Wars and Thou Shalt Not Die were scheduled for the North American market, but it were canceled. It was later explained that the Sony classified Sakura Wars as a text novel, which made then-future licensing for importation and translation difficult. A Korean translation of So Long, My Love was published in South Korea by Sega in 2006. The PC CD-ROM versions of Sakura Wars and its sequel were localized and released in Russia by Akella in 2006 and 2008 respectively. Dysin Interactive published the PC versions of Sakura Wars to Is Paris Burning? in China, and Fall in Love, Maidens was released in the region by Beijing Entertainment All Technology. The first official English release in the Sakura Wars series is So Long, My Love, which was translated by NIS America in collaboration with Red Entertainment and Idea Factory. The dub was produced at Bang Zoom! Entertainment, and included actors from NIS America's localization of the Disgaea series. The team also included the Japanese voice track in the PlayStation 2 version, with a dedicated translation which preserved the original character names being created for it. The localization took two years to complete, becoming NIS America's largest localization effort to date. For the 2019 reboot, Sega brought on Yakuza 0 translators Inbound Games to localise the game. The localised version uses the Japanese audio with subtitles in other languages. Reception and sales Between the series' debut in 1996 and 2010, the series has sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. Each entry on Sega hardware rank among the best-selling titles for their respective hardware. The original Sakura Wars was an immediate success, with several stores being sold out of copies within hours of its release. Sakura Wars 2 remains the best-selling title in the series, with over 500,000 copies sold on the Saturn alone, making it one of the console's best-selling titles in Japan. So Long, My Love is the worst-selling mainline entry to date, and was a commercial failure in the West. Japanese website 4Gamer.net described the series as a "legendary" property connected to Sega, citing several elements such as the anime-style presentation and blend of genres that were hardly seen in gaming at the time. Jenni Lada of TechnologyTell wrote a retrospective on the series in 2009, calling Sakura Wars "an odd series [...] that defies genres". In a 1999 IGN article on the franchise following the announcement of Sakura