A little wet and wild adventure lies in wait here…
Some key points that this game offers:
- Fantastic art work.
- Nice story line, with decent character growth.
Gameplay & Controls:
The story plays out well enough for you to leisurely kick back in your comfy chair, hit that auto button and then enjoy the story as it unfolds before you. This time around the UI looks somewhat different than what we’ve seen in previous titles.
Instead of worded clickable options, this time we have icons that act as our clickable options, it’s a nice change of pace, it’s the little things after all that makes something unique. We have the same control options that we’ve grown accustomed to, LFM being used to manually move to the next scene, RMB bringing up the menu, H/ Middle Mouse button hiding the UI for those screenshots.
Graphics:
Stunning artwork was created for this one, this time around a modern scene is given to us, scenes of a school’s interior are some locations we will be visiting along with a few other unique areas. All however have been beautifully created for us, bringing with it rich and vibrant colours to truly deliver a visual masterpiece. The characters we meet are each created unique in their own way, the way they carry and present themselves easily describes them and paints the pictures of who they are as people and what their personalities are like.
It will really be a pleasant journey to see how Winged Cloud expands their visual novels by incorporating moving scenes and animated scenes into their novels to bring a whole new perspective into their novels. It will really raise their bar as Visual Novel developers. On the menu side of things, we get to choose whether we want to play the game in Fullscreen or Window mode.
Sounds:
The sound for the game isn’t that great and this is not because it’s terrible, it’s too short in some scenes, especially scenes you revisit a lot, having that same melody repeat itself over and over really gets annoying at times. Something I hope they work on in future releases. Something that really makes up for the game here is the ambient sound, some scenes really have some amazing background sounds to them that really give their scenes a feeling of being alive which is quite pleasant to experience.
Another neat add on here is the female Japanese voice acting we have for the two female characters. It is quite a fun and enjoyable add on to experience in a visual novel, however the lack of volume control for these voice overs really brings that joy down. everything feels shouted and way to loud with no way to bring the volume down unless you turn the main volume of your PC down. On the menu side of things, we have volume control for the Ambience volume, the Music volume and the Sound volume.
Replayability:
This is an area where the game lacks again, the game has numerous choices that you can make for the main characters but besides changing a line or two of the scripts they don’t really impact the game in any way whatsoever which is really a bummer.
It makes the choices seem useless in this regard. There is an adult patch for the game so if you are of age, I suppose you can play the game without it to experience, it as is and then download the patch to play it with X-rated content. but that is as far as replay goes for the game.
MGR Gaming’s Conclusions:
Spoilers Ahead:
Sakura Swim Club begins the story of Kaede, a young man who seems to be trapped in his father’s massive shadow with everyone having even higher expectations for him than what his already successful and famous father achieved including his father. Kaede does not feel the same way as everyone does and this has led to a divide, instead of caring to achieve better results, he simply stopped caring, which was the cause of several new school transfers in hopes of picking up his grades unbeknownst to his family the cause of his bad grades lies in a different area all together.
This all slowly changes and improves when Kaede transfers to the latest school and joins the swim club where he meets Mieko and Hiromi; the two ladies that are going to change his life forever. Slowly Kaede’s attitude will start changing as he and the two lovely ladies grow closer and he finally realizes what it is that he wants from life.
The story reads really well, it is thoroughly enjoyable, you can see and feel how Kaede grows as a character as the story progresses, the ambient music in the scenes give the story a decent feeling of being alive which really is a nice add on. I do feel like the story should have had a few extra lines in certain scenes just to further boost and bump the story up; a good story can only be improved if one invests more detail into it. Something that I feel was a real let down is the fact that the choices didn’t really matter at all this time around, making them useless to the game itself. Last but not least the game has a few spelling and grammar errors that were never fixed.
Adult Patch:
This patch can be downloaded from Winged Cloud’s Patreon pages for free and after installing it you can start a new game to experience scenes with sexual content and full on nudity. Do note that applying this patch makes the game pretty much a full on X-rated game where it is not implied sexual content or nudity but actual sexual content such as sex scenes and nudity in its ‘nudist’ form.
Several scenes in the game will either move on to the next scene where the characters will have sex or new scripted texts will be available that leads to a sex scene.
Additional Info:
Platforms: PC: Mac: Linux
Genre: Visual Novel: Anime: Sexual Content
Censor Rating: NSFW
Age Rating: R18
Developer: Winged Cloud
Publisher: Winged Cloud
Release Date: 11 September 2015
MGR Gaming Steam Curator:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32364038/
