Sakurairo Dreamer (さくら色 Dreamer) Review

In the last month of 2020, on a weird date, a weird game showed up: Sakura-iro Dreamer.

The developer is listed as “Cover,” with “Hololive” as its subsidiary — and everyone knows that’s a Vtuber agency. The heroine is one of their talents: Sakura Miko. The name is profoundly dumb, because translated it comes out as the painfully rustic “Sakura Shrine Maiden.”

Sure, a Vtuber getting a game is a good thing that fits where the industry is headed. Vtubers are capital’s darling right now, the successful ones aren’t short on cash, and they’ve definitely got more money than the eroge crowd, so a game made with that backing should be solid, right?

So I looked at this game, and it nearly killed me with anger before I even got started.

The plot is dead simple. You play as the heroine Sakura Miko’s [ ] — note you can name the character yourself, and I bluntly typed in “Dad” — you ramble at her at home for a while, then send her off on the train to go make her way in the wider world, and…

And that’s it!

The game even has the gall to present a choice: right before she boards the train, do you confess to her or not?

Of course the choice does nothing. Confess or don’t, she can’t hear you either way.

Then the game hits its ED.

One last thing: the game has exactly two CGs and one OP (or ED, whatever) sung by the Vtuber. It doesn’t get more bare-bones than this. And even though they brought in Sumya, an artist I personally like, the coloring makes it not look like her work at all — the coloring style, the facial expressions, it all reads more like a game from another company.

Yes! Alcot, the company that spent all of 2020 not making games and just running crowdfunding!

I checked the staff list. The game doesn’t carry the Alcot label, but by any measure it’s an Alcot game — the sound director in particular gives it away.

So this whole thing is Cover/hololive paying Alcot to outsource a game that doesn’t even qualify as a “gateway” — pure traffic funneling for their own character. And Alcot didn’t even try: the music is lifted straight from Cloverdays. The staff list looks impressive, but odds are they just dug up cut scripts from some earlier game and recycled them.

Honestly, I fully endorse Vtubers doing porn games. The Vtuber market is brutal right now — some of the top talents are already doing vibrator play, which is basically indistinguishable from eroge anyway. That’s a theme begging to be done properly, and stopping where this game stops is a waste.

As a genre, something like Sakura-iro Dreamer is very necessary. This particular game, though, is very much not okay.