Stranger Than Heaven's second era takes Makoto Daito to a navy port town in 1929

RGG Studio is walking through Stranger Than Heaven one decade at a time. On September 30 the studio and SEGA put out the second of five in-depth gameplay videos, this one built around 1929 Kure, in Hiroshima Prefecture - a naval port town, and the second stop in a story that runs fifty years.

Kure, 1929

Kure is a navy town, home to one of Japan's largest naval arsenals, and the video's framing is that the military presence and the foreign culture arriving through the port are both reshaping it at once. Protagonist Makoto Daito has grown from the boy of the first era into a man by this point.

That first era is 1915 Kokura in Fukuoka, covered in a video the day before: a smoke-blackened foundry town where Daito, the son of an American father and a Japanese mother, arrives from San Francisco after his parents' deaths. According to Gematsu's rundown, the remaining three eras are 1943 Minami in Osaka, 1951 Atami in Shizuoka and 1965 Kamurocho - the fictional Shinjuku district RGG has been building games in for twenty years.

What the game is

SEGA's own description calls it a fifty-year action-adventure saga of men with nowhere to go and their desperate struggle to find a home, where you use extreme violence to survive and musical talent to thrive as a showman. A separate deep-dive earlier in the week covered that showbiz layer: you collect sounds around town to build tracks, then arrange a setlist, pick a star singer, assign musicians and promote the show.

Stranger Than Heaven, previously known by the working title Project Century, is due January 15, 2027 on PS5, Xbox Series and PC via Steam and the Microsoft Store. RGG said at the start of September that it had passed a million wishlists, making it the studio's most wishlisted game ever ahead of launch - with four months still to run.