Games like Sakura Note give the slice of life genre a bad name. There’s no point making a game about ordinary life with a mystic twist if the result is going to be less interesting than real life. Heck, there’s no point making any game that’s less interesting than real life. After two mediocre chapters of walking around a small, dull town talking to dull NPCs, I’m all but ready to throw in the towel.

Story: The cherry tree at the local shrine is blooming out of season. Unless the main character can find a solution, it will stop blooming forever in a few days. The key to saving the tree this lies with a girl named Nanami Yoshida, who just moved to town and transferred to the main character’s school. Her tears and her blood hold a mysterious power that is a target for good and bad guys alike.

Real story: The main character’s father (the suave Lothario on the cover) is looking to start an affair with his newly-divorced childhood friend. Said not-entirely-unwilling friend happens to be Nanami’s mother. MC’s mother is understandably unhappy about this, but is far too passive-aggressive to come out and confront her husband about his intentions. It’s compelling drama, in a soap opera-ish kind of way, and if I continue playing it will be largely because I want to see this situation play out.

Characters: The main character, his family and his cat. Nanami, her mother and their dog. The strange old man who keeps kidnapping Nanami to get her to save the tree. These are the important members of the cast. There are also NPCs scattered around town who you interact with to get their tears. I like everyone except the grown ups, who are making their own lives needlessly complicated by refusing to communicate about simple matters. As I said, it’s compelling in the way only a marriage on the rocks can be, but man, I just want to punch them! All of them!

The Tears system: Walk around town, talk to people and pick choices that elicit emotions. These emotions will make them shed blue tears, which you automatically collect and use to unlock extra scenarios. You also get to view the same events from the viewpoint of your cat and Nanami’s dog. Sometimes these are interesting, but very often they just retread the same ground you’ve covered before. You can restart a chapter at any point to pick different choices and see how these affect the NPCs. Racking up enough of the right “experiences” across all scenarios gives permanent boosts to the main character’s battle stats, which is useful enough but not really worth the considerable amount of trouble you have to undergo to unlock them.

Combat: Sakura Note is a visual novel, with 99% of your time spent walking, reading and picking choices. For some reason, Marvelous felt the need to shoehorn an action battle against a demon at the end of every chapter. Run, dodge, attack with A or B and keep attacking until the demon drops dead. Each battle is fairly easy and doesn’t take very long, which only highlights how unnecessary they are in the larger scheme of things.

Impressions: Boring, seriously. I’m sorry Greenpeace, but you’ll have to do better than “Save the trees!” to give me a reason to play a game. In the first two chapters, the writers have established that there’s something seriously wrong with the town and that the cherry tree is only a symptom of that disease. Unfortunately they are taking so long to explain what is going on and spending far too much time on the (admittedly more interesting) adult side story that it’s hard to stay focused. The gameplay is repetitive too, going basically like this: (walk, talk, pick choice)x 10, walk, talk, get tiny snippet of story, (switch point of view to dog or cat, get a little more story)x 7, switch back, walk, talk, one last bit of story, battle.

Wikipedia tells me Sakura Note sold only 4,124 copies in 2009, which is about 4,000 copies too many for a game that doesn’t appeal to anyone. The story is too weak and slow to please a story lover, the combat isn’t worth writing home about, the main story will bore adults and the secondary plot will confuse and annoy kids. I may try one more chapter before pronouncing a final verdict., but I’m not holding out much hope.

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