Sen no Hatou, Sarabana no Kōki: Hanaakari (千の刃濤、桃花染の皇姫：花あかり) Review

I have to admit it now: that August title I’d been dunking on for ages, Sen no Hatou, Tokihana Iro no Kouki (千の刃濤、桃花染の皇姫), is actually a really, really goated game.

What makes it so good? The good part is that its setting is absurd on the surface, yet still rings true.

Back then I was shitposting about it: “How can a world have a theocratic feudal monarchy on one side and a republic on the other, living side by side in peace, with the monarchy’s upper-class kids even going to school in the republic? That’s complete bullshit!”

Obviously I don’t think that anymore. And I don’t think you do either. This kind of arrangement really does exist in the world.

Sen no Hatou, Tokihana Iro no Kouki is also packed with realistic content—like the republic exporting “freedom” and “democracy” purely for its own interests, and the monarchist empire deciding it needs to walk its own democratic path…

Man, the more I say, the more familiar it sounds, and the more people will think I’m hinting at something. I’m not saying anything, of course. It’s just a feeling. What I am very much looking forward to is the fandisk for Sen no Hatou, Tokihana Iro no Kouki hitting the shelves.

The fandisk is called Sen no Hatou, Tokihana Iro no Kouki: Hanākari, which is the name of the original’s main heroine—except… at this point the name really doesn’t mean much. Probably nobody cares either way.

This FD’s content is shockingly short. Twelve additional heroine stories, each under an hour… you have to wonder whether the total playtime even reaches ten hours. But that’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is this:

This so-called fandisk has no new story at all. It’s nothing but after stories for the old game.

Take the main heroine’s story: the princess regains power and decides to reform the empire, learning more from the republic while abolishing her own country’s backward customs—including that curse wall forged from souls or whatever.

So the princess has the shrine maidens dismantle the curse wall, which feels an awful lot like digging up your own ancestral graves… and the story is her flirting with the protagonist while they dismantle the wall, only to find that a giant vengeful spirit, Godzilla-sized, has been released.

Then everyone discovers the spirit actually came from the republic—probably a soldier who died in the war—so they call in the republic’s ambassador and seal it together…

And then it’s over…

Over!

Even the other characters’ stories are painfully short. The founding emperor’s route, for instance: the protagonist travels back in time, changes the history where the founding emperor sacrificed countless lives to forge a nation-saving artifact, avoids the tangled hatred with the neighboring people, and saves… the princess of another timeline, while incidentally cucking the princess of the original timeline…

And then it’s over again…

Not a single thing in this whole FD qualifies as a main story. Most of the individual routes are just expansions of the original’s anemic character routes, and the world-state endings differ from character to character. In some stories the empire still exists; in some it’s been abolished; in some it’s been remade into a republic. And the most cringe one: in some stories the empire becomes the republic’s dog, the republic plays world police, and it demands the empire send its warriors off to fight too.

Getting kinda USA-invades-Iraq-and-asks-Japan-to-send-troops vibes, isn’t it?

Anyway, I get it now. This so-called FD is at best a DLC. Maybe it’s got a new OP and ED, but the content is three little stories per character. That’s it.

And I can’t help but sigh: August, what happened to you?

I remember August’s old fandisks being generous as hell, like The Shepherd of the Great Library (大図書館の羊飼い) and its fandisk Dreaming Sheep. That volume was insane. Nothing like this half-assed attitude today…

If you tell me the original story was already finished and there was nothing left to write for an FD, I don’t buy it. The original never detailed Yagiri Yukika’s branch story in Kuni no Kuni. Pulling that out as a prequel or side story would’ve been great, but for some reason August didn’t do it.

Did August decide that making eroge isn’t worth it compared to browser games? And the irony is, I barely remember most of this game’s stories. What I do remember is the fat cat from their earlier games showing up as a joke cameo…

Don’t forget where you came from! PLEASE MAKE AUGUST GREAT AGAIN!