Sega paid the Nier director to turn its franchises into anime girls

Nier director Yoko Taro has finally gone mad with power and turned Sega franchises into anime girls as part of a new mobile game.

404 Game Re:set was just announced for iOS and Android in Japan. In this game, Sega is an evil corporation in a dystopian world, and its classic franchises have been anthropomorphized into anime girls. Virtua Fighter is a dark-haired woman in kunoichi dress. Virtua Cop is a lightgun-wielding gal in a heavy jacket. Out Run is a woman in a revealing, futuristic racing suit and engine-shaped jetpack. After Burner is a lady in a military jacket and jean shorts over… I guess that's a slingshot bikini?

The game has only been announced for release in Japan, though in the mess of the automatically translated subtitles on the announcement video, there is mention of "multi-language distribution." There are also hints that games from publishers besides Sega will be given the anime girl makeover.

A more direct translation of some of Yoko Taro's comments comes to us via VGC: "It’s a game that features Sega’s IP, so I thought Sega should be in the game, but I didn’t think Sega would want to see a game that portrayed it well, so I portrayed it negatively."

This isn't the first time Sega has leveraged the inescapable draw of anime girls to liven up its old properties. The Sega Hard Girls multimedia project reimagined old Sega hardware like the Mega Drive, Saturn, and Dreamcast as high schoolers. There was even a 13-episode anime series.

I'm just browsing our list of the best Dreamcast games and wondering - what would Seaman look like as an anime girl?

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.