Today the Japanese arm of Sony Interactive Entertainment released a new commercial for the PS5, starring popular girl group Atarashii Gakko! and some of the console's newest games.
The games featured are Square Enix's Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Foamstars, Sega's Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Koei Tecmo's Rise of the Ronin (of which we're going to see more at a State of Play presentation tomorrow).
If you're not familiar with Atarashii Gakko! (also known as Atarashii Gakkou no Leaders), they're a popular four-member girl group that has been active for the past 8 years or so.
The commercial features the song "Born to Be Free!!!!" and the choreography includes PlayStation's symbology with squares, circles, Xs, and triangles.
The members of the group also imitate some of the scenes in the games' promotion, like Foamstars' foam shooting, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth's fighting, the horse riding in Rise of the Ronin, and the iconic clash between Sephiroth and Cloud that has been featured in the latest trailers of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.
The inclusion of Foamstars is interesting, considering that it's kind of the odd one out in the group of primarily single-player cinematic games. Yet, that may be the very reason why it's featured.
You can watch the 30-second version below. As usual for high-budget Japanese commercials, a 15-second version also exists, and can be found on PlayStation's YouTube channel.
PlayStation also released a much longer making-of video. While it's entirely in Japanese without English subtitles, you can take a look below if you want to see how the commercial was made or if you're a fan of the band.
This kind of celebrity-driven commercial isn't a new thing for the Japanese arm of Sony, especially to drum up excitement ahead of the release of a major new game or at the beginning of each season. In this case, the commercial celebrates the spring lineup of games for PS5.
