I actually finished Jewelry Hearts Academia a while ago and just couldn’t be bothered to write about it. Main reason: I’d already done the commercial piece, where I dissected the plot front to back, went through the details, and gave the damn thing a thorough evaluation from every angle. It wore me out. The thought of writing a second version for the blog made me want to throw up, so it just sat there. Still, for the year-end roundup and review, I have to write about it eventually. No escape. I really can’t be bothered to lay out the plot. It’s too fucking long and too fucking complicated. Let’s keep it brief, just a summary, and skip the details.

I had my eye on Sakura no Kumo * Scarlet no Koi (さくらの雲＊スカアレットの恋) well before release, mostly because that “Cabbage” game from before was so unbelievably stupid. The scenario is by Fuyu Akane (冬茜トム), who’s done story-driven work for several SugarPot and Cabbage titles, and this wasn’t his first time teaming up with Korie Riko either. The premise when it was first announced kind of baffled me: our protagonist gets sent back 100 years into Japan’s past and has to find a way home. That’s literally the level of a Chinese web novel. One of the bad ones. Trusting the writer, I still opened it up and it took me a good while to finish. Partly because things were busy at home, partly because the early-to-mid game is just so damn boring. The good news is the final chapter is genuinely fun, and it’s tightly paced — it blows through all that long-winded buildup and explains what was actually going on. In Japan they call this “paying off the foreshadowing.” Sure, if you say so. Anyway, let’s get into the game.

There’s a fairly famous song called “Amazing Grace.” The Chinese translation usually goes with something like “divine grace,” though the official rendering in a lot of places is “wondrous grace.” It’s actually a religious song with deep roots in Christianity, but it got so famous that it spread around the world and stopped being confined to religious use. The gist of “Amazing Grace” is right there in the name—praising the grace God has given you, basically a hymn. But what people actually like about it is being moved by that sense of the “sacred” in the song. Maybe that’s the unique appeal of religious music in general. So at the end of this year, a game showed up carrying the “Amazing Grace” title—an 18X eroge, no less, with Korie Riko as the artist and Tsukiyashiro Tomu on scenario. A stacked lineup. The last time Tsukiyashiro Tomu and Korie Riko worked together was Magical Charming, and I called that one “the most insane galgame ever”. The slice-of-life content, the way the foreshadowing unfolded, even the system itself—all of it was full of highlights. After that, Tsukiyashiro Tomu planned a few more games, but they felt a bit middling. Last year’s Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro. had plenty of highlights in its story too, but something still felt like it was missing a step. So this year Tsukiyashiro Tomu came back, and not only did he drag in his old partner Korie Riko, he also brought out Sakura Saori, who sang the OP for Magical Charming back in the day, and put together this new work: Amazing Grace -What color is your attribute?-. The title means exactly what it says—“Amazing Grace, what color is your attribute?” But look at the staff and it screams Lump of Sugar from every angle. If that bright “Cabbage Soft” logo weren’t sitting right there on top, I think 99% of people would assume this was Lump of Sugar. Same scenario writer, same artist, same OP singer—it’s the exact same formula. Of course, the reason I played this game wasn’t because I had any expectations for a Cabbage Soft title, and it wasn’t some particular fetish for the writer. It’s just that this is a game about “winter.” Yeah, anyone who knows me probably gets it. I like the atmosphere of winter, the way everything looks when it’s snowing, so naturally I like games set in winter. So I looked at the release list, saw Amazing Grace, saw the winter setting, saw that the writer probably wasn’t going to screw it up, and decided to give it a shot.