Wondering what this series is about? What's with the "crappy" rating system? Find out all about it here!
Welcome back to the Shovelware Adventures, the series that most likely no one was missing, but it came back regardless! It's been a while since I last delved into the Sakura series, so with only a few of those games still not reviewed, and staying true to my grossly counter-chronological coverage of the Winged Cloud’s trashy catalogue, let’s finish it where everything started. When Sakura Spirit appeared on Steam in mid-2014, on what was still a fairly barren EVN landscape, it quickly became something akin to a viral sensation – achieving not only sale numbers that most likely no one ever expected, but also popping up frequently on YouTube and becoming popular enough on Twitch to quickly get officially banned. It also established a peculiar variant of ecchi formula, which took the fanservice usual for eroge and trashy anime, and dedicated every CG and the whole plot to showing it off, without ever going into actual porn to stay within Steam’s, at the time, strict adult content policy. Before Winged Cloud made a transition into actual hentai games, this model spawned an impromptu franchise that turned "sakura" into a dirty word for most Western VN fans, with a total of six "all ages" fanservice VNs released within it. Today, I’ll take a look at first three of those not-quite-porn Sakura games –
Sakura Spirit has been ridiculed countless times, but apart from the immense amount of typos and terribly implemented popcultural references, it’s actually not the worst thing Winged Cloud has even created (even not counting the obviously-trash-tier free games like Sakura Clicker). It offers both a semi-coherent, low-fantasy isekai story (although, of course, a poorly executed one with a highly anticlimactic ending), and a somewhat appealing cast of heroines (two fox spirits, who helps the protagonist after his accidental travel to a parallel world, and two human girls acting as village guards) which could all work as a decent basis for an enjoyable ecchi VN. However, it strangely doesn’t utilize the biggest strength of visual novels as a medium, offering pretty much no meaningful choices, very little romance and an inconclusive harem ending straight out of a shitty fanservice anime.
Sakura Spirit also lost much of the appeal that the sheer scarcity of anime boobs on Steam gave it at the time of its release – for many it was an introduction of sorts into the world of Japanese and Japanese-inspired ero games, definitely having its role in preparing ground for the whole genre entering the Western market and the massive success of "proper" adult VNs such as Nekopara. Hilariously enough, it was also so badly written that many people thought of it as a poorly-translated Japanese game – this by itself might be clear enough indication that reading it nowadays is not really worth it, unless you treat it as a rather shameful, but still important piece of EVN history – maybe not fun to read, but worth it for curiosity's sake.
Final rating: Smelly Poo
The second Sakura title is a bit forgotten nowadays and didn’t achieve as big of a success as some other titles in the series, but is still remarkable in a few different ways. Learning from the shortcomings of Sakura Spirit, the studio made slightly more effort to tell a proper story, with a clear focus on the two main heroines and a decently-paced fantasy/magical girl-themed intrigue driving the plot. Its biggest strength, however, might be characterisation – not only Wanaca’s designs are nice to look at, but the heroines themselves have quite a lot of personality – especially Sayaka, who at first glance looks like a typical airhead, but soon after shows a rather devious and dominant personality, far-detached from her cheerful and carefree facade. The merciless teasing she subjects both the protagonist and her mildly-classic-tsundere partner to is one of the highlights of the game, escalating throughout the plot in a highly amusing manner. Even the endings (one for both heroines + a “harem” one), while a bit abrupt and inconclusive when it goes to romance, were nice enough to be satisfying from my perspective.
Still, while I enjoyed the story and characters in this game quite a lot (it’s also a bit longer than a typical Sakura game, which makes everything feel just a bit more fleshed out and meaningful), it’s obviously still a rather basic plot-serves-the-boobs setup with numerous problems. Maybe the biggest one it how little we learn about the heroines – while they can be vaguely identified as magical girls and both of them give hints about some rather dark backstories (fighting evil magic seems like a really shitty and draining job, I tell you), nothing that isn’t directly connected to the main intrigue is explained properly. It was the only time in the Sakura series when I’ve been seriously interested in the lore and pretty much none of it ever materialized. There’s also a fair share of WCs typical, cringy moments and fanservice showing up in the most inappropriate situations, but it’s not something you can seriously complain about after approaching this kind of game. In the end, I think Sakura Angels is one of the best titles in the series – at least if you don’t play them for actual porn, as even the fanservice here is among the mildest in the whole franchise.
Final rating: Golden Poo!
One of the first Sakura titles to feature character art by Inma was also a surprisingly ambitious project by Winged Cloud’s standards. With three fully-fledged character routes and four endings, it offered a fairly impressive amount of content and heroine-centric storytelling, maybe getting closer to being a proper moege than any other game in the series. It’s also possibly my favourite one of them all, for a simple reason – it’s absurdly dumb, but fully embraces that stupidity to deliver relatively inoffensive romance scenarios that are simply fun to read, apart from delivering the necessary amount of fanservice CGs. The heroines – a clumsy daughter of Santa Claus, a lonely fox spirit and a childhood friend with an attitude – are a bizarre mix of themes, but all of them are amusing and well-designed enough to carry their own little stories. Adding a protagonist likeable in a way which makes this whole scenario borderline-believable (I mean, he's nice and selfless to the point he actually could get a girl to like him) and a genuinely funny harem ending to the mix, it’s maybe the very few Sakura game (not counting the generally recognized, positive outlier in form of Dungeon) that tempt me to sincerely recommend them to others. Really worth it, if approached with the right mindset.
Final rating: Golden Poo!
I have to admit that I have a peculiar affinity towards this early "fanservice age" of Sakura games. While hentai usually requires little imagination to make, trying to create a “sexy” game that can fit within Steam’s and similar platform’s limitations requires some creativity and when done well, can give a game something of a trashy charm – one that nukige, spending most of the time on bombarding you with plain porn, will rarely have. While Sakura Spirit wasn’t able to capture that ecchi “magic”, Sakura Angels and Sakura Santa were just the kind of mindless fun you would hope for from a fanservice VN. They also come from the age when the formula still wasn’t repeated to the point of pure absurdity – now, 20 Sakura titles later, it’s hard for the new entries to replicate this appeal and keep any kind of quality standards. Obviously, the games were never anything beyond “somewhat ok”, but being just “ok” is absolutely fine by me. Not every developer can create masterpieces and I can appreciate even the trashiest formula if there’s actual effort put into it – sadly, soon after these two games, Winged Cloud stopped fulfilling even that basic requirement. In two weeks, we’ll take a closer look at the final free non-hentai Sakura games – Sakura Beach 1 & 2 and Sakura Shrine Girls – last of the dying breed, but at the same time, symbols of things to come for the whole franchise…
PS This time, my special thanks go to Noble, whose videos made creating this post a lot more fun than it would otherwise be.
I feel like Winged Could is the perfect example of how being somewhere early can result in you getting a lot popularity despite your shortcomings. I can't really critisize their works, mainly because I've never played any of them longer than like 10-15 minutes (despite trying a few), but still, when I see the attention and popularity some of their titles received in the past and the fact that they now have a fairly big community around them I can't but be a bit sad that the same doesn't apply to other interesting titles.
ReplyDeleteAgain, I haven't played their games much, so I can basically only go by what I've read from the community. Their art looks nice, which is cool. And they're doing H-contect now, which is also good for them. And I agree that their titles can be charming (S Dungeon the most probably, also I thought Beach wasn't that horrible from the 30 minutes I've read). But no matter what I still can't get away from continuing every sentence with "but still ..." and bashing them a bit. Idk, it's a weird studio. They've succeeded fan-wise atleast, so kudos to them. Not an easy thing to do at all.
Woah, there's actually no 'edit' button on these posts? Gotta check my comments before I post them then. Discord has made me too comfortable with just typing out whatever and then editing it afterwards.
DeleteHaha, well, I don't think you made any embarrassing mistakes. ;]
DeleteAnd yeah, it's hard to really fault a company for succeeding just by pioneering things, it's not necessarily that easy to create a new niche, or push the boundaries of what's allowed (let's remember, Sakura Spirit came out in time when people didn't even try to publish real erotic games on Steam and there was quite a decent chance that even this kind of ecchi content could cause a serious backlash). As I see it, the main problem with Winged Cloud is that the company's founder care about the money, and as the Sakura games became more and more obvious, cheap cash-ins exploiting the previously-formed audience, even the fans got fed up with it. If you look closely, Winged Cloud's latest releases received some really lukewarm reception and their Patreon support seems to be dropping constantly. I personally have no issues with this kind of dumb ecchi VNs (its quite obvious if you'd follow this particular series of mine) and I wouldn't mind Winged Cloud making them all the time, if they would also make any kind of effort to innovate and keep their quality reasonable - but they simply don't seem to care. And they'll quite likely disappear because of it.
*I mean, the founder cares ONLY about the money. I don't suggest developers shouldn't care about profit, but they usually also strive to make the best game they can within their abilities and resources. Winged Cloud maybe had one period like that, and then just stopped trying.
DeleteI was thinking more about the conctadiction I made when I said that "I haven't played any of them for more than 10-15 minutes" and then said that "I played S Beach for about 30 minutes" in the very next paragraph. It's a small thing, but it irritates me a lot for whatever reason :D
DeleteI admit, the last time I was even remotely interested in how Winged Cloud's doing was sometime in mid 2017 and I haven't checked their doings at all since then. I can see now that their audience has dropped considerably (thanks Steam Spy). Ain't gonna lie, I'm a little glad. It's not like I dislike 'trashy' VNs or something, I don't mind reading/watching something dumb as long as it's fun, but still, one can only take so much from one creator. What do we know, maybe they'll have to start trying in the near future. Atleast I hope they do. Despite all the "critics" hate and the greed issues, I'd kinda sad to see one of the studios that made VNs atleast slightly more popular gone. They still have a place and an audience, they just need to realize that this is not going to keep working forever.
Thanks for the article, actually I find it interesting to go through all the Sakura games like this. Especially since my knowledge on such a controversial Studio is kinda low.
There's a whole another layer to this with alleged abuses and shady business practices by Winged Cloud's founder. I haven't researched it that much and for that reason didn't write about it in my articles (also, the allegation I did follow in detail weren't super-serious, mostly just the guy being a general dickhead). Still, taking all those things together, I wouldn't be that sad to see WC go. The only issue with them disappearing is that there's a real danger their artists wouldn't get hired by any other VN developer and that would be a damn shame. :s
DeleteAnd I'm glad you enjoyed the article! These posts are extremely fun to make, so I'm happy to see someone actually reacting to them. ^^
Well, Imma take your word for the WC situation and the founder's shadyness. I don't really feel like looking into them myself :p It was probably a bit of an exageration when I said I would be sad to see them gone (I would most likely not even realize unless someone would post it on twitter or vndb) and I was also talking more about the artists in general rather than the founders and those who are in for the greed. Their artists definitely deserve to be hired somewhere if this whole thing was to end, but they'd probably have to go freelancing or something for a while. And that's always a double edged-sword :/
DeleteHey, I'm actually super happy that a blog like this even exists. Recently I've been super interested in the EVN industry as I feel like it's slowly growing whilst being under the radar of most. You know, I have hope that at one point this scene is going to really blow up (like, in the boundaries of its genre), and I want to be there when it happens. To see people with the same ammount of love for the same thing, who also spend their time writing about things and reviewing works of small developpers, it just makes me really happy. So please continue with this for as long as possible. I'll try to chip in a comment or two whenever I feel like I know enough about something ;)