Today I finally finished Sakura, Moyu.~
From chewing through the raw Japanese in June 2020, to giving up in September 2021, to starting over again, and finally finishing it now after the 2022 Chinese patch came out, Sakura, Moyu. has been with me for a long time. Like the D.C. series, it watched me go from full of enthusiasm, to wrapping things up hastily, to having my interest reignited once the patch was released, and then finally playing the whole thing through.
If I had to describe what playing Moyu felt like for me, I would say it was a genuinely good experience, but real life kept draining my motivation until I eventually chose to put it down.
This time, though, the Chinese patch was like an accelerant, mixed with my own wish to repaint an unfinished piece of darkness from the past back into pure white. So today, I finally completed it. In that sense, I am grateful to Moyu. Clearing away even a little residue from the past always feels refreshing. And meeting Moyu again during a period when my emotions were turbulent and quiet, and having it rekindle a little bit of my dreaming self, feels incredibly lucky.
Compared with the studio’s earlier “bird” works, this title feels noticeably improved. At the same time, you can still see fantasies that grew out of ideas from those earlier works, such as the Night Country as a library of books that record lives. There are also plenty of fresh settings, like the glittering Night Country hidden behind reality. And yes, you can also clearly see the studio’s taste for motherly archetypes (lol).
Looking at Moyu as a whole, the song “さくら、もゆ” runs through the entire work and carries the emotions it wants to express: dreams and hope, and a love that wants to break through time to reach someone in the future whom you can no longer meet, a love that can only ever love one person in a lifetime and still cannot be fully delivered. It is gentle like cherry blossoms, and passionate like cherry blossoms. In the end, that song reaches a distant future and becomes the key that connects the future and the past. Maybe it also becomes a hero in the hearts of many lonely people, whether Haru or Kanade Taiga.
In the end, the Night King is saved, and everyone reaches a happy ending. There is of course rescue and support gathered under Kanade Taiga’s call, but what matters even more is the hope inside them when they are brought back to the point in life where they were most full of hope. The happy ending they arrive at is not something granted by others, but something they seek out for themselves. Of course, the studio still makes Kuro suffer a bit (business as usual, lol).
What shocked me even more were the mysterious beings of the Night Country: Nacht, who treated Chiwa like his own; Nana (Himeori’s mother), who sacrificed herself to bring Himeori into the world and gave her one final push; Asahi-nee and Toya, who pulled the protagonist out of the shadow of a cruel death and ultimately gave their lives for the protagonists’ happiness; Kuro, who stays by his side; and Mashiro, who projected her own wish onto him and, after hurting him, chose to become the “Queen of Night” to atone.
Their actions, blooming for a single moment out of seemingly endless lives, shook me deeply. They also left a little hope and momentum in a part of my heart that had quietly gone still without me noticing, and made me feel again that maybe having dreams is not such a bad thing. Maybe a life like that could happen to me too, instead of only chasing money, returns, or mere “survival.” Maybe people are always a little impulsive. I only hope that this new self’s little daydreams, written down now, might someday in the future give you a small reason to keep living.
By the time I got here, it feels less like I was discussing the story of Moyu and more like I was recording my own fantasies while playing it. Maybe that is also proof that this is the first time I have really tried to describe what a game felt like to me. In any case, Moyu is truly an excellent game. Whether as an F-fan or just as an ordinary galgame player, I think it would be wonderful if more people could come to love this work (so… when is the FD coming out, lol).
That’s all for now. I’ll end this post with “Rinne,” a song I would gladly call a masterpiece.
“May the magic of happiness stay by your side in the future that lies ahead of you.”
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