Sakura Wars / Sakura Taisen and the character Maria Tachibana are (c) Red Company and Sega Corporation.


Another piece of fanart from 2005. The scanner left some out-of-colour lines, I still recommend full view.

So far I never played one of the Sakura Wars games, never watched one of the animes, never read one of the manga volumes, never listened to one of the soundtracks. My knowledge about this series is based on articles out of German anime+manga magazines. Articles with pictures... I like the character designs. For my taste, Some of the SW girls are charming but not tooooo special designed, others are a bit more charming, and a third group has the certian "special something" to me. Tachibana belongs to my third group.
She plays always the male roles during the SW stages shows, and her character features in general seem to go into the direction "Takarazuka member who´s playing a man". Right? Wrong? Well, then I saw an artbook artwork that stressed her femaleness more ( not what some of you might think ), and I rather liked it. Started to see Maria Tachibana not as the almost-man but as one of the prettiest woman from the SW girl cast, and had the wish to draw her with a more feminine look, too. I read that her soundtrack songs tend to be the slower, melancholic ones...so the idea of her as a night club singer singing something smooth came into my mind ...and you can see the result.

I especially like her hair cut! At least the first one. It seems to me that, compared to the first game and OVA, they changed her hair-do for the second OVA into something simplier and brighter. Don´t know about the cut in the following games and animes, and I didn´t really the check the manga for it either ...but I prefer the first version.