One of the things that most annoys me about my blogging is that I’m never quite sure how to capitalize post titles – should they just have initial cap, or should they follow normal title capitalization rules, where significant words are capitalized and insignificant aren’t?  And that’s when I get into the problem where I wasn’t paying a TON of attention in 2nd or 3rd grade English class, whichever year it was when they explained WHICH words were significant.

Mind you, it could have been…4th? grade.  I skipped 4th grade.  I’m going to blame it on that.  Lest you think of me as some sort of child prodigy, I wound up repeating a year of high school due to an unfortunate tendency to not be in school when I was supposed to be.

Uh, I have gone somewhat far afield at this point.  Let’s get back to the fishing for page views.

Sakura Nova is yet another mildly naughty VN from Sekai Project, and the first to break their naming convention.  Previous Sakura games have been very clear – Sakura Dungeon was “this is a mildly naughty game set in a dungeon”, Sakura Beach was “this is a mildly naughty game set at the beach” and so on.  I was, therefore, expecting either a love triangle between anthropomorphized exploding stars OR a love triangle set behind the scenes of a long-running PBS show.

Turns out, it wasn’t either.  It’s just set in that vague sort of futuristic fantasy world where people have invented digital watches and microwave ovens but nobody has thought “hey, if we made a device that propelled projectiles down narrow metal tubes to kill things at long range, it would be WAY better than everyone carrying swords all the time.”

Still and all, swords – especially futuristic swords – are cool and I guess the rule of cool applies.

So, not to deviate too far from how these games USUALLY go, there’s a love triangle between you (an up-and-coming knight in training) and your two comrades (also up-and-coming knights-in-training, though LONG out of training bras if you catch my meaning).  As part of the training, you fight a lot of monsters, discover an evil plan to conquer the… world? kingdom? city? (it’s not actually clear), get yelled at a lot by your drill instructor, and face off against a demon who has a REALLY weird set of priorities.

Now, all of these games wind up with you dating or marrying one (or often both, because what the hell) of the other two vertices of the love triangle, and usually the path to the heart of your choice of one girl or the other is pretty clear and the harem ending is a little tricky.  Sakura Nova shakes things up a little in this regard, because the default solution is that you wind up confessing to BOTH girls and it is actually quite difficult to make all the right choices to woo only one future Mrs. Knight.

Something something couldn’t quite pull off a “Mrs. Right” pun here.

Should you pull this off, both of the other characters actually have an extra story to play through.  So there’s actually quite a lot of game that can be easily missed if you  settle for a life of bigamy.

With this, I’m almost caught up with the “Sakura” series. I don’t own “Sakura Agent”, because I’m trying to keep a 10 games played to one purchased ratio and so far this year I have already bought one game and have a preorder for “Horizon: Zero Dawn” looming on the… well, it’s on the… oh FINE IT’S ON THE HORIZON dear God I should be shot for that.  Anyway I will probably buy that on a Steam sale.  I expect that it will have a secret agent in it.