With Sega’s heavy focus on Valkyria Revolution, many fans have been concerned that Valkyria Chronicles as a series has been quietly shut down by the company. A recent interview over on the Japanese PlayStation Blog with Valkyria Revolution director Takeshi Ozawa and producer Youichi Shimosato have both creators promising fans this isn’t the case.

They explained that Sega is definitely planning on continuing the original Valkyria Chronicles series, however the team wanted to try something a bit different with Revolution. They made a note in confirming various pitches for a new Valkyria Chronicles game have been made since its third entry – however they didn’t pan out due to scheduling.

While the original games are tactical, turn-based shooters, Revolution is a real-time action RPG. It’s also worth mentioning the former is more alternate history, while the latter leans a bit more towards fantasy. Revolution was made purely as an RPG, to make up for the elements not seen in the original games.

Ozawa compared the two parallel Valkyria games as two entirely different series, similar to the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series. They may share common themes, mechanics, and so on, however the characters, story, and so on are very different. Perhaps we’ll start to see both series developed simultaneously in the future?

Thanks to fan feedback, the Valkyria Revolution team was able to find a hopeful balance in the game’s real-time combat and the tactical feel of the original games. Fans originally found the game to be too action-oriented, so a new menu scheme was implemented to pause the action whenever you hit triangle to bring up the action menu.

Ozawa celebrated the Valkyria Chronicles series and the universe it has established. Coming from this, he teased that he constantly thinks about how to approach the next entry, while also taking into account how much hardware has progressed.

It’s worth mentioning at the time of writing Valkyria Chronicles III still hasn’t gotten an official western / English release.

Valkyria Revolution is launching in Japan on January 19th for PlayStation 4 and PS Vita. A western release for the game is happening in Q2 of next year, across PlayStation 4, PS Vita, and Xbox One.