The Sakura Wars (Sakura Taisen in Japan) franchise holds a special place in the hearts of many gamers, especially in Japan, but faithful fans got a bad surprise yesterday as they browsed to the official website of the series sakura-taisen.com only to find a generic placeholder used for expired domains, as you can see below.

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Apparently the domain expired on December 29th, and the website was duly removed, as it happens with all domains on their expiration date. Sega has since reacquired the domain name as you can see from the whois result at the bottom of the post, but announced that it'll take a little while to get things back up and running.

Despite the fact that the publisher did renew the domain, it's very strange for Sega to let the domain of one of its historical series expire like this, possibly hinting to the fact that the franchise may have been pretty much abandoned. Of course this is just speculation, but this doesn't really bode well for the future.

The latest Sakura Wars game released is a spin-off on the mobile platform Mobage, with almost no connection to the original series.

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