Y’know, I bought this game for the same reason everyone else did, having already played all the other Sakura games and plenty of other ecchi visual novels, most of which expectedly contained pretty basic, lackluster storytelling and writing with just a bunch of cliched scenes and generic fluff in between the saucy CGs, and they do the job just fine, of course, but this visual novel is a massive improvement in writing quality that is a breath of fresh air. Now, I’m a writing and literature major myself who values a good narrative, but I understand that erogames don’t exactly need to have a strong focus on quality writing beyond making sure the grammar is accurate and there’s no typos, so I wasn’t expecting anything special going into this. To my suprise, the change in writer (I believe the writing of this game is named “waffle” or something like that) made a big difference right away, and a lot of the inner monologue and dialogue is far more engaging and charmful. Just the plain improvement in humanizing and adding character to the dialogue and a vastly improved word choice among other influences makes the text much easier to digest, rather than something boring that you tolerate enough to get which characters have which personalities archetypes and to follow the main ‘plot’ to a degree until you become too bored and skip ahead to the next CG. The direction of the story is far more dramatic and engaging than prior Sakura games, due to the more serious tone the characters’ physical and emotional conflicts are portrayed, and, just, like, the general writing quality of everything a typical story has is much, much better this time around. It’s not just a bunch of fluff. Even if the narrrative it tells is simple, it’s executed well.

Another great thing about the writing and charm of the game is that it’s centered around the characters making an eroge visual novel themselves, which adds a lot of comedy and interesting dialogue due to the meta satire of explaining the process for a visual novel while in a visual novel, and the jokes drawn from this are all over the place. It’s a clever way to add more appreciation for the parts of the visual novel that are being pointed out, comedically and artistically.

The game’s length is pretty comparable to the prior entries, but there are more optional scenes that play out for far longer than usual, and, like I said previously, more of the dialogue is unique, and not just more of the same. The music is pretty samey in terms of quality, as far as I can tell. Seems to be just some typical remixes of the standard themes. The music is unobtrusive, and works well. The art is also pretty much the same stuff as before, which is probably the central reason why people would be interested in picking this up, so there’s no need to change it. There’re 3 different endings and a few optional scenes that occur depending on the choices that you pick, and they’re all pretty fleshed out.

Overall, the game is honestly pretty decent, as short visual novels go. Everything that you would expect to get out of the game is in there, just as you’d like, but it’s a lot easier to enjoy the whole game, not just the bits where hot, likable anime girls get naked and kinky. I should stop myself from claiming this game is a must buy, or that it’s really all that incredible, because it is still just a couple hours of fanservice and a simple story that’s probably only gonna be played through a single time, but compared to plenty of other games of the same archetype, the sizable leap in quality of the experience makes it worth checking out in my opinion. Basically, if you liked or kinda liked any of the other Sakura games, I’m saying you should really pick up this one.

Oh, and before I forget, I suppose it wouldn’t be right to review an eroge game without mentioning this at least once: The girls are indeed very hot.