I played サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ last year, and my takeaway at the time was: strong opening, decent premise, peaks early and then nosedives, rushed ending. I remember the promo OP being absolutely insane. The buildup before the OP hits is done perfectly—basically the protagonist falls in love for the first time, confesses to the girl he likes, Madoka, and then the very next moment, because he wasn’t paying attention, she gets killed by a serial killer. His rage, despair, regret—all of it explodes the moment that blazing OP kicks in. Hell of an opening.
I won’t get into the rest of the game. It’s a textbook high-open-low-walk. The protagonist starts randomly chasing the killer who murdered his girlfriend, randomly joins a few organizations, solves a few random haunted-house incidents around town, and the plot gets more and more psychedelic. The killer turns out to be a psycho, also bisexual, then the killer himself starts randomly getting superpowers, and the protagonist gets a parasite…
This kind of escalation reminds me of a ghost story I read in high school. The mystery setup was solid, then suddenly the protagonist gains Taoist powers and starts having superpowered xianxia battles with all sorts of ghosts. I literally spat out my drink. It went from mystery to melodramatic wuxia, massive disappointment.
Same with サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ. Massive disappointment. Great start, then it turned into a mess. After that, the scenario writer for サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ, Go Nii… oh wait, Mr. Go, went off to write other games. Still heavy horror stuff, but no longer the “dream diving” of the original サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ. The game called 仄暗き時の果てより tells a story of aliens and Cthulhu-style time travel. It was actually okay, but I was starting to feel fatigue with Mr. Go’s approach of “not enough plot? add ketchup.” Then サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ 2 was announced as a sequel.
At first I was curious what kind of story サクラノモリ†ドリーマーズ 2 could possibly tell, since the first game basically wrapped everything up. The protagonist’s girlfriend died, killed by a bisexual psycho. By the end, Madoka had ascended to heaven and the protagonist couldn’t even see her ghost anymore. The mastermind, that bisexual psycho, had been taken out by the protagonist. The story had a relatively complete ending. All that was left were some loose threads with the side heroines. I could understand an FD, but a “2”? Are we just calling FDs “2” now?
Then the game came out. After playing through it in bits and pieces over two weeks, I’d say as a “2” it holds up.
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