Sega on Valkyria Chronicles III in the West: “All Hope is Not Lost. It’s Very Open Ended”

Giuseppe Nelva October 17, 2011 12:00 PM EST

A few months ago Sega West Associate Brand Manager Aaron Webber reportedly said that the publisher wasn’t planning any more PSP releases in the west. This marked the start of a sad period for the fans of the Valkyria Chronicles series, as it excluded the possibility of a localization of Valkyria Chronicles III on this side of the Pacific Ocean. To make things worse a few days ago Gamespot reported about an interview to Sega’s team manager of the console sales’ team Hiroshi Seno, that confirmed the bad news, saying that Sega wasn’t planning to bring the beautiful JRPG to the West.

As you probably already know and as you can see by looking at the side bar, here at DualShockers we support the Gallian Liberation Front, a group formed to promote and encourage the localization of Valkyria Chronicles III in the west. But words of support are cheap, so we decided to try something more solid.

On friday we met with the Gallian Liberation Front‘s Executive Vice Adminstrator Ashik “Eximius Sorel” Ittehad and he put in our hands (in a quite classy black briefcase) a printed copy of the online petition that the group is using to spearhead the cause. More than 2,000 signatures in support of a niche title are quite an impressive number.

Then, On Saturday, we tracked down Sega’s Aaron Webber himself at New York Comic Con in order to deliver the package and ask him about Valkyria Chronicles III just again.

Turns out that not only Webber already knew about the cause of the Gallian Liberation Front, he also revealed that he’s a fan, but more importantly, he had something to say that will make the fans of Valkyria Chronicle series smile after the sequence of bad news of the past few months. You can see the full interview embedded below.

While Webber was very clear that he couldn’t make promises, he also stated clearly that, as opposed to what was previously reported, the localization of Valkyria Chronicles III in the West is definitely not a lost cause.

The best I can say right now is “Don’t give up, keep trying”, to all those guys out there, keep growing the cause, and we’ll see what happens in the future”

But even more importantly, when asked what are the odds of Sega sublicensing Valkyria III to another publisher or publishing it as an HD remake on the PS3 or the Vita like I suggested in my open letter a couple weeks ago he responded:

All hope is not lost, I think this is the best way to look at this” Keep at it, you never know what can happen in the future. It’s very open ended”

So there you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth. No promises were made, but things are not as bad as we were previously led to believe. All hope is not lost and Valkyria Chronicles III might actually, one happy day, see a release in a language we can all understand and enjoy.

There sure is no better time than now to support the Gallian Liberation Front. Our voices have been heard and the battle is still “very open ended“. This story might still have an happy ending, after all.

EDIT: It seems there has been a some misinterpretation going on in the chain of linking this article from site to site, so we’d like to clarify: This was pre-planned and Aaron Webber was told ahead of time of the petition and asked if he could do an interview surrounding it. This was done so he would have time to check with the Sega PR team. DualShockers doesn’t endorse or condone the taking of PR hostages and no Aaron Webbers were hurt in the making of this interview.