Narumi Nitpicks: Shin Sakura Taisen
To begin I feel it necessary to say that I have absolutely no history with the series beyond knowing that it’s some SRPG series by SEGA and the only reason I was interested was because: they’re ditching the SRPG combat, they’ve gotten the Yakuza team to work on the event scenes, and Ayaneru and Mizuki Nana are in it. No other reason.
To my surprise the game ended up being more VN oriented than a more balanced VN-Musou hybrid, which was a pleasant surprise considering the combat is pretty barebones and shallow, yet at the same time incredibly tedious. The meat of the gameplay lies in the VN segments where you interact with the various denizens of Tokyo. This reminded me very heavily of the Yakuza series in which almost everyone is a weirdo and you can either choose to be the Tsukkomi to their Boke or double down on the stupidity and freak them out. It’s great and it helps that Yakuza’s over-the-top cheesy animations are recycled in this game to full comedic effect. As far as the actual impact of your choices go, they are very minor and only determine which ending you get at the very end of the game with regards to choices involving the main heroines. For everyone else, they offer a good variety in dialogue options and can lead to some very funny situations with no lasting impact on the overall narrative and story beyond a trophy unlock.
The conversations themselves have some of the best writing I’ve seen in a long while. I’ve spent the entire game antagonizing everyone and saying the dumbest possible things to everyone and had an absolute blast doing so. I had the biggest grin on my face throughout especially during the side content. However, while Kamiyama may be a perverted hypocritical cowardly petty jackass, he somehow manages to avoid getting fired (from a cannon) and retains his job as the beloved (and useless) leader of the Imperial Revue. No irreconcilable hostilities here. Jackass Kamiyama is certainly more likable than generic harem protagonist Kamiyama at any rate.
That being said, for main events in particular, the main story and dialogue very rigidly snaps back from whatever dialogue option you chose back to the common route. This very much dispels whatever illusion of choice there may be and just serves to illustrate how little impact your choices actually make in the grand scheme of things.To make matters worse, sometimes the game outright cheats and makes all three options essentially the same thing.
Now choice impact doesn’t matter much so long as the story is good, my favourite ever VN is a Kinetic Novel after all so I am especially lenient on things like these. But the story of SST is mediocre at best. It’s nothing special and nothing you haven’t seen before. Half of it is a sports anime complete with rivals, underdogs and zenkoku taikai and the other half is a bog standard JRPG plot with none of the intricate plot details or trappings that come with it. As far as the main plot goes, there is nothing in it that is particularly interesting or even unique. I’ve seen plots like these done many many times before in much better stories. By the second half of the game I was just skipping through most of the fluff dialogue to get to the meatier stuff because everything got so predictable I could envision it in my head long before any of the characters say it.
So what if the plot is bland? VNs are all about characters and character interactions! And yes the writing is superbly hilarious through and through. However this mainly applies to the side characters, where interactions with them stay fresh and interesting all throughout the game. For the main heroines this stay true up until you progress further into each character’s relationship, where the choices become more and more homogenized and start being more serious. Again, this isn’t an issue if I liked the character enough to enjoy a more serious conversation with them. However… just look at the more detailed breakdown below.
For the majority of the game the story is focused on Sakura and her journey to live up to her idol, old Sakura. A majority of the story’s conflicts and plot points revolve around her with everyone else (even Kamiyama) serving as nothing more than a backdrop. For a visual novel that touts itself as a dating sim this is somewhat baffling and surprising, as it means the rest of the main heroines get very little attention beyond their spotlight chapters. Hell, for Hatsuho her spotlight chapter entirely focuses on Sakura, with her character trait boiling down to “Sakura’s Friend”. I ended up liking Claris the most out of the main characters, as her character arc ends up being the most developed out of the bunch (outside of Sakura). The game even thought so too and awarded me with the Claris ending on my first run through even though I made a conscious effort to antagonize and weird her out. This is also despite her (and the other heroines) hardly playing a role in the overall narrative. Some thoughts of each heroine:
Sakura: She’s fine but character wise she’s every harem protagonist’s childhood friend trope rolled into one with some battle harem childhood friend tropes thrown in for good measure.
Claris: As said before I liked her character and personal arc the most, being the most developed personal arc of them all.
Azami: She’s cute I guess and says funny things. She’s just kinda there but I do enjoy the character interactions with her.
Hatsuho: I wanted to like her the most seeing as I liked her characterization in the beginning of the game when you just get to know her. But over time and especially in her personal arc she just becomes someone who is defined exclusively by Sakura and who Sakura is, giving her little to no character of her own.
Anastasia: I can’t spoil much and I won’t but ugh...
I ended up liking the side characters more in this game as a result. From Sumire to Hiromi to Hakushuu, just talking to them is a reward in it of itself. And of course, ITSUKI KANGEKI! Whose genkiness and the fact that she manages to acknowledge Kamiyama as a jackass made her especially endearing to me.
There really isn’t nothing much to write about the gameplay. It is as shallow as you can imagine. No inventory management, no money management, not even a lock on feature, the battles are a real bore and a chore to get through. The dialogue the characters occasionally have (that you can’t listen to because the combat is too loud or because you ended combat too soon) are also nothing special and don’t serve to develop the plot or the characters in any way. Enemies take too long to kill and tying several trophies to doing well in combat is cruel.
I came to SST after playing a lot of Xenoblade 2 and the graphics and music immediately come to mind when comparing the two. The lighting in SST is especially gorgeous with character reflections even on transparent surfaces and music that doesn’t get tiring after a few hours. I can’t get enough of the overworld theme and how relaxing it is. The general French-European style of the music fits the atmosphere of the game really well. The vocal tracks are fantastic as well, but the clumsy placement of them in the game is certainly disappointing. The way the tracks are edited in is quite poor, with the track barely being audible in boss fights and appearing for each character at the very end when you maxed out their relationship bar. As it stands, they are best experienced from the Vocal Track CD itself as a standalone experience.
Despite being fairly critical on the game and its story, I had a lot of fun with the dialogue responses and would consider the game to be one of the funniest from 2019. If all you want is a lighthearted adventure with a good laugh, then you can’t go wrong with Shin Sakura Taisen. Just don’t go in expecting much from the story.
6/10
To my surprise the game ended up being more VN oriented than a more balanced VN-Musou hybrid, which was a pleasant surprise considering the combat is pretty barebones and shallow, yet at the same time incredibly tedious. The meat of the gameplay lies in the VN segments where you interact with the various denizens of Tokyo. This reminded me very heavily of the Yakuza series in which almost everyone is a weirdo and you can either choose to be the Tsukkomi to their Boke or double down on the stupidity and freak them out. It’s great and it helps that Yakuza’s over-the-top cheesy animations are recycled in this game to full comedic effect. As far as the actual impact of your choices go, they are very minor and only determine which ending you get at the very end of the game with regards to choices involving the main heroines. For everyone else, they offer a good variety in dialogue options and can lead to some very funny situations with no lasting impact on the overall narrative and story beyond a trophy unlock.
The conversations themselves have some of the best writing I’ve seen in a long while. I’ve spent the entire game antagonizing everyone and saying the dumbest possible things to everyone and had an absolute blast doing so. I had the biggest grin on my face throughout especially during the side content. However, while Kamiyama may be a perverted hypocritical cowardly petty jackass, he somehow manages to avoid getting fired (from a cannon) and retains his job as the beloved (and useless) leader of the Imperial Revue. No irreconcilable hostilities here. Jackass Kamiyama is certainly more likable than generic harem protagonist Kamiyama at any rate.
That being said, for main events in particular, the main story and dialogue very rigidly snaps back from whatever dialogue option you chose back to the common route. This very much dispels whatever illusion of choice there may be and just serves to illustrate how little impact your choices actually make in the grand scheme of things.To make matters worse, sometimes the game outright cheats and makes all three options essentially the same thing.
Now choice impact doesn’t matter much so long as the story is good, my favourite ever VN is a Kinetic Novel after all so I am especially lenient on things like these. But the story of SST is mediocre at best. It’s nothing special and nothing you haven’t seen before. Half of it is a sports anime complete with rivals, underdogs and zenkoku taikai and the other half is a bog standard JRPG plot with none of the intricate plot details or trappings that come with it. As far as the main plot goes, there is nothing in it that is particularly interesting or even unique. I’ve seen plots like these done many many times before in much better stories. By the second half of the game I was just skipping through most of the fluff dialogue to get to the meatier stuff because everything got so predictable I could envision it in my head long before any of the characters say it.
So what if the plot is bland? VNs are all about characters and character interactions! And yes the writing is superbly hilarious through and through. However this mainly applies to the side characters, where interactions with them stay fresh and interesting all throughout the game. For the main heroines this stay true up until you progress further into each character’s relationship, where the choices become more and more homogenized and start being more serious. Again, this isn’t an issue if I liked the character enough to enjoy a more serious conversation with them. However… just look at the more detailed breakdown below.
For the majority of the game the story is focused on Sakura and her journey to live up to her idol, old Sakura. A majority of the story’s conflicts and plot points revolve around her with everyone else (even Kamiyama) serving as nothing more than a backdrop. For a visual novel that touts itself as a dating sim this is somewhat baffling and surprising, as it means the rest of the main heroines get very little attention beyond their spotlight chapters. Hell, for Hatsuho her spotlight chapter entirely focuses on Sakura, with her character trait boiling down to “Sakura’s Friend”. I ended up liking Claris the most out of the main characters, as her character arc ends up being the most developed out of the bunch (outside of Sakura). The game even thought so too and awarded me with the Claris ending on my first run through even though I made a conscious effort to antagonize and weird her out. This is also despite her (and the other heroines) hardly playing a role in the overall narrative. Some thoughts of each heroine:
Sakura: She’s fine but character wise she’s every harem protagonist’s childhood friend trope rolled into one with some battle harem childhood friend tropes thrown in for good measure.
Claris: As said before I liked her character and personal arc the most, being the most developed personal arc of them all.
Azami: She’s cute I guess and says funny things. She’s just kinda there but I do enjoy the character interactions with her.
Hatsuho: I wanted to like her the most seeing as I liked her characterization in the beginning of the game when you just get to know her. But over time and especially in her personal arc she just becomes someone who is defined exclusively by Sakura and who Sakura is, giving her little to no character of her own.
Anastasia: I can’t spoil much and I won’t but ugh...
I ended up liking the side characters more in this game as a result. From Sumire to Hiromi to Hakushuu, just talking to them is a reward in it of itself. And of course, ITSUKI KANGEKI! Whose genkiness and the fact that she manages to acknowledge Kamiyama as a jackass made her especially endearing to me.
There really isn’t nothing much to write about the gameplay. It is as shallow as you can imagine. No inventory management, no money management, not even a lock on feature, the battles are a real bore and a chore to get through. The dialogue the characters occasionally have (that you can’t listen to because the combat is too loud or because you ended combat too soon) are also nothing special and don’t serve to develop the plot or the characters in any way. Enemies take too long to kill and tying several trophies to doing well in combat is cruel.
I came to SST after playing a lot of Xenoblade 2 and the graphics and music immediately come to mind when comparing the two. The lighting in SST is especially gorgeous with character reflections even on transparent surfaces and music that doesn’t get tiring after a few hours. I can’t get enough of the overworld theme and how relaxing it is. The general French-European style of the music fits the atmosphere of the game really well. The vocal tracks are fantastic as well, but the clumsy placement of them in the game is certainly disappointing. The way the tracks are edited in is quite poor, with the track barely being audible in boss fights and appearing for each character at the very end when you maxed out their relationship bar. As it stands, they are best experienced from the Vocal Track CD itself as a standalone experience.
Despite being fairly critical on the game and its story, I had a lot of fun with the dialogue responses and would consider the game to be one of the funniest from 2019. If all you want is a lighthearted adventure with a good laugh, then you can’t go wrong with Shin Sakura Taisen. Just don’t go in expecting much from the story.
6/10
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