First of all, it should be noted that Sakura Swim Club is a game really reserved for adults. Because even if the Steam version has been watered down with the most pornographic passages, Valve's platform being little focused on this kind of thing, it is actually very easy to add the missing content thanks to a patch available on the net. Good news for those who do not wish to have a discounted version, and bad news for minors or chaste spirits. This warning being made, let's take a look at the scenario of the game which, not surprisingly, features young students. Embodied by the player, Kaede is a mediocre student, who lives in the shadow of his father, rich, famous and successful in everything. Constantly wandering from establishment to establishment, he struggles to make real friends. But things change the day he joins the swim club at his new school. Suffering from a bad reputation following an accident, this club has only two members. Life being sometimes well done, these are two young women with generous curves. Mieko, the brunette, has a strong character and is by turns authoritarian then shy. Conversely, the blonde Hiromi shows much more consistency and maturity. Obviously, our three heroes will befriend each other and then end up doing somersaults together, just to offer the reader/player some very tough scenes. But apart from this saucy aspect, the game knows how to develop a sympathetic story, evoking implicitly problems of filiation, serious illness, social isolation, betrayed friendship and other daily pains. Not enough to compete with a Dostoyevsky novel, but we frankly expected worse. In this regard, let us specify to those who do not know the genre of Visual Novel that the gameplay of Sakura Swim Club borders on nullity, in the literal sense of the term.
DON'T FORGET YOUR FLOATS...
No moves to manage, no inventory, no life points, or anything like that here. The player's main action is to click their mouse to move to the next line of text. From time to time, the game allows itself to offer him a choice between two actions. But we remain very far from a "real game" since these events are extremely rare (at first glance, about fifteen for the whole adventure) and generally completely devoid of consequences. Example during the first meeting with the heroines: believing the places to be empty, Kaede must decide between waiting or going for a walk outside. In the first case, the two mermaids emerge from the water after a few moments and in the second… the two mermaids emerge from the water before the hero comes out. Truth be told, there is only one choice in the whole adventure that bears consequence. Extremely trivial, it consists of taking advantage of Mieko's favors in one way or another (we'll let you dig into the screenshots for a more explicit description…), which results in the display of slightly different images. A principle of choice/renunciation that we would have liked to see applied to other situations.
Devoid of real animations, other than transitions between different static shots, the game retains an artistic direction straight out of an anime. The artist in charge of the characters and the one responsible for the backgrounds did a pretty good job, even if the whole thing remains very classic and typically Japanese. The same goes for the situations, but this classicism is not really a problem for those who will discover the genre. On the other hand, they will regret as much as the regulars the short lifespan of the game, which ends in three hours. It is even possible to spoil the fun completely by using the fast forward function, which scrolls through all the texts extremely quickly. We should then be able to see the end word in less than ten minutes. It is obviously of no interest for a first run but, despite everything, it's a safe bet that some players use this feature to access the most explicit images as quickly as possible. They will then deprive themselves of a classic but pleasant story, and of characters that we would not disdain to find in a possible sequel. Like what, a few words and a few well-felt images can be enough to keep players awake.
