When Your Guardian Angels Are Cute Girls: Sakura Angels Review

Player(s): 1
Platform(s): PC (Via Steam)

What happens when your cute anonymous guardian angels have to reveal themselves to you in order to protect you from an evil threat? Well, Sakura Angels is what happens of course!

Your first meeting with the angels.

Sakura Angels is a visual novel that stars the faceless hero Kenta, who lives a fairly boring and lonely life only to discover he’s being hunted by shadow monsters. It’s during one of these attacks that his assigned angels, Hikari and Sayaka, reveal themselves in order to be able to properly protect him. After this event, the story unfolds as Kenta tries to come to terms with the supernatural nature of what’s going on around him, along with coming to terms with his own role in these dark events.

An 'accident' clearly meant to sate fans of revealing images.

Hikari and Sayaka end up attending Kenta’s school undercover in order to be able to keep a closer eye on him, and fun antics ensue. Neither of the characters are particularly unique. Hikari is the typical ‘I’m too serious for my own good but ultimately I’m the biggest softy there is’ character. Sayaka is the typical ‘I’m extremely bubbly and energetic and like to play pranks all the time’ character. There’s also a third character named Yuzuki who plays as the villain of sorts who is the strong, silent, mysterious and lonely character. The archetypes for all three of the girls is pretty standard along with Kenta being the typical bland and slightly perverted male you’d expect from a visual novel from the Sakura series. As is always the case with these visual novels, I feel like the number of characters is quite limited, which sometimes makes it hard to jump into the story. You can’t really make a living breathing world that feels immersive when reading if there aren’t other characters at least for the sake of having realistic interactions. Despite that, I do admit that there are times where external people are used in order to make you understand that it’s a complete world, but usually this isn’t executed very well.

That's a lot of options! All with no actual impact on anything.

Another sore point with Sakura Angels is the story. All things considered, the story isn’t too bad. It develops well enough, the characters have some fun scenes and everybody feels like they have growth by the end. It’s a marked improvement over how shallow and dull the earlier Sakura games have been. The biggest problem I have with the story is that it feel underdeveloped. The overall theme and flow is pretty good, with a good beginning, middle and end, but none of the interesting ideas are developed beyond being there to move the plot along. In many ways, this visual novel feels like an abridged version of a more detailed story. A more detailed story that, unfortunately, doesn’t exist. What is present is satisfying enough to keep you going though, and the conclusion felt a lot more satisfying than I expected it to.

Did they not bother checking how much text fits on the screen?

Sakura Angels is drawn by Wanaca. If you’re a fan of their artwork then you already know what to expect. The characters are beautifully drawn, with a good variety of expressions to match the story as it progresses and some very well-drawn gallery shots too. The backdrops aren’t particularly special, but there’s enough of them there to keep you interested and they are drawn very well even if they aren’t unique. The art is definitely something I won’t complain about here. There are, of course, some scenes that happen for the sake of fan-service, but despite being labelled as mature and having nudity, there aren’t any explicit scenes nor is there any actual nudity. One issue I do have, though, is with the text. Sometimes the text is so dense that it doesn’t even fit in the text box and falls over the menu text. The audio, on the other hand, is a mixed bag. It’s nice to have full voice acting, even if the voice acting is mediocre at best. The music is solid as well, which says a lot since usually I find music in visual novels to be grating. The bigger problem is the lack of sound effects. After having played Sakura Agent before this, where sound effects were used in a great way to facilitate story-telling, the dead silence of scenes in this one really pulled me out of the situation.

Lovely, grumpy Hikari.

You might have noticed that I am not referring to this as a game, and have taken care in labelling it as a visual novel. That was done because unlike many other great visual novels, this one doesn’t have any gameplay. Sure, you have a couple of A or B decisions you get (that have absolutely no bearing on the story at all), but for all intents and purposes this is a linear read with no real interaction at all. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but if you’re used to some of these higher tier visual novels that have a great balance of reading and interaction along with a sort of hybridized set of styles (like Danganronpa), then this won’t be the place to get it.

A panty shot during an action sequence! Entirely necessary!

In the end, Sakura Angels is completely dependent on what kind of experience you’re looking for out of your visual novel. If you’re looking for a short, pleasant, slightly amusing read with some fan-service moments that’s overall a family friendly experience (no 18+ patch here guys) with a relatively solid story, then this is actually one of the better buys you can make in the Sakura series in my experience. If not, then there are plenty other options abound. Clocking in at 4 hours for a 100% completion, the $9.99 price tag is definitely a little steep. If you can manage to get it on sale for almost any price below that though, this isn’t too bad a visual novel to curl up with over the course of a night or two.

- Teepu

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Story: B
Graphics: B+
Sound: C
Value: C-

OVERALL: C+

Pros:
+ Great artwork.
+ Solid story.
+ Voice acting.

Cons:
- Short.
- Not enough depth.
- Extremely linear with no real interaction.

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