Join Mikage on his quest to knighthood.
Some key points that this game offers:
- Beautiful artwork.
- Fantastic story line.
Gameplay & Controls:
Sakura Nova has a major fun story to experience, truly fun and enjoyable, you start off by hitting that Auto button, grab the popcorn and then enjoy this stunning story as it plays out before you.
When a nice scene pops up that you’d like to capture, you hit that H or middle mouse button hiding that UI and then your free to capture all the screens you want. As always if you’re a more hands on reader you can use the LFT to manually move on to the next scenes. The story really reads well and is pure joy to experience.
Graphics:
Still no moving or animated scenes, not even flashing lights which really is a bummer, Winged Cloud should have moved on to the next phase already, there is no reason for them not to!
The art however is really beautifully created, rich and vibrant in colour. There is plenty of detail invested into each scene. They are all uniquely created setting themes up for each area or region you visit, loads of effort invested into creating a vibrant world for us filled with beautiful areas to visit and explore.
The characters also have been decently created each looking unique in their own way; unfortunately, the lack of animated scenes leads to no animated characters either, so we have characters that change standing spaces or hand movements which is about it.
Sure, we have grown accustomed to that, it really is high time that it changes and moves onto the next stage. On the settings side of things, we can change from Fullscreen to Window mode. With Sakura Nova we also have the settings to adjust the interface colour so it’s one step in the right direction.
Sounds:
This time around we have rather pleasant background music that really compliments the gameplay, its soothing and not overbearing as some of the previous titles accompanied music. Further increasing the overall gameplay is the ambient music we have, each scene or happening in the game having a unique Ambient sound to really liven up the story in those specific scenes.
The two female characters are voiced in Japanese so we have that for us which is quite nice and new, but what’s more, unlike Sakura Swim Club this time we can turn the Voice Volume down to our liking. The Music, Sound and Ambience volumes can all be controlled and set to your liking as well.
Replayability:
The game offers more than one ending so you have that going for you in terms of replaying the game, but let’s face it you’re only replaying the bits that can’t be skipped so that you can unlock those other Gallery pictures.
The game offers a few choices which helps lead to the different endings, but besides that the different choices do open up some new scenes and locations unique to the choices you made in that playthrough, so that’s also nice this time around.
MGR Gaming’s Conclusions:
Spoilers Ahead:
Sakura Nova has a brilliant story, it starts off with Mikage who wants to become a knight, even stronger and better than his dad, the Legendary Zero, and on this journey, he has two team mates, Kaguya and Arisa. The three of them are still in the Academy training, working and learning together to become actual knights.
For once we don’t have a story that’s based on ‘perversion’ or sexual innuendo’s, Sakura Nova actually has a decent story line with backgrounds on all the characters that are explored as the story plays out before you. There are proper character breakdowns and growth, it’s not a simple written romance; the story is focused on knighthood with the potential for romance becoming available only at the end of the story, in a sense of living happily ever after, so the story side of the game is really an improvement of previous ones.
The game has an adult patch which can be downloaded from Winged Cloud’s Patreon page.
Once you have installed the patch and started the game you will see that some scenes that just ended in the non-X-rated version continues here with scenes that lead to sex scenes. There are also some extra scripted scenes in the X-rated version and sex scenes that occur after the day’s events.
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: 20 October 2016
MGR Gaming Steam Curator:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32364038/