Sakura no Toki (サクラノ刻) Review

Thinking back, Sakura no Uta (サクラノ詩) was eight years ago now.

I rated it pretty highly at the time, and it resonated with me on a personal level given some of my own experiences.

It genuinely taught me a lot too, especially about the relationship between “mathematics” and “art” — the correspondence between the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence had me half-convinced that a “Creator” and “God” might actually exist, and made me instantly understand why so many scientists end up turning to mysticism.

Because there’s just too much in this world that’s strange, mysterious, and completely unexplained.

All that to say, I got a lot out of Sakura no Uta, and even purely as narrative it’s plenty gripping — honestly it’s that gripping story that kept me reading, and along the way I picked up all sorts of interesting trivia.

I figured the story was over, since the ending really didn’t leave any obvious room for a sequel. Then I heard about Sakura no Toki (サクラノ刻).

There’s a sequel? What would it even be about? I genuinely had no idea. The female students who barely registered in the original main plot? Or forcing a route onto Ms. Ai, who was already perfectly complete as she was? The protagonist’s relationship with her was lovely precisely because it wasn’t family but might as well have been — were they really going to shoehorn a romance in just so she’d be “routeable”?

No way, right? There’s no need to be that tacky… doing that would drag down the whole game’s prestige and even wreck the protagonist’s character. I already thought him getting with Misono Rin was a stretch — that was already a concession to “R18 game sales” — no need to go that far, surely?

And then with the release of Totono no Sora Remake (终の空 Remake), I became even more confident about Sakura no Toki. I figured it absolutely wouldn’t be some unnecessary sequel milking the name, nor a rushed product made just to pander to players by forcing a route onto some character.

Well, Sakura no Toki came out anyway, and you can probably guess the rest.

I was wrong. Spectacularly wrong.

Almost everything I predicted came true. Sakura no Toki really is a continuation of the original story, and it really is about a bunch of female students whose names I don’t even remember. And the final True End really is an excruciatingly awkward forced route for Ms. Ai.

And the biggest difference between Sakura no Toki and Sakura no Uta is that the main storyline is incredibly hollow — lots of parts where there’s just nothing to say, and it’s clearly padding. Four-odd months after finishing it, I still can’t put together a coherent summary of the plot. It feels more like a DLC for the original, a collection of short vignettes…

First, the story about the forgery. From the start I knew what it was getting at — the relationship between imitation and originality. Artists all start by copying, and when you copy to the extreme you eventually develop your own style. And no matter what mindset you copy with, even if you’re making a forgery, the forgery itself is a masterpiece.

The logic is simple, same as those smartphone makers who got their start by “copying.” Even Japan itself took its first steps through copying and imitation.

Then in a later chapter the game introduces a new character, Honma Shiro. Her CV is the universally, ridiculously adorable Natsuwa Koto, but I see Misono Rin in this character from every angle — or rather, she’s a chimera: Misono Rin as the base, spliced together with personality traits from several of the original heroines. The way she talks, the way her talent is displayed, the final showdown with its overwhelming sense of déjà vu, even the family feuding — it all felt like a straight rehash of the original, just there to introduce a new character and pad out the game’s length.

And the final Ms. Ai route, I think, is still just a remix and extension of Sakura no Uta’s last chapter, only with baffling horniness and HCGs added, and it badly damages her character.

Yeah, I think Ms. Ai and the protagonist are more like trusted friends and family, an older-sister figure. Mutual support and trust was already enough. Why does she have to strip naked and get fucked for it to count?

Why?

Sakura no Uta without that scene was a work of literature. Sakura no Toki, with its abrupt “a route for the sake of a route,” sinks to being just an ordinary galgame — and to some extent it drags down Sakura no Uta’s level too.

That said, I can understand the Makoto romance, since it’s probably writer SCA-ji making up for his own regret — in the original Sakura no Uta the Makoto parts were outsourced to someone else, so naturally he’d want to reclaim his own character.

Sakura no Toki is extremely fragmented, and fragmented stories can’t support that much volume. So the game pads its runtime with “daily life between the female students and the teacher,” in the style — dare I say it — of Ms. Wang’s favorite “Chinese-invested, Korean-made, Japan-published anime version of 咸鱼之王,” A.K.A. Blue Archive. Whenever the story doesn’t know how to move forward, students flock around going “sensei, sensei,” though there’s no MomoTalk, no sweep, no total assault, and you can’t tap avatars to farm affection. As a galgame it can’t chase playability, so all Sakura no Toki can do is have the teacher protagonist banter with his students.

The banter is all random trivia, which is SCA-ji’s forte — rambling on about everything under the sun, making you feel like you learned a lot of facts, none of which affect the main plot.

Oh right, don’t forget the game basically has no main plot. The only main plot you could extract is “fuck Ms. Ai.”

So what’s left is fragmented anecdotes and some forced romance to serve the player’s desires. It felt like that manga Ebiten: Kōritsu Ebisugawa Kōkō Tenmonbu — at first glance lots of references, occasional great lines, but no convincing throughline, just a pile of loose sand. Fine as a 4-koma, maybe, but it falls far short of the “uta” feeling of the original Sakura no Uta. Like those common chuuni-overdosed scenario writers who write pretentious philosophical works that read like schizophrenia — a bit deeper than moege, but still can’t escape the R18 galgame frame. That’s all.

Many people think SCA-ji’s strength as a writer is his “denpa” quality, but as I said in a previous commercial piece, SCA-ji’s real strength is telling a gripping story while slipping denpa text full of trivia and philosophy between the lines, so that before you know it you’re influenced, drawn into his spiritual world, gradually exploring broader unknown territory — like the Buddha’s raft, or Wittgenstein’s ladder.

Sakura no Toki doesn’t do that, because it has no gripping story as bait. Nobody but the mentally ill who resonate with SCA-ji would sit through it — and people synced to his wavelength don’t need bait anyway; they’ll overinterpret and praise even his farts. For the “general public,” Sakura no Toki compared to Sakura no Uta offers only boredom… oh, and Ebiten is the same.

In the final showdown, Sakura no Toki keeps hammering on definitions of “artist” and the like. That ugly writing reminded me of a middle schooler writing an exam essay, realizing they’ve gone off-topic, and desperately repeating the theme in every sentence so the grader won’t misunderstand.

An artist doesn’t need to explain — it’s an aura that seeps out between the lines. It’s Misono Rin lying under the cherry tree in Sakura no Uta, sighing “math is beautiful” at the petals falling from the sky. It’s the protagonist’s father on the night before the elopement, holding his lover and saying “Whatever” — that nonchalance. Sakura no Toki tries to recreate that scene with Ms. Ai, and the result is obvious: the atmosphere is gone.

If Sakura no Uta is an ensemble drama of artists full of philosophy, art, life, struggle, and nonchalance, then Sakura no Toki is more like a boring adult film with sex scenes put on by a bunch of self-styled “artists” copying the form without the substance. Frankly, it reads like a fan-made doujin work of Sakura no Uta.

And the scariest part is that the same person wrote both.

And recently I heard there’s yet another sequel after Sakura no Toki…

Please. Don’t. Just stop…