In contrast to the old Final Fantasy/ RPG Maker style, which is the gameplay and strategy equivalent of sticking forks in your eyeballs over and over and expecting it to finally stop being excruciatingly painful (read: mind-numbingly boring), the EO style of RPG combat allows for a ton of variety, as the character-switching system creates scenarios where overwhelming opponents become surmountable through proper character management by switching in counters and switching out wounded party members, thus allowing for otherwise-impossible positional combat on a static 2D plane. Then again, it’s also true that good gameplay isn’t exactly easy to deliver – it’s a rare art that not even a huge budget can guarantee (see: most AAA schlock nowadays).įortunately for Sakura Dungeon, the handbook it chose to follow is a great one that’s both easily pinned down and easy to make changes to – the Wizardry/ Etrian Odyssey style of dungeon crawling, with mappable dungeons and a party of many, many interchangeable characters, consisting of a front-line and a back-line facing off enemies in turn-based combat. It’s rare to see an H-game that is a game first, which is both odd and sad since good gameplay that keeps the player glued to the screen can make up for and even improve porn that would otherwise be just “decent” or worse, “good enough”. Sometimes you’ll see a title that really goes all-out on the art, and yet oftentimes these sorts will also not be able to hold your attention for long due to middling gameplay. See, the thing about H-games is that, due to the low budget usually involved, titles usually offer both mediocre porn and gameplay, and we forgive them this because hey, it’s a niche genre. I’d say we’re off to a good start so far. I can gladly confirm that titty detail did not in the least suffer for it, though. Hell, it doesn’t follow the usual H-game template – there’s porn, yeah, but the focus clearly went into making the gameplay as polished as it could be within the limits of the Ren’Py visual novel engine. My point is, Sakura Dungeon does not follow the usual Winged Cloud template. I’d argue that it’s a very successful template and that rather than fault a particular dev for what works for them, we should focus on finding devs that fit our niche, but I digress. That’s a discussion for another article. That’s understandable – developer Winged Cloud has been accused of churning out anime titty games that all more or less follow the same cut-out template. Now, some people may be feeling skeptic right about now. No matter how you look at it, Sakura Dungeon really does deliver. people who are wrong about everything, but let’s not get into that). Instead, I should focus on whether the game can appeal to people who are not necessarily addicted to cel-shaded cartoon girls (i.e. I soon realized, however, that the question was a poor one to make. So, when I played Sakura Dungeon and got sucked into a nerd-shaped black hole from which I only emerged some four-odd hours later, I did stop to wonder: ‘Am I this easily swayed by anime breasts and magic explosions?’ ‘Yes,’ came the prompt answer. It takes a truly bad experience to make that status wear off in any appreciable amount of time. You throw some swords, magic and cute anime girls into something, and I essentially become a drooling ‘tard for a while. I may be a bit biased, is what I’m trying to say. You ever played Labyrinth of Touhou? Wanna hear all about my tabletop RPG campaigns? I should probably stop. I have three-hundred hours clocked in Dragon’s Dogma and can sing ‘Into Free’ from memory. I could probably write an essay gushing about how magic works in the universe of Kinoko Nasu’s Fate/Stay Night and Kara no Kyoukai (though I will never be able to explain how a man responsible for that also conjured up material as retarded as Nero being Saber in a transparent skirt and Thomas Edison being a furry). I counted the days until the release of Fault: Milestone 1 and its sequel ( Milestone 3 never ever). I blazed through Monster Girl Quest in two days and a night, and cried like a little bitch at the end. Allow me to get one thing out of the way – I am a SUCKER for fantasy VNs and fantasy video games in general.
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