Azur Lane Finally Bringing Senpai Mikasa to the West

Yostar announced more content coming to the English version of its popular shipgirl-focused mobile game Azur Lane.

We’re finally getting Mikasa, who has been a long time coming considering that she was released in Japan and China all the way in 2017 and appeared in two reruns since. 

Alongside battleship Mikasa we get the conformation for destroyer Hamakaze and her skin “the Honor Student.” 

For those familiar with the Japanese and Chinese version of the game, this means that we’re finally getting the event that brought Mikasa, “The Return of the War God.”

It also indicates that over the next few days we should get confirmation of quite a few more shipgirls that came in other regions with the event. 

These are battleship Hiei and destroyers Kuroshio and Oyashio. Two more skins should also be included for Mikasa, and one for Hiei. 

The event also included the famous “Z Flag” as an ultra-rare auxuliary piece of gear, which considerably empowers Mikasa’s stats.

Western fans have been asking for Mikasa for a while, considering that she is basically an omnipresent poster girl on the Japanese servers.

She is defined “senpai” because the real Mikasa is the last surviving pre-dreadnought battleship worldwide, having been commissioned in 1902.

While she didn’t see service during World War II unlike the vast majority of historical ships that inspired Azur Lane’s shipgirls, she served as the Japanese flagship during the Russo-Japanese War which the country won in 1905. 

She is currently moored in Yokosuka, now serving as a museum ship and as the setting for a recent Azur Lane event.

That’s why she’s effectively everyone else’s “senpai” (which means older colleague) besides having survived every other Japanese warship personified in the game. 

If you’re unfamiliar with Azur Lane, it’s a free-to-play mobile horizontal scrolling shooter/RPG hybrid currently available for iOS and Android.

If you are interested in console games as well, Compile Heart and Felistella just released a brand new Azur Lane game titled Azur Lane: Crosswave for PS4 in Japan. It’s coming in the west next year.

If you’d like to learn more, you can read our recent interview with Yostar’s director of operations.

If you’re curious about the game’s popularity in Japan, you can check out my report about the recent anniversary event that pretty much literally invaded Akihabara.