didn't really care about the series. (Source: Sakura Wars Serenade 2) Initially, they even considered replacing the main theme and not bringing back series-composer Kohei Tanaka, who composed more than 400 different vocal songs for multiple types of media in the series (Games, Musicals, Anime, CD-Dramas) and many more compositions for each individual OST. However, they decided to keep him once they settled on keeping the theme. (Source)
To explain further points of controversy, I will have to give you a very quick, basic rundown of the games story:
The game starts with the explanation that all the characters, that fans had fallen in love with throughout all the years, had suddenly been banished to what I can only describe as "Ultra-Hell" being forced to fight their enemies for all eternity. This, of course, was only described to us by 1 paragraph of text and we didn't get to see any of it. There is only one member from the previous games who had survived. The game then introduces their replacements, many of which share personalities and appearances, explicitly stated to fit the previous characters' archetypes and be similar to them, even down to their very color. The protagonist even quite literally shares the same name as the previous series-protagonist and is said to be a huge fan. Later on in the story, a masked villain gets introduced, eerily similiar to the series' previous protagonist in appearance, even sharing the same voice-actress, which was intended to make people think it was the previous protagonist, only to reveal later on that it wasn't. At the end of the game all the series' previous characters stay stuck in "Ultra-Hell".
Throughout the story, many of the franchise's previous plot-beats got repeated and many of its core-themes straight up broken.
Many of these narrative decisions were quite controversial with longtime fans, but also with previous cast and staff members, most importantly: The actress of the series' original protagonist and the actress of the only returning character. Both talked about the fact that they struggled with whether to even accept the role or not given the complete lack of people who had previously worked together with them and the fact that the scripts mischaracterized their roles pretty badly and only accepted the roles after several requested rewrites and a lot of persuasion, as to not disappoint fans. (Source)
One more important note regarding the only actual returning character: Nagoshi didn't know who she is, despite her great popularity, as late as 8 months before the game's release and accidentally ended up spoiling her return because of that. Later on he explained: "I just don't really know the series" adding, "It can't be helped" (Source)
Many fans have also been stuck wondering why the game was never ported to different consoles, but at least the lack of a switch port is most likely explainable by Nagoshi's lack of faith in the future of handheld-consoles, during the time of release. (Source)
Now, does that mean Nagoshi was single-handedly responsible for every bad or controversial decision of the game's production? No. But given his self-admitted controlling handling of the team and production and his lack of basic knowledge of the series, I do believe it wouldn't be a stretch to assume he might have had a hand in many of the more controversial and negative aspects of this production.