Love vs. Evil lies in your future with the latest Sakura release…
Some key points that this game offers:
- Beautiful art work.
Things this game lacks:
- It’s 2017 and Winged Cloud still publishes visual novels with static images. Sure, the artwork is great, but at this stage it’s a drag, they can do better and they should. They’ve published more than enough visual novels to evolve to the next stage.
- The game feels rushed. The story is short and shallow, it lacks emotion and an actual story line, it doesn’t read well, and it’s over before you know it, with no actual character progression other than the ‘teaser’ they call a novel.
- It feels like the game was purely made as an X-rated visual novel which they patched so that the non-X-rated fans will also buy it, and by patching it they made the already shallow story feel even emptier with dead spots where the story simply just cuts off.
- This simply proves to me that Winged Cloud is busy devolving and has started publishing more and more empty, shallow and poor excuses for a story so that fans would keep on buying them, yet this title isn’t even worth the price whether it was cut in half. I feel sorry for the illustrator, there is amazing artwork behind this game, and this accompanying story just ruins it.
Gameplay & Controls:
Not much in terms of controls to mention, at this stage if you’ve played one Sakura Game published by Winged Cloud you have already mastered the controls for all of them. It hasn’t changed at all. You simply sit back with the Auto button telling the story for you at the speed you choose.
You can also choose to manually progress the story by using the LFM to move on to the next scene, the RMB brings up the menu, with the middle mouse button or H button hiding the UI for screenshot. The concept behind visual novel controls are all fine and well, it’s just the poor repetition and lack of creativity or will power to rise to the next stage that really dampens this game.
Graphics:
We have fantastic art as always; it is pretty much the only feature that this game has that makes it noteworthy; unfortunately, it is not enough to save this title. As with previous Sakura titles we can choose to play Full screen or Window Mode with a resolution of 1280×720 which is not bad, but this isn’t 2017, resolution options should have been there along with settings on how we wanted the animated scenes to look and feel and move, yet we have none of that.
Winged Cloud has given us another empty game where they took a brilliant artists art and used them in a shallow low budget game which ruins the true potential of what it could have been. Their Visual Novels should have moved onto the next phase in animated scenes several releases ago already.
The Graphics get an 8 for outstanding visuals, the scenes and characters are really creatively and beautifully drawn, rich and vibrant in colour. The drawback and lack of animated scenes and actual character movement and facial expressions make the graphics section a failure at 4 points, should the artist ever read this, at least they were graded separately for their amazing work.
Sounds:
Another vital part of any game that is hollow, it’s the same melody over and over, it feels like they took the first 10 seconds of actual songs and then added them to certain scenes to play over and over again. All that this does is make an already boring story more dreadful to read and enjoy. The game lacks any actual in game sounds or character sounds, the options in the menu for them are there but they do not exist.
We have that atrocious option to press V to have an automatic voice to voice the scripts which doesn’t help the story at all, it makes it even hollower and void of any actual creative input. The game is best played with your own music or the game volume at a really low volume.
Replayability:
The game has some achievements that requires at least two full playthroughs where you do not choose the same choice options again.
In these two playthroughs you can also obtain all the Gallery scenes so unless you plan to patch the game after these two playthroughs with the adult patch to see what it looks like from that view point the game doesn’t really offer any reason to replay.
MGR Gaming’s Conclusions:
Spoilers Ahead:
Sakura Magical Girls may be the latest release from Winged Cloud but, it is a failure at best. As you’ve read in the above sections, this release really has nothing new to offer except for some new art work this time at a Hotel Holiday resort.
The story revolves around Taichi a young man with anger issues who has a knack for making the wrong choices which landed him with a terrible job and in enough debt not to quit it. From there on he witnesses a supernatural monster which he isn’t supposed to and soon after that he meets the Magical Girls and the poorly thought out adventure begins.
The story really comes across interesting and like it’s going to be great, but that is all it is. Not nearly enough attention has been invested into this one. The story is over before you know it, there is no actual story within the story, character backgrounds don’t exist besides Taichi’s which makes him sound like a fresh out of school character but plays off as someone who’s in his twenties.
There is no need to delve more into this; this game truly failed in every aspect it should have excelled at, however it would seem that one aspect the game has to offer with intent is open perversion which might be all fine and dandy for the X-rated version.
It would be easy to assume that they tried to milk both markets by delivering an X-rated and a non-X–rated version of the game. I can argue here saying that they didn’t even bother to make sure that once they cut out all the X-rated content the non-X-rated version will still play well and the story progresses without too much issue, but they never even bothered to make sure that the story was an actual story to begin with.
This is also another title they have released which ended with the concept that a sequel is probable, since they end the story as such but this simply does not happen, it seems more like they are trying to dump as many stories these days instead of creating a one of a kind story line.
The adult patch:
It starts by continuing some of the scenes, In Yuki’s solo scene a slime monster gets hold of her melting her clothes away then it starts sexually violating her, the scene plays out and then the next day Hikaris scene starts and play out in the same way. The patch also adds some new scripts to the game here and there.
Some scenes lead to sexual acts between Taichi and the girls. That is about it for the X-rated patch, certain in game scenes have been slightly altered to show some nudity such as Yuki’s nipples during the first cruise once she gets splashed with water.
Additional Info:
Platforms: PC: Mac: Linux
Genre: Visual Novel: Anime: Sexual Content
Censor Rating: NSFW
Age Rating: 18
Developer: Winged Cloud
Publisher: Winged Cloud
Release Date: 23 February 2017
MGR Gaming Steam Curator:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32364038/
