Jack Jeanne Localization Confirmed

We have yet more unexpected localization news to discuss!

Yesterday, during the game’s 1st anniversary live stream, Broccoli announced that Jack Jeanne will be translated into English and Traditional Chinese.

Jack Jeanne (which I’ve also seen written as JackJeanne) is a Nintendo Switch game that comes up quite a bit in discussions of otome games people want localized, and now it’s finally happening.

There’s been some disagreement about whether or not Jack Jeanne is an otome game. As far as I can tell from what I’ve read, it is, just one where the romance is lighter and starts as friendship that grows into love. That, together with the developer not marketing it as otome to try to draw in a larger audience, seems to be where the confusion comes from.

(This brings to mind my personal “Is Steins;Gate a galge?” debate while I was tagging posts. I concluded it is.)

Anyway, Jack Jeanne is a visual novel about a young woman who gets permission to attend a prestigious men’s-only opera school on the condition that she star in the final performance of the year and hide the fact that she’s a woman.

In addition to the visual novel gameplay, it also has some form of stat-building as well as rhythm game segments during performances. Stat-building elements in visual novels aren’t my favorite thing, but I don’t mind them if the game sounds interesting enough, and this one definitely does.

One of the key people behind the game is Sui Ishida, the creator of Tokyo Ghoul, so that has drawn a lot of attention to it as well.

No release date has been given for Jack Jeanne yet, so we’ll have to wait and see. We don’t know who is handling the localization yet, either, so it’s up in the air as to whether or not this could be IFI’s mystery announcement or what PQube was teasing.

Meanwhile, apparently this is a big deal because no game developed by Broccoli has ever been localized before, so I’m adding this to the list of games no one thought would be localized that are being localized. Kenzan and Ishin must be next.

Are you looking forward to Jack Jeanne?