Happiness! Sakura Celebration is the first English localized title by Windmill Oasis. It’s a tale of reunions, blossoming feelings, magic both good and bad, and familial love (including the 18+ kind in more than one route). NekoNyan has picked up this former Sol Press license to bring it to the English-speaking audience.
You may have seen this visual novel referred to as Happiness 2! Sakura Celebration. It takes place in the same setting as the first Happiness and some characters have connections, but this is a standalone story.
Season of the Sakura
Happiness! Sakura Celebration begins in the Year of the Cherry Blossoms, a special event that happens every ten years when mana erupts, causing said cherry blossoms to bloom everywhere and for longer than usual. With this event, a girl named Karen, who once visited ten years ago, and Shizuki, the sister of the protagonist (Kazuki) who left to study magic abroad, return to Misaki City.
Karen has come here to study magic, but we soon find out that she also hopes to find a childhood friend from the city, one who became very important to her after an impactful experience.
We soon also spend time with the outgoing Mizuki and the introverted Shizuki (twins and Kazuki’s younger sisters), the talented class representative Rino, and his older ‘fiancée’ Fuuko. Later on, we meet the mysterious Mashiro too, a powerful mage without any memories.
While the story setting involves magic, they attend a fairly normal high school. Classes run as normal with students goofing around with friends, and aside from the occasional magical battle or club, it feels like any other school. This makes sense as it’s explained that most mages start to lose their powers as they become adults and magic is a rarity in most of the world.
There are plenty of lighthearted moments with the heroines and other friends (including best ‘girl’ Nao), but it also takes time in the common route to drop hints at matters going on behind the scenes. Hints of a secret called Project Happiness, talk of cover-ups, and mutters of a once-in-a-decade chance are slipped in. Still, most of the time, Happiness! Sakura Celebration is a comedic affair with characters poking fun, playing the fool, or teasing each other. It never gets particularly tense, which is generally a good thing, but unfortunately it includes moments that would benefit from it such as the aforementioned battles.
While the other heroines are introduced and other story elements come into play, it feels like Karen takes center stage during much of the common route. Hints are dropped about vague memories of their childhoods and she’s present for most of the plot-relevant events. With that said, Rino does make quite a few appearances too and there are some nice moments with the entire friend group, showing a dynamic that’s amusing to experience as a reader.
Karen – Childhood Memories
Karen is not just a talented mage, but one with a dream to make people happy with magic. She’s the type of person to stop and help a crying girl with her magic rather than simply walk by. She shows Kazuki that kindness from the start, and soon into her route she becomes incredibly sweet and loving, dropping sweet lines such as how she loves you more today than yesterday.
Karen’s route is the first route of Happiness! Sakura Celebration as part of an enforced playing order (explained in our guide/walkthrough). It uses this well to explore both a central theme around forgotten memories that impacts several routes, as well as establishing that there’s more to the Year of the Cherry Blossoms that occurs in Misaki City every ten years than meets the eye.
Several questions are raised and purposely left unanswered in this route. Sometimes unusual and incomplete answers left me with further questions for the story. This worked well in tandem with how the other heroine routes played out, which helped to fill in the information.
Rino – Become the Best You
Rino often shows her concern about Kazuki and seems to be prone to meddling, though she doesn’t easily admit caring about him. She’s slightly tsundere, not being honest about her feelings at first, and is easily flustered when others bring up the idea of her liking him. It doesn’t help that several of her classmates assume they’re secretly dating!
She can be a lot of fun, both in her route and in general. There are a lot of comedic moments between her and Rokusuke, the typical idiotic male friend character where she pokes back at his comments, but my favorite moments with her were more intimate. She encourages Kazuki to be more than he currently is. Her confession scene was my favorite one in Happiness! Sakura Celebration. It’s incredibly sweet and full of emotion. I enjoyed the challenging but supportive role she plays with the protagonist too.
Rino’s route takes a step away from the issue of the more serious events and instead focuses on a more personal revelation. A twist occurs in Karen’s route that reveals a new question about Kazuki’s past which we find out more about here. It does unfortunately showcase just how dense he can be, which may be frustrating to some readers. Even though it’s not as related to the main plot as the others, I enjoyed how her story developed and the solution to a secret that was revealed here.
Fuuko – Fun with Fiancée
Fuuko is a slightly older student who has known Kazuki since they were young due to his family’s assistance at her family’s shrine. She enjoys teasing him by flirting and calling herself his fiancée since their mothers liked the idea. She’s known for fortune-telling magic, and particularly for giving bad fortunes that always come true.
She does feel like somewhat of a background character until her route, with Karen, Rino, and Shizuki having more important roles and more frequent appearances until then. I enjoyed the teasing moments and seeing her end up on the backfoot when the protagonist eventually pushes back as the romance starts. I did feel like things changed quite suddenly though.
Fuuko’s route fills in a lot of the story’s background. Her family has a long history with the events of the past in their city and they have strong opinions about it, which causes clashes with other interested parties. There was quite a surprising twist included, which is always nice to see in a story like this. While I still enjoyed reading her route, it did feel like one of the weaker parts of the main plot as her story was less important in the story’s present time, even if it becomes more important in the final route.
Shizuki – Family First
Shizuki is more subdued than the other heroines and even standoffish at times. She certainly cares about her brother and sister but is more likely to show annoyance at her sister’s clinginess than anything (as well as envy at her much larger chest).
I like Shizuki as a character and how their romance actually makes a difference by helping to drive her away from a certain negative tendency. What was a pity was that while there were very minor initial reservations about being blood-related siblings, it’s not really taken seriously and nobody around them has any concerns about them getting into a relationship. This is the case for the other incestuous relationships shown in Happiness! Sakura Celebration too, except one mentioned in a more distant context.
Shizuki’s route reveals a lot what happened ten years ago and the actions of the characters in the modern day in relation to it. It’s interesting not just for the plot revelations, but also for the lessons that the talented and sometimes arrogant Shizuki learns through the events.
Grand Route
The final route of Happiness! Sakura Celebration mostly focuses on bringing everything together and concluding the story. That said, it does include romance with two more heroines, Mizuki and Mashiro. Unfortunately, this is quite minimal.
While there are hints of her affection and jealousy throughout the other routes, Mizuki’s romantic moment is incredibly brief. Still, there’s not much immediate build-up and it seems more of a quick way to include her as part of the central mystery which is finally being fully unraveled.
Mashiro’s romance isn’t much better, though she does get more screen time. I didn’t feel much hint of romantic interest in other routes or this one until it happened, which perhaps isn’t helped by her rather relaxed attitude. In Mashiro’s case, she’s the central figure in the final route. While the romance didn’t blow me away, I was far happier with the part she played in the story.
Each of the heroine routes explores an element of the story, most often focusing on the calamity. The grand route includes all of the heroines and the details discovered in their routes, tying them together to bring things to a satisfying conclusion. The loose ends I had been wondering about were finally explained and it even brought up a few clues that I thought were just idle chatter when they first came up in other routes.
Filling Holes
Assuming that you’re playing the adult version, whether the full version or the Steam version with the patch, each route includes multiple H-scenes. Nudity appears in the common route, but this is a rarity.
The first H-scene CG displayed was slightly surprising, showing Kazuki licking Karen’s side, near her armpit. This appears with another heroine too. For the most part though, these scenes in Happiness! Sakura Celebration are fairly standard and vanilla in terms of acts shown in the common route, at least if one does not count the nature of familial relationships involved and Mashiro’s young appearance even by the standards of this artstyle.
As well as the scenes in the heroine routes, unlockable after-story scenes are included. These do get slightly more intense, with somewhat more directly fetishy content along the lines of multiple partners and stepping on the protagonist. The scenes are fully uncensored without mosaics.
If you don’t wish to use the patch and are playing the all-ages Steam version, all routes are included.
Sight, Sound, and Localization
There’s quite a lot of movement in Happiness! Sakura Celebration, which adds to the humor and allows for the characters to be more expressive. It uses moving sprites, pose changes mid-line, and little animations like music notes flying from heads well for this. I have noticed some issues with suddenly slowing down for a few seconds at times when skipping through and animations happen, but this shouldn’t affect reading normally.
The sprites themselves look great and they have a good amount of poses and expressions. There’s an unlockable sprite viewer to take screenshots too. There are also over 80 CGs, not counting the variations which many of them have quite a few of.
The soundtrack size is fairly standard, with twenty-six pieces of background music. Both they and the voices of the characters all felt like they fit well.
In terms of the localization, the editing could use some further work. While more lines than I’d like have small issues along the lines of typos, the rare incorrect name usage, or could just read better, the most glaring issue here is line breaks in inappropriate places are relatively frequent, though this may vary based on font chosen (the default font is Arial, which isn’t great to use to read). As a note, honorifics are retained in the script, which I felt was a good choice for this setting to help establish the relationships between the characters in the school and family environments.
Verdict
Mixing entertaining moments with friends, romance with some lovable heroines, and an engaging mystery to unveil, Happiness! Sakura Celebration is an interesting read. I particularly enjoyed how it used the route structure to reveal different aspects of the plot, building it up as you enjoyed the romance with different heroines. There are a few weaker areas and it won’t be for anyone who has an aversion to incestuous routes, but I felt it was well worth the read.
HAPPINESS! SAKURA CELEBRATION IS RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for another visual novel, you may enjoy Amanatsu. We have covered a wide variety of visual novels both original to English and localized from Japanese, which you can check out here.
Thank you to NekoNyan for providing a Steam review code for Happiness! Sakura Celebration.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
