Sakura Dungeon (2016)

I am a simple man. I like dungeon crawler games, RPG’s, beer and titties. Except the beer, Sakura: Dungeon had it all. Simple as I am, I played it (for the plot of course).

The game starts with a strong story and, like most anime (or a certain “h” version of it) based games, it comes with a lot of text, lore, background and explanation. In short, you play as a chick who was originally the overlord of the dungeon beneath a small town, but was defeated. Your rule has been taken over and you want to reclaim your throne. You get attacked by another chick, a knight with perfect covering armor and whoop the floor with her. Afterwards, you enslave her and you obey her to help you venture into the dungeon, conquering its many floors and reclaim your throne from the new overlord. Throughout your journey, you become friends (with benefits) with the knight and a certain bond is created between the two. You even release the knight of her bonding spell and the whole plot shifts to “fighting evil together”.

Sakura: Dungeon consists of a endless cycle of just progressing through the floors, fighting random encounters with “monsters”, which are all hot anime babes that resemble some sort of animal or mythical creature and opening chests to find items or outfits. The outfits can be put on your character or the knight chick for some extra visual stimulation. Once in a while, you fight a boss, encounter some sort of puzzle that you need to solve in order to progress or need to avoid traps.

The combat is turn based in this game in true RPG style. Your character(s), and the monsters all have a set of attacks they can use which costs Action Points. When not in combat, your AP are restored for each tile you walk over without being attacked. New skills can be learned from scrolls.

You can capture monsters when they are the same, or lower level than you. You can then recruit them into your party and use them in combat. You can only use one per monster type. The monsters are first sent to the dungeon in the starting town and need to be interrogated first before they agree to join your party. Sometimes, a unique approach is used, so to speak.

You start of in a small town where you buy supplies with mana shards, organize your party, recruit captured monsters and walk around town to trigger certain events (with some tissue box worthy tones), mostly after beating bosses or progressing past a certain floor. You switch back and forth between the town and the floors.

The graphics, and especially the artwork, and unlocked “pictures” are really well done and of good quality. They are simply the best aspect of this game, and of course, the only reason to play this perfectly normal game.

The sound effects are fine but the music on the other hand is terrible. Not because of bad music choice, but because of the repetitive nature. You hear the same three tracks over and over again when starting each encounter. Sometimes, you encounter three monsters in a row and, at the start of each battle, the music starts over again, it drove me insane sometimes until I turned it off.

While I liked the concept and simplicity from this game, after floor eight, everything turned. I hoped for something different, some other mechanics, but no, this was it. Twenty seven floors of doing exactly the same stuff over and over again, no breaks, no variation, just walk forwards and kill monsters until you reach the end. It became a slow and painful drag that I only completed to finish the game.

Of course, you need to find an obscure patch to unlock the, how should I put this, more delicate aspects of the artwork, something I never understood in the first place with this kind of games.

Items feel pointless and do not add anything interesting, besides the healing potions. You can earn seeds to increase your stats, but it does not do anything as far as I can tell. You level up, but this goes automatically. You cannot choose any new skills or increase stats, it is all static and boring.

But the main reason I would not recommend this game is that it is broken beyond belief and feels very cheaply build. The game often crashes, leaving you with a blue background with Python programming code. Certain quests needed to be completed in a specific order, if you failed this, the quest is stuck. Interfaces glitch the hell out when using Auto battle and the encounter rate is broken too. Sometimes, nothing happens for two floors, other times encounters spawn within milli seconds from each other.

Many times, I used the power of the internet and Steam community to figure out what the hell was going wrong and what I needed to do. The answer? Switch to the beta version of the game. This resolved almost all the issues, but this is not how this sh!t works. Sakura: Dungeon is not a two-dollar game, it sells for twenty bucks!

You can add six members to your party, but only three can attack at the same time. Many times, the other three will not do anything in their existence of your party.

Besides the mentioned problems, Sakura: Dungeon just feels like a tech demo that a student made. It is repetitive, boring, too simple, broken and way too overpriced. The artwork remains very nice, but that is simply the only thing that is good about this game.

To top it off, it features some achievements, which were all easy, except (of course) a filthy grind achievement in which you need to kill five thousand monsters. Really? You only encounter one or two (three if you are lucky) monsters at a time, so you can calculate how many hours of my pathetic life was wasted on this sh!t.

So in conclusion, I would not recommend this game. The artwork and story is fine, but the mechanics, functionality and RPG elements are a total disaster and it has been a long time that a game gave me the feeling of completing a chore instead of playing something fun.