RPGM - Completed - Kozue’s Strange Journey 2 – Sayuri Shirasagi’s Wonderful Life [v1.01] [Asakiyumemishi]

i give this a 3/5. the gfx are actually good and i like the art style. but the game play feels clucky and grindy. its also kinda confusing how exactly do you push the game forward, as the enemy difficulty seems to spike up fairly quickly. the loss of guidance and direction makes this a confusing game to play.

This game's story is lame and I didn't even care to move forward a lot in it. The game has no clothing damage. Fights are boring. The game is very grindy and most h-scenes consist of static images with tiny variations. You constantly spend time befriending npcs without a clue what the payoff is. You could probably spend over 100 in-game days just doing that hoping to unlock something cool. I also don't like the poses of these images. They lack aesthetics and are usually close ups.
This game kills a lot of the player's time with little pay-off and a big lack of love for details. I guess that sums up what most Sakura games are like. Beautyful on the shelf but bad after.

This is one of my favorite games, I finished the first one like 3 times, it's difficult at the beginning but right in its mechanics and with a good variety of events, I liked the story, and the fetishes... too.

This game is just inferior to the prequel in many ways. First off, it's odd that it's called "Kozue's Strange Journey" when the protagonist isn't even Kozue; it's Sayuri from the previous game. The game uses the terrible writing trope of forced amnesia. None of the girls remember the events of the first game. The whole time mechanic is gone which just turns this game from strategic time management sim to endless clicking every single day just to grind out stats and "relationships." Relationships are in quotes because all it is is clicking talk over and over and over and over again until you can get a discount or more pay. As usual, the gameplay attempts to mimic Persona and there's a lot of customization which makes it fun to set up your characters since there's so many equipment slots. However, the whole stylistic choices to the battles just add bloat to battles making them last longer than they should.

Played the unofficial translation some time ago. The writing is decent enough for the admittedly cookie cutter heroines, but it gets the job done. The scenes have a lot of variety that takes into account clothing, hairstyle, corruption level, virginity and pregnancy. The other heroines have similar variety in their scenes albeit they are a minority of the scenes.

For the negatives, the game is incredibly grind. To unlock scenes with different NPCs, you'll need to grind a lot of different stats (particularly lewdness and relationship level but other stats matter as well) with not just the MC but the party members as well. Highly recommend using Mtools and RPGM Cheat Plugin. For pregnancy while it is a mechanic with scenes and NPCs reacting to it. There could have been more depth like the MC having a monologue each night depending on corruption and number of prior births ala Violated Heroine. Also, pregnancy doesn't really impact the story unlike the previous game (see major spoiler below).

MAJOR SPOILERS

Finally the story ends with everything being a dream. Yes, the MC is trapped a nightmare scenario as part of some coming of age ritual and her friends jumped in to save her. So as expected the ending isn't satisfying as ultimately all the sex and pregnancy doesn't matter.

Overall, a 4-star game that's definitely worth your time doubly so if you have a pregnancy kink.

Bit of a slow burn type game, but has a lot of stuff in it.

Graphics are pretty good, number of scenes is good, amount of gameplay is actually pretty high for an ero game, the lewdness corruption results are interesting, and there are even scenes for multiple characters giving birth at once from my singular test on this.

It is very sandboxy in it's structure, which is both a good and bad thing, but something I tend to like.

Very good art and characters. The sex scenes are also very well made. And most importantly, for once pregnancy is actually a mechanic and not simply an end game scene!

Only downside is that the game is quite grindy.

The sequel to a persona like rpg that abandons some of its core formula for a blander, simpler game. Still good, but inferior to its predecessor in my opinion.

- There's no calendar limit anymore, removing a layer of immersion and and choices, which is the spice of that type of game.

- The combat is somehow super clunky with attempt at stylish menus and transitions, which wouldn't be that big a deal if not for unskippable animations which turn every combat into a slog.

- The game is way grindier for both combat and h scenes. (making the removal of calendar restrictions all the more felt as going from one day to the other just becomes a "reset events" button).

That being said, the scenes are still good and somewhat varied and the characters are still enticing which was a big part of why I liked the first game so much.