people who are wrong about everything, but let’s not get into that). No matter how you look at it, Sakura Dungeon really does deliver. Now, some people may be feeling skeptic right about now. 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. 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. My point is, Sakura Dungeon does not follow the usual Winged Cloud template. 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. I can gladly confirm that titty detail did not in the least suffer for it, though. I’d say we’re off to a good start so far. 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. 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. 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”. 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. 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. You start off with a single party member, the cute knight girl Ceri.
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