A thrilling tale of scepticism meeting a supernatural destiny…
Some key points that this game offers:
- Beautiful art with incredible attention to detail.
- Stunning story line filled with joy, excitement and love.
- Cat Girl Spirits…. Two of them!
Gameplay & Controls:
Another brilliantly crafted visual novel has you sitting back, hitting that Auto button once you’ve set your text and scroll speeds, and enjoying another beautifully created story. As with most games by Winged Cloud, you can either have it play for you using the Auto feature or you can do it by using the left click button to move onto the next screen.
As I mentioned text speed can be altered as well as for moving onto the next screen. The UI can be hidden with the mouse button being clicked; scrolling up and down goes back to previous scenes.
Graphics:
Truly another beautiful marvel to look at, each scene has been beautifully created with stunning attention to detail, vibrant and bright colours giving them life as we’ve come to expect with Sakura, so warm and welcoming, one easily gets lost admiring some of the beautiful landscapes. The characters each have their little body postures and movements giving them each a unique look and feel.
There are numerous different scenes that the game has to offer, and a lot of them in different day cycle variants making for a very pleasant experience as you enjoy the story. On the menu side of things, we can choose whether we want to play Fullscreen or Window mode.
I would like to add this little piece as my personal opinion, they would make these little gems far more appealing if repeated scenes changed more than the colour scheme from morning to night. By having small unique elements shift and change as the day changed to make it a bit livelier, and lastly adding some animations into some of these scenes would do great for these titles and really bump their graphics and visual appearance up several notches.
Sounds:
The sounds are quite nice and very soothing and relaxing, it really sets the tone for the game. Some of them really give you that soothing vibe that you’d expect to get from a setting like this which really enhances the game, it gives it that extra nudge making it so much more dramatic and impacting, but some of them really do feel repetitive at times.
which isn’t entirely bad but in my opinion some scenes repeat themselves quite a few times with the same tone playing and that is how the repetition can build. Other than that, all of it has been beautifully selected and added to the game. On the menu side of things, we have full volume control over the Music, Ambience and Sound volumes.
Replayability:
The game offers three different endings so you have two reasons to replay it to experience the story in a different setting.
MGR Gaming’s Conclusions:
Spoilers Ahead:
Toru is a young man who has always been sceptical of anything supernatural, religious or the spirit world. What he wasn’t entirely aware of was that his family has been carrying on a family tradition where every previous generation has taken the mantle to continue the legacy of becoming a priest who attends two shrines whilst being dedicated to the spirit world. This is where our young Toru’s entire reality comes crashing in hard when he meets Nayoko and Kayo the two Cat Girl Spirits.
Sakura Shrine Girls tell the story of a young man who doesn’t believe in anything supernatural or spiritual up and until he moves to his grandfather. It is here where things start changing as he is introduced to the spiritual, along the lines of learning what his duties as a priest will be, romance blooms adding a rather decent flair to it. The story has been really neatly told, easy to listen to and thoroughly enjoyable, each moment spent experiencing the story really is time spent well.
There are two aspects that need some light; one is that there are a few scenes where the sentence is missing a word which can be traced to a translation missing a spelling tense. Secondly the game offers quite a few choice scenes which all lead to different endings, but unlike Sakura Santa for example had its different choice options that led to different paths entirely here the different choices all have a few lines of different words and that is all. It would have been a much nicer experience if there was more difference between the different paths, especially considering that this is a Visual Novel.
Additional Info:
Platforms: PC: Mac: Linux
Genre: Visual Novel: Anime
Censor Rating: Mature
Age Rating: 18
Developer: Winged Cloud
Publisher: Winged Cloud
Release Date: 27 August 2016
MGR Gaming Steam Curator:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32364038/
