Sweet Galaxy Adventure!

Developer: Tofubeef | Publisher: Touwaku Studio | Release Date: 2019 | Genre: Visual Novel | Website: N/A | Purchase: Steam

It’s hard to believe that there was a time when the number of visual novels with English translations could almost be counted on one hand. However, the floodgates have been well and truly opened, which means fans of the genre are spoiled for choice. The downside is that there are now also plenty of lazy cash-ins flooding the market. Then there are games like Sweet Galaxy Adventure! that is far from a good game, but clearly, some actual effort went into its creation.

Sweet Galaxy Adventure! places players in the role of a space cadet who has been assigned to a research vessel named the USS Octopus. It will be your first real mission and you’ll be joining the crew on a mission to explore uncharted sectors of space and collect information on the unknown star systems to be found there. This is not a bad premise for a visual novel, but regrettably, SGA squanders all this potential. As your character boards the USS Octopus he discovers that apart from the captain the only other crew members are three attractive women. After a scene that highlights the personalities of these girls players can then choose which of them to spend time with to build up a relationship.

Amaya is the ship engineer and she is a feisty redhead with a penchant for jokes and pranks. Then there’s Ei the scientist who is painfully shy and very clumsy. Finally, players can get closer to the navigator, Juri, who is a typical tsundere character with a short temper. Apart from selecting which character you want to spend time with there’s also the occasional choice when it comes to things like kissing them or not when the opportunity arises. However, the entire experience is very short-lived and comes to a rather abrupt ending. Players must basically spend enough time with a particular girl to discover a solution to a particular problem that crops up at the end of the game. Do it correctly and you get an ending for the girl in question, but fail and it’s game over with a bad ending. This pretty much means that players need to complete the story three times and focus exclusively on a different girl each time to see all the scenarios and endings.

As we mentioned earlier the whole premise is not a bad one, but the game doesn’t do anything with it. This would have been understandable if it was a nukige title where the focus was on sex scenes instead of the story, but rather bafflingly, SGA is devoid of any hentai content. There’s plenty of risque references and innuendo, but as soon as anything is about to happen the visuals fade to black, and the scene sort of fizzles out. It’s a rather bizarre approach as it won’t appeal to fans of story-driven visual novels or hentai fans looking for racy content.

Visually SGA looks a lot better than other low effort visual novels and the character designs are actually really good. Not only are all three girls very unique, but their sprites are detailed and they have a number of different expressions. Each girl has four CGs, but once again these are all slightly risque instead of showing any real nudity. Even the backgrounds look like they could be good, but everything is so blurred that it’s hard to really tell. The audio is decent enough, but the short looping tracks can quickly become annoying. It’s also no surprise that the game is devoid of any type of voice acting. We had no issues with the user interface apart from the fact that the text cannot be advanced with a scroll wheel, which is our preferred method of playing. The game shows the names of all three girls at the top of the screen along with hearts to denote how your relationship with them is progressing. This made it seem like there might be some actual strategy involved to grow these relationships, but the whole experience is over in less than an hour.

All in all Sweet Galaxy Adventure! is a visual novel that is very hard to recommend. The translation quality of the game is very poor which doesn’t do it any favors either. However, the story is simple enough that it’s easy to understand what’s going on despite this. It’s hard to say who this game was designed to appeal to as it feels like a shallow nukige title that had all the adult content ripped out. There are far better titles available in the genre, so this is one that can be skipped.