Saturn games that never came stateside...
Props to Dragonmaster Dyne for the site link provided in the SoR for DC thread.
The Saturn portion of the site tells the dismal story of the console and provides some keen insight as to why some of the most eagerly awaited titles never came to these shores. There are a bunch but I've posted the bigger titles.
I'll post them here but be warned: it's quite a long read! :)
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Eternal Champions: The Final Chapter
This was perhaps the most acclaimed 2D fighting game to ever be created somebody other than Capcom or SNK. In fact, Eternal Champions was dreamed up by none other than Deep Water, one of Sega of America's own in-house programming teams. The Genesis version was pretty good, and the Sega CD version was spectacular but suffered from the limitations of its consoles. Eternal Champions: The Final Chapter would have picked up on one of the loose ends from the Sega CD game - the appearance of the Infernals - and gone on to introduce new characts and an all-new tournament.
Sega of America was already making plans to release the third and final installment on Saturn and souping up the game engine big time when their superiors over in Japan put their foot down and said "NO!" It wasn't going to happen because they wanted Virtua Fighter - a game that had come out of their own programming stable - to be the definitive fighting game for the platform. Not only did Eternal Champions for Saturn never see the light of day, it never even got its foot in the door. It's a crying shame, too, because the Sega CD version received a lot of good reviews and many American gamers were looking forward to playing a spiffed-up Saturn version. Word leaked in October 1996 that the game was indeed going to be axed, and Sega of America reluctantly confirmed that sad reality before the year was out.
In retrospect, Eternal Champions: The Final Chapter might have been one of those regional titles that could have helped push console sales had it been given a fair chance, but it never got that opportunity. Sega of Japan killed Eternal Champions for Saturn before one line of alpha code ever made it through a Saturn development kit.
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Grandia
In 1997, everyone knew that Final Fantasy VII was turning out to be the monster hit that had been expected; furthermore, everybody thought they knew what Saturn RPG that Sega had in its Japanese arsenal to best counter it. This was none other than Grandia by GameArts, which was released in December of 1997 to eager Saturn gamers in Japan and was already being hailed as a masterpiece and a milestone insofar as the use of 3D environments in an RPG was concerned. To the surprise and anger of Western gamers, though, Sega passed on Grandia in 1997 and instead opted to translated and release the first installment of its own Shining Force III series. This seemed to fly in the face of all reason, if you were an eager Saturn gamer or RPG addict following the videogame market that year. It was quite a different story in the corporate boardrooms of the companies involved.
What most Western gamers do not understand is that Grandia for Saturn did not do all that well in Japan. It may have been one helluva game, in fact the best RPG ever created for the console and one of the all-time RPG classics, but it didn't exactly take the Japanese market by storm. Grandia for Saturn only sold some 350,000 copies during its original market lifetime - large numbers for a Saturn game to be sure, but nowhere in the ballpark compared to what Square's Final Fantasy VII was doing. That, combined with the sad reality that Saturn had failed in the West, was the reason why both Sega and GameArts agreed not to do an English language port of the game. Their sales projections show that they couldn't make enough money off of an English language port in the West, where the Saturn market was already small and shrinking daily, to justify the expense of the translation effort. On 10 January 1998, Sega angered RPG fans worldwide when it announced that Grandia for Saturn would never be translated into English for a Western release. It is a grudge that both Sega diehards and RPGers hold against Sega even to this day, made all the more painful by an obviously inferior English-language port for PlayStation released by Sony approximately two years later.
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Sakura Taisen (Sakura Wars)
Perhaps the one classic Saturn game that anime addicts dearly wanted Sega to bring to the West in an English translation is the one classic Saturn game that was guaranteed never to make it out of Japan. Sakura Taisen, i.e. Sakura Wars, combined the action-packed antics of mech combat with a delightfully entertaining dating simulation ... and therein lay its problem. Dating simulations are quite popular in Japan due to the culture of that country, but they have almost always bombed in the West. It didn't matter one whit that it achieved the prestigous title of Overall Game of the Year in Japan - there was simply no way that Sega was going to release such a game in a market where a sizeable audience for it simply did not exist. To be frightfully honest though, and I know this is going to irritate a lot of Sakura Taisen fans, nobody else save them has missed its presence or that of its later Dreamcast incarnations.
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Sonic X-Treme
Without doubt, Sonic X-Treme is the saddest "lost software" story in the saga of the Sega Saturn. You see, despite stories to the contrary, Sega planned all along to have a brand-new Sonic game for Saturn that would showcase the console's power - just as the original Sonic had done with the Genesis years before. Sonic X-Treme, originally planned for the 32X, was to have been that game. Its loss is due in part to its develoment team and in part to none other than Sega of Japan.
As with the later Sonic efforts, Sega Technical Institute (STI) over in America was tasked with the latest incarnation of Sega's beloved mascot. This time, they had the formidable job of creating the first-ever fully 3D next-generation Sonic game. They had lots of ideas and wasted no time in throwing together executable code in order to demonstrate their ideas. Sonic X-Treme, as was revealed to a number of videogame industry reporters and magazines at the time, looked nothing short of fantastic. It had the look of every Sonic lover's dream - full 3D environments in which Sonic could maneuver in all directions, rich gameplay enviroments true to the series legacy, and so on. Sonic fans worldwide were salivating as 1996 came to its end and 1997 loomed on the horizon.
This is where Sega of Japan enters the picture.
You see, STI also had some major problems coding Sonic X-Treme. Even the executable alphas they created took up far too much of the Saturn's resources to ever hope to make a playable game out of theme. The situation was so bad that Sega of America was pulling programming resources from other departments (such as Sega Sports) in an effort to overcome the obstacles. They wanted Yuji Naka's help, but he was busy working on NiGHTS and was therefore unavailable. Executives over at Sega of Japan were not pleased by the reports they were getting about STI's production problems, so a delegation was sent over to review their work first-hand. According to reports, they came back appalled and reported the dismal findings to their superiors, who then relayed them to Sega CEO Hayao Nakayama and the senior corporate staff at Sega. A short time later, in early 1997, STI was coldly informed that Sonic X-Treme had been officially canned. STI never recovered from this debacle and broke up shortly thereafter. Parts of Sonic X-Treme would later wind up in Sonic R, Sonic Jam, Sonic 3D Blast, and Sonic Adventure for Dreamcast a few years later.
On 08 December 1997, Sega of America released Sonic R for Saturn to a disappointed American gaming public. Although it received wide acclaim for its stunning graphics, it was not the 3D Sonic riot that Sega of America had originally promised. Even to this day there are many Sega diehards who complain that Sonic R was no "true Sonic game" and deride it at every opportunity. Overall, opinions about Sonic R remain mixed to this day.
Poor, poor Saturn... :(
