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  • Joined: 01 Apr 2008
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Why Sagaia?
Post Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2017 7:47 am
This is a question that I've always had: Why "Darius II" was renamed as "Sagaia", and what does "Sagaia" means?
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Post Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2017 8:07 am
Because it doesn't involve the planet Darius I think.

Saga means legend. -ia is a noun plural suffix, unsure why they'd add that to the word.

But I'm just guessing, only someone like Taito would really know :P
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Post Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2017 4:52 pm
Back in the day it wasn't uncommon to change the names of games seemingly randomly when releasing them in other territories. Just think of the Gradius series: The first one was named "Nemesis" in Europe, and Gradius II was renamed "Vulcan Venture", which doesn't even make any sense regarding the content of the game. Then from Gradius III onwards, they kept the original names.

So, yeah, the answer is probably known only to Taito's marketing department of the time of release.
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Post Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2017 8:51 pm
To further confuse things: the SMS version of Sagaia uses the flyer art from the first Darius game.
Not only that, but Taito released a gameboy game also titled Sagaia in Japan, but it was a mix of Darius 1 & 2.
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Post Posted: Fri Jun 28, 2019 2:17 pm
I can only guess, but for some reason the companies didn‘t seem to think in franchises when it came to western versions of their games, so they acted as if the sequels were independent new games.

An even more extreme example is the Gradius series whose second entry came out as Vulcan Venture here. I distinctly remember that Salamander was perceived as the sequel to Gradius/Nemesis back then, so they probably thought that releasing Gradius II after that would confuse people.

When it came to the console ports it actually made sense to use the alternative names, at least from a marketing perspective, as people on consoles the predecessors weren‘t released for wouldn‘t feel like they‘re missing out on something.
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Post Posted: Fri Jun 28, 2019 2:40 pm
Well, since you mentioned Salamander, Konami actually re-released the arcade version using the western title Life Force while replacing the power-up system with the Gradius system....
And then released Gradius II.
So I think Europe could've handled the name change. :D
(from what I've read, Gradius II was not officially released at all in America until either the Wii VC or PSP Gradius Collection, whichever came first?)
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Post Posted: Fri Jun 28, 2019 4:50 pm
Why Sagaia, you say? How about why do you rip-off my post? XDDD!

http://www.smspower.org/forums/16556-WhySagaia
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Post Posted: Fri Jun 28, 2019 5:07 pm
Topics merged and spam bot post removed :)
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Post Posted: Fri Jun 28, 2019 7:04 pm
LOL, when posting today I didn‘t even realize that I typed essentially the same thing two years ago already.
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Post Posted: Sat Jun 29, 2019 5:45 am
Maxim wrote
Topics merged and spam bot post removed :)


I've seen those kind of spambots recently. They copy-paste some random old post (or sometimes not so old, thankfully bots are dumb sometimes and copy-paste a recent post) and only if someone says something do they get detected.
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Post Posted: Sun Jul 14, 2019 2:56 am
Maybe for copyright reasons? Similar to how Biohazard was renamed Resident Evil because an American music band had the same name already.
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Post Posted: Sun Jul 14, 2019 7:09 am
It looks like "Sagaia" was first used in North America for the Genesis release in 1991 (was the 1989 arcade original Japanese-exclusive, or does GameFAQs just not list it?), the same year Darius Twin was released (with no name change) for SNES, so it's not likely someone else had the Darius name in NA.
Europe?

Kind of amazed you can trademark a title as generic as "Biohazard", though. (a single word in the English language) But apparently you can.
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