Sakura Spirit Writing Critique - An Introduction
Entry posted by Darklord Rooke
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For those that don’t know, the other day some villains ambushed me and they gave me a task – to produce a writing critique of Sakura Spirit. This, they say, will entertain the masses and provide much mirth for those on Fuwa. It is a task I went into full of hubris.
But first some background. Sakura Spirit is an English developed Visual Novel with extroadinarily pretty art, and yet it suffers from a horrible reputation. A reputation even more repulsive than those terribly translated, doujin, nukige abominations Mangagamer spews forth. The mere mention of this title produces hisses and insults from nearby people, reactions you’d usually only hear if you gatecrashed a teenagers party. Dressed in only a bathrobe and slippers. Shouting that it was past your child’s bed-time, you were here to collect them, and had anybody seen them?
There’s very few people or institutions that could release something so aesthetically beautiful only to produce such disgust in the public, and my money’s on the Government.
And so I went into this challenge supremely confident, reassured by the knowledge that the Government has never done anything right. I would be gifted a game that was completely horrid, and I would need to apply only a minisule amount of brainpower to produce a detailed critique. How misplaced a feeling this was!
But onto specifics, why the uproar over such a beautiful looking game? Well, there’s 4 reasons: there’s no plot, it’s a game about sex but there is none, it’s an English developed visual novel with Japanese words and phrases sprinkled everywhere, and the writing is horrid. So the only positives to the game are the pretty art, and the fanservice.
But surely gamers are a smart species, they wouldn't fork over good money just because of some large, oil-smeared boobs, am I right? That would be like watching NASCAR for the crashes, or watching a foreign film to laugh at the funny mistranslations in the subtitles.
But I was wrong. Over 100,000 people own Sakura Spirit, and that’s more than the entire voting population of Aruba. And most of them appear to have thoroughly enjoyed themselves, if the review system on Steam can be taken at face value.
Which it can’t.
But here’s the thing, if a small indie studio can sell over a hundred thousand copies just by including some nice art, and sprites with reflecting boobs, then there’s no incentive to provide a decent story or good writing. Writing takes time, and good writing even more so, and if there's little monetary reward to head down that path then people won’t.
But unlike Winged Cloud, Sekai Project is a production studio and DO have a professional reputation to maintain. In response to the uproar they made some apologetic sounds and issued some vague promises on Reddit. They said they asked Winged Cloud to “improve the grammar and writing” and have since “changed their QA procedure”. But despite their revamped QA procedure the situation repeated itself with Nekopara, another awfully pretty game that was obviously translated by the Government. This didn’t bode well for their first promise.
So over the next few weeks (Fuwa time) I will analyse the game’s writing to find out how much it has improved, and what writing issues are still included in the script. Obviously they wouldn't have been able to shoe-horn in a plot, or much additional character development, but what have they improved and how bad is the writing in its current form? Is Sakura Spirit finally worth purchasing or is it still nothing more than a glorified erotic CG gallery… with no actual porn?
That’s what we’ll find out.
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