All of Sega’s 13 consoles, 12 arcade boards personified in Samurai & Dragons collaboration card pack

Kei, the illustrator who came up with Hatsune Miku’s image, designed the personified forms of Sega’s 13 consoles. Veteran illustrators in the anime industry, including Total Eclipse character designer Yumiko Hara, will be handling the designs for the remaining 12 characters, themed after Sega’s arcade boards.

All 25 characters will be featured as monster cards in Sega’s PS Vita free-to-play title, Samurai & Dragons, in two separate card packs – one each for the console and arcade hardware-themed characters.

Segakko 13: Yume Kanaeshi Mono

The 13 console characters or Segakko (セガっ子, lit. “Sega daughters”) will head to Samurai & Dragons first, in a collaborative card pack the game’s developer is calling the Segakko 13: Yume Kanaeshi Mono” (セガっ子１３：夢、叶えし機械) pack.

If “Yume Kanaeshi Mono” sounds familiar to you, that’s because a similar phrase was used as the subtitle for Yakuza/Ryu ga Gotoku 5: Yume Kanaeshi Mono (龍が如く5 夢、叶えし者, literally Yakuza 5: Those Who Grant Dreams).

Except, the “Mono” in that other Sega game’s case is written as the Kanji “者”, which refers to human beings, whereas the Kanji used in Segakko 13′s case is actually 機械 (machines), normally read as “kikai”.

“Are you sure it’s okay to call it that?” one of the hosts at a Samurai & Dragons Fan Meeting event, which was livestreamed on the Net earlier today, asked the game’s producer Riichirou Yamada when he announced the pack’s name.

“Yokoyama himself (Masayoshi Yokoyama, scenario writer for Yakuza 5) suggested it, so it should be alright. As long as Nagoshi (Yakuza series producer Toshihiro Nagoshi) doesn’t find out,” Yamada cheekily replied.

Yamada said that he thought the subtitle was very appropriate, for he personally believes that consoles are machines that grant dreams. Or at least, that was the way the Sega games developer felt back when he was a kid, when his mother bought him his first games console – a Sega SC-3000.

The Segakko 13 pack will launch alongside Samurai & Dragons‘s third season of content updates in Japan, beginning February 1.

More screencaps from the livestream: 

Sega arcade hardware characters

Design work on all of the Sega arcade hardware characters have not yet been complete, so the Samurai & Dragons team were only able to share a few details on five of the characters planned for this series. From left to right in the picture above, you’re looking at:

• Sega System 1, designed by Ryouko Amisaki, who worked on character designs for TV anime Sumomomo Momomo
• NAOMI, by Daisuke Kamei, who did key animation work for Tiger & Bunny
• Model 2, by Total Eclipse character designer Yumiko Hara
• Sega System 16, by Ikuma Fujibe who worked on Kamisama no Memochou/Heaven’s Memo Pad
• Sega System 12, by Yuko Yamada who worked on TV anime Hakuouki

An English version of Samurai & Dragons will be released in Asia sometime in Spring 2013 this Friday, February 1.

The collaboration packs announced today are meant for the Japanese version of the game, and may not apply to the English version.