Holy ****. I tried, ya'll. I really, truly did try to like this game. I'm that kind of weeb who loves that Isekai shtick. It's garbage and I love it and read the crappiest of stuff.

But this is just such a spit in the face to anyone who plays this game, whether you're my brand of weeb or not.

It's hard to even know where to begin, but if you're looking for my recommendation? No. Hard pass. Save yourself the time. Even if you're only in it for "Those" scenes, in my entire playtime I've encountered three of them and they were all hot garbage, with two of them being easily missed.

So, you're still here and wondering why I have a bone to pick? Okay, here's the deal.

Their coding is garbage. Screen sizes outside of standard (Or possibly even in standard 1920x1080, according to some forum posts) have UI issues, where half the UI is off the screen. Hoping for a fix? Not likely. Apparently this dev has a reputation for releasing and letting it burn.

The gameplay itself is hot garbage. I think the developers acknowledge this a bit by setting your default difficulty setting to "Hard." I played on Normal, because I'm not here for the gameplay. Even so, it's offensive enough to be a giant time waster. The gameplay loop is to lead a single girl into a dungeon and play a Match-the-crystals game to deal damage to enemies. Your girl levels up. You take her to a higher level dungeon. Use the money to upgrade skills. Rinse and repeat.

There's a lot to unpack here, but the Matching game is absolutely boring. I lost exactly once in my time playtime and that's because I attempted a higher level dungeon (By one step) and got annihilated since I wanted to save time using the better skills my higher level girl had unlocked. Since there's only three lines on the matching board, there is no strategy. Mash the buttons and if you see four of the same crystal packed together click it.

Skills offend me. They're vague by default and give you no indication of how much damage they actually do. (What does "A lot of damage" mean? Apparently not as much damage as my "Normal damage" starter move.) You spend gold to upgrade them but it never feels like they get better because you can spend minutes playing a single battle in this matching game because the enemies are inflated stat sticks.

This is all compounded by the fact that the game hardly explains anything other than "Match the crystals" to you. Are quests useful? Not that I've seen. They give meager EXP and gold. You'll be spending hours trying to level up to get to the next story beat of five lines of dialogue to then do another dungeon to see five more lines of dialogue. And you have to do this for *every* girl you want to interact with. It gets boring in the first fifteen minutes and - to be clear - I never even reached top level with any of the girls or unlocked any of their specific CGs.

The story is by far the most offensive. Unique premise, sure. Instead of saving the world himself, the protag has to train the girls to beat them. But, spoiler warning, the story itself isn't consistent. At one point it's revealed that one of the girls in your party has a special debuff that makes it so they can't damage creatures stronger than them. Or was it weaker than them? I'm honestly not sure because in the same scene they used both variations. So it's a toss-up and you have no way of knowing because the author seems to switch between it as suits the strange, stupid story.

It's not even an exaggeration to say the story runs on "Idiot Logic." At one point your character beds down for the night with no one on watch or on guard after several of your party members went off to fight in a dungeon. They get stabbed in their sleep after the girl who was an assassin apparently had a change of heart and had a nice loud fight right next to where the protag was sleeping. Obviously you didn't wake up.

Who is the Demon Queen? No one knows or remembers because of a massive memory wipe for any and all info related to the Demon Queen. Why do they even need the protag if all it takes to beat the Demon Queen is just leveling up a lot? Who knows! I think what really rubs me wrong is that the short little slice of life cutscenes are not even synced to the story. You'll click to read the short scene and someone who hasn't joined your party yet will be there. Or people who are noted as specifically avoiding you will be there talking to you as if it was normal. Don't even get me started on the choices because they don't matter at all.

Okay, okay. I'm being a bit harsh. The real draw here is the girls right? They might be nice... The swordswoman is alright, her personality boiled down to a trope of "Fights for honor and wants to be stronger." The Magician is just an outright b****. She's listed as "Tsundere" but that's not Tsundere. That's psychopath. The kind of person even the yandere-lovers couldn't stand because there is no dere, only Tsun.

There are other girls, but they come later on and their personalities are forgettable except for the healer, who gets a lot of screen time and is a "Priest with Daddy Issues and a dead fiance'." She's decent, but she's the only redeeming character in this game and she's given a lot less screen time than any of the other girls. They give the girls "Level up" chats as you level them and to say they don't make sense is being kind to the writer.

The only - and I mean the ONLY redeeming quality of this game is its artwork. It's for that reason you should just Google it. Save yourself the $20 or $15 if it's on sale and just google the artwork. I guarantee you you're not missing *anything* because the scenes are so badly written that sometimes your character will pop up and say something that was clearly meant to be the girls line and vice versa. It's mind-boggling how very little QA went into this.

And if you really, really have to spend money on games with cute girls in it? Just go get Monster Girl 1,000. At least that games dev cares about you as a player and doesn't waste your time.

If you're hoping for a Sakura Dungeon 2 like I was... don't.

Given the subject matter, you'd expect likeable girls to show up promptly, but no, it takes hours. And while I did grow to like the gameplay, spamming beats strategy, and there's no getting around the ridiculous level grind. Each new party member starts at level 1, with no shared exp. You can have 50+ level gaps going on before the game is through. Not to mention, more than a few skills flatout do not do what their description claims

Somehow I enjoy the game more than I don't, but the flaws are glaring, and most of them could have been easily fixed. Can't help but wonder if the game was playtested before release

I wish it was good, but it isn't. It feels like the game's story was cobbled together in 5 minutes, and poorly. It doesn't flow, the gameplay is garbage, sometimes you'll end up with story segments that make no sense because the game assumes you're further in the story than you are despite that not even making sense. I desperately wanted to like it since I was hoping this could be the next Sakura Dungeon, but god was I wrong. Don't waste your time or your money.

Surprisingly, this game took three years to produce. It took longer than Sakura Dungeon. (Okay Let's forget Sakura Dungeon was able to make it easily because they plagiarized the game code of Demon Master Chris.)

The game is a series of pain. Low quality of VN parts, minimal character build-up, Male protag taken from their low-grade harem VN, boring battles and meaningless battle mechanics that happen every time when you pass through each tile. and yeah, the UI of this game lags behind the Newgrounds games of the 2000s. I can write these things in a few lines for each category, but I don't think I have to because many disappointed dude have already devoted long reviews.

Well, for me the biggest rulebreaker of the game is that a character I haven't met yet suddenly popped out and hosted her side story event. Jesus Christ, Winged Cloud....

The worst Winged Cloud game I've every played and I have them all.
The combat is repetitive and boring.
I can't even recall the story a week after I played it the last time.
At the time of this review, I have almost 18 hours on the clock, but only because I forgot to turn it off.
3-4 hours should be more accurate.
Stay away from this game, it's not worth your money, not even on sale.

This was hyped up to be the next Sakura Dungeon or have gameplay like Winged Clouds most popular game Sakura Dungeon(last i checked), but its a total letdown. On a story and gameplay level. There's a plot point that made me so pissed off I stopped playing and uninstalled the game, but because that plotpoint was past 2 hours into the game I couldn't refund it.

I had real hopes for this game since I first heard of it through WC's other games and usual channels around them... But for the game to feel like being a first time Starwars fan to watch episode 6 first without any previous knowledge. As the male perv hero has zero backstory before this game starts, opening minutes only make me dislike 1 of the first 2 girls with a burning passion, and the so-called king of the kingdom the protag apparently saved in the past.

I give this game a 1.5/10 and its only not a 0/10 due to WC's cute style giving it that at least.

Edit 5/5/23: Forgot to mention the part that pissed me off is a massive plot hole in the game that makes it entirely fall apart due to how game breaking it is. On top of the fact that no one can remember the BBEG or anything about them(trying to not put blatant spoilers as seen many do in their reviews) but what the BBEG did to the world makes the goal of re-summoning the past hero null and void because it contradicts that point.

As a lets player, I've:
Tried to make more videos on this game after uploading one video of this game, but I couldn't force myself to continue, this game is way too deadpan, to the point that even Wanaca's art is not appealing enough for me to even force myself and try to continue making more videos. I tried to play this even when I'm not recording, but I just couldn't, the experience I've felt is the same as what I've already described at the beginning.

Also:
This has been worked on for a descent amount of time, yet the end result is an insult, it's honestly a-s-s and not worth the price that it is presented with. It's not even worth grinding for the lewds. The girls personalities of this game are just a rehash of all the previous sakura novels that they've released before, the music is actually descent but very unfitting, the backgrounds in everywhere, even for a visual novel, aren't very appealing and empty as well. Regarding the story and writing, and I've said this before and other people as well, you guys need to hire a different person for f-s sake, that person makes this game even more bland than it already is.

Lastly:
If you want to get a descent game that you've never played from this company, either play Sakura Dungeon or move onto another company as this one isn't ever trying to make their games feel more ''alive''.

It's playable, but definitely unfinished/unrefined. It could be a lot better with some proper testing and a few modifications. It's like it was rushed.
H-scenes are okay I guess, but normally only a single image or two.
Characters should lv up as a group. Repeating every level with every character is far to monotonous. The timeline gets messed up if you don't lv up the characters in sync with the main plot, and you don't really know how to do that. The quests don't refresh often enough and often aren't for the dungeon you want to go to.
Not really replayable, as it was a bit of a slog (40 hours) to get through the first time (all characters to lv85+, so didn't even max out or unlock all scenes by 40 hours). Like other players have said, it would have been better to make Sakura Dungeon 2.
If you're a fan of Winged Cloud games and you've got heaps of free time then try it, just don't pay full price.

Editing my review after completing the game. This game DOES NOT deserve all the negative reviews and hate that it's getting. The characters and story are phenomenal. So many times I was laughing my ass off reading the dialogue and sometimes it even got emotional. I know a lot of people are disappointed that it's too different from Sakura Dungeon, but it's literally a different game. It's not like they called it Sakura Dungeon 2. Personally, I believe the characters, story, and dialogue are an improvement to Sakura Dungeon. The combat was personally my least favorite part right below the dungeon crawling. The items, side quests, and skills are cool, but the match-blocks game with mana was just not it for me. I read that a lot of people thought it was too grindy, but I didn't have any issue on that end. The combat was just personally very boring. As for the dungeon crawling, I didn't really like that you couldn't go backwards and collect/fight in rooms you missed. It isn't something that would make me like the game less though. Overall I absolutely loved the game and I think it's much better than the large amount of negative reviews make it seem. If there is anything I could suggest, it would be adding a sort or search option to the equipment. Going through my rings and runes got a little confusing a few times lol. Looking forward to seeing the next Sakura RPG game!!! <3 (Also, Ayumi is the best girl)

Writing this because I don't think this deserves a Mostly Negative, even though I don't think I will affect it getting the game from the Humble Bundle.

There ARE many things to find wrong with, as you'll see, but the rating is too harsh.
* Like Melody CGI changes imply some characters should have another outfit with the patch, but they don't.
* Also like Melody some triggers ingame may prevent certain scenes. Kinda okay there but here, do you really plan to replay 40h for those scenes? Altering saves is easy though.
* Maaaaaaaaaany spelling errors.
* Tomokazu default playername popping up.
* Dev-noes (!) popping up
* Repeated lines where none should be pop up
* Confused Ayanami "weak spot" as another reviewer mentioned.
* Weak implementation of some h-scenes. Like defeating slime and have it re-appear and the final scene everyone is teleported away, but the next scene they are right there again and Byron is suddenly a different item???
* Level 70 skits refer a scene that hame for level 90+
* During a scene 3 characters should be MIA they still appear in scenes, and Seras appears in a "too rich" scene before joining. Also Mikaki in a levelup scene before she appears.
* a "?" icon appears in dialogue

One cgi is missing from ingame, but it's also not in gallery. It's not a mess like Melody. Though they definitely need to patch both their Unity attempts up...