Sakura Fubuki Sennen no Koi (樱吹雪-千年之恋) Review

I only played this because my hands slipped. I found it in some eroge guy’s cloud drive, and the title was too pretty for me to look away, so I couldn’t stop myself and hands-slipped a download. Finding the unzip password took some effort too, and the real kicker was discovering after extraction that the thing had no CD crack, so I had to download a 3 GB+ original disc and mount it as a virtual drive just to run it. While everyone else was pushing Your Diary, I sat alone with my tablet playing this game, and after finishing it I had a lot of feelings, so I’ll just ramble. Spoilers ahead as always, look away if you don’t want them. (Though honestly I think the game spoils itself well enough.)

First, you need to know there’s a kind of work out there. Instead of the usual beautiful fantasy plot, it uses something closer to reality to shatter your dreams and help you better accept the world you live in. We generally call this “human truth,” like how Uncle Kan’s “Boki yo Shoujo” used its broken animation to show us the miserable fate of having no money to make anime, and Sakura Fubuki, with its no-money-but-still-gonna-do-it behavior, made me understand where the fundamental needs of making a visual novel lie…

The game’s story is actually pretty good, but the pity is that it slapped on the subtitle “A Love of a Thousand Years.” Anyone who reads that title, what comes to mind?

“A love story where the hero and heroine fell in love 1000 years ago but couldn’t be together, and end up tangled together over the course of those 1000 years.”

Right! And that’s exactly the story the game tells…

Content-wise it uses the Peach Blossom Spring setting. 1000 years ago, the hero’s past life was a defeated general who fled to an isolated village, “Sakura Village.” While healing his wounds there, he fell in love with the village’s princess. But a general with healed wounds has to leave eventually, so he promised the princess he’d return, and the princess went ahead and told him how to enter Sakura Village.

The general left and never came back—only the smoke of war returned. Because the method of entry leaked, war reached Sakura Village and everyone in it was killed. The princess’s act of revealing the village’s location was deemed a crime for the ages, so as punishment she was forever transformed into a cherry tree, becoming the new barrier of Sakura Village, with no release. And 1000 years later, the general… meaning the hero’s reincarnation, comes to Sakura Village again… which is now the closed-off Sakura森 Girls’ Academy, and meets his thousand-year lover once more.

At the start they tell you that you, as the hero, enter an all-girls school alone, but shortly after entering, the hero starts making deals with people, wanting to escape this school.

I get the reason—this is where the “human truth” comes in. There are no soft girls in this school, only Chun-ges, yakshas, guro lolis, and a yandere older sister. You could say not a single character in this school is watchable… The lonely hero can only chat with his bro (who’s fake, by the way) every day, muttering about when he can escape.

The reason is obvious once you play. What’s worth mentioning here is the character design—every single one is broken… The only watchable one is Sister Tenfuki Yuka, and even she got drawn broken…

Though the setting is grand, the storytelling isn’t very novel. The hero keeps dreaming about his past life, and a loli character who looks a lot like the heroine keeps showing up and tangling with him. Days pass one after another like this. Only at the very, very end, on the True End route, does the plot go wild like a roller coaster—secrets are revealed, dreams are explained, and all doubts are resolved…

The route branching is ridiculous. You have to clear every heroine’s route to reach the True End, including that sharp-tongued yaksha and that sword-carrying Chun-ge. I didn’t even want to look at those two properly, so I just fast-skipped them. The sister route is also weird—in the end you elope with her, not a single cent of secret-solving, and it just adds new questions. After clearing everything I realized the other heroines’ routes are all smoke bombs, completely unrelated to the main plot, and quite a few settings contradict the main story—it’s basically a parallel world.

After finishing the game, I felt like I’d seen this setting somewhere before. I thought about it, and the name 11eyes popped into my head. Same thousand-year-old love, same being trapped in a barrier, same women who can cut people, same deadpan loli…

Compare them and you can see where two games with the same story and plot differ…

First, Kusakabe Misuzu wasn’t drawn as a Chun-ge, Momono Shiori wasn’t drawn with a guro face, and Tachibana Kukuri wasn’t drawn as a yandere creep… More importantly, 11eyes had great direction—every fight came with visuals, plus the cool senpai’s sword-drawing effects. And Sakura Fubuki? Nothing. The three fights with the black-clad weirdo had no effects at all, not even a little sprite movement or shaking effect. The game’s CGs are pitifully few, and even backgrounds are massively missing—in the underground passages and dreams, scenes that clearly need backgrounds are all replaced with black screens. Zero immersion, it just feels boring. Especially the final scene: 11eyes used multiple perspectives to describe the past, while Sakura Fubuki just simply describes dreams, the perspectives are a mess, and still no new CGs… It’s hard to feel any sincerity.

Last thing worth mentioning is the game’s voice acting—very immersion-breaking. Aside from the bro’s voice actor Tanaka Ryouko who did the best, the others all have more or less problems. I looked it up and they’re all nukige出身, barely voiced any proper eroge, and thinking about the production team’s arrangement of direction, I let it go.

The game has a story that barely counts as first-rate, but it was made into this. If we need to assign blame, the art team can be strung up and beaten, the direction can be strung up and beaten, and the programmer? Should be dragged out and sodomized to death. Compared to Your Diary next door, same engine, and they made something with no backlog—truly deserves to die…

I heard Sakura Fubuki has a sequel, describing the student council four-member group’s story, with the hero crossdressed by the sister and sneaking back into the academy. I can’t imagine this game wasting its project on something like that. With this art style and direction, I don’t know where the developers got their confidence. Of course, reality is cruel—the wiki told me this production company, abbreviated SB, has gone bankrupt…

As for whether this game is worth playing… I can’t really say clearly. First, its story is okay, but it didn’t move me, because the character design and voice acting were too distracting. Maybe if you extract the text and read it as a novel, the effect would be better…