Phantasy Star Online 2 showing life in the West

Thanks to the solid detective wor k of NeoGAF user Nirolak, they have spotted a new career posting where Sega is looking for a Server Engineer to help bring over an "existing live MMO project in development in Japan". 

Notably, the only MMO that Sega currently has public is Phantasy Star Online 2, whose sheer existence in the West hasn't been talked about since PAX Prime 2012. The full ad can be seen below:

Server Engineer
Programming/Engineering | Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada | 12/23/2013

Relic Entertainment, a wholly owned studio of SEGA, is the award winning RTS developer of Homeworld, Dawn of War and Company of Heroes, among other games. Relic was founded on the premise that it is entirely possible to ship first class, genre altering, AAA titles, and have a life. Relic is based out of beautiful Vancouver, Canada, a city that has breath-taking mountain and ocean views, along with snowboarding and skiing, golfing year-round and amazing hiking trails. If you love games, enjoy working collaboratively with smart, creative people, and have diverse personal interests outside of work – you’ll enjoy our culture.

What you will be doing

Ramp up and perform due diligence on an existing live MMO project in development in Japan, embedded with the live team
Gain full understanding of the game and code architecture, content authoring pipelines, build and deployment process, engineering process, and current code status
Establish working relationships with key members of Japanese development team
Participate in and contribute to minor/peripheral engineering tasks on the project, as well as in daily project planning, code reviews, release process, etc.
Create/translate documentation of existing code modules, tools, processes and work flows
Prepare regular status and activity reports to Producer
Prepare a full written project evaluation

What you should have

5+ years’ engineering experience from PC client/server based MMO development
Ability to spend extended (3+ months) periods of time on-site in Tokyo
Ideally fluent in Japanese and English languages
Excellent verbal and written communication skills

It is great to see Sega using the strength of some of their recently-acquisitioned studios to make the job of localizing a lot easier. With Relic on task here and Atlus in the wings, it's a prospectively good sign for the future of some of their other properties including Yakuza. 

Currently, the community has produced an English patch for the game, but obviously in a dynamic MMO, there is still plenty of text and voicework that takes a lot of time to do or can not be translated.

This isn't an official confirmation, but it would be great to see arguably one of the most impressive Free 2 Play MMORPGs finally make its way to the West after making a few appearances already - preferably on both PC and Vita.