Windmill Oasis’ Happiness! 2 Sakura Celebration is one of the latest games to get banned from Steam. It sadly didn’t get a proper store page, but the app was added to the Steam database last summer, likely with the intent of the game launching on Valve’s storefront. Well, those dreams have been squashed.
The Steam Nukige group updated their Google document cataloging all the latest apps to get hit with a ban-hammer on Steam in the anime-theme and visual novel categories, and Happiness! 2 Sakura Celebration along with its free demo.
If you follow the link to the SteamDB page you’ll note that the app was last updated on February 7th, 2020 before it was nuked.
It joins a litany of other games on the continually growing Waifu Holocaust database.
If you’re wondering why the game was banned, no official reason was given by Valve. The taste police typically don’t make any statements or public acknowledgments of the games they axe from the service. And if you’re assuming it’s because the game was submitted as an R18+ title, well according to the Visual Novel Database, there’s no indication that the app submitted to Steam was the R18+ version.
However, there are plenty of hints of why the taste police dropped the ban hammer on the game based on the opening movie alone. First off, there are sequences involving the characters in a classroom, and according to Valve’s ridiculous standards, if it involves anime characters it’s a huge no, no.
Second, some of the female characters are wearing school uniforms. Once again, according to Valve’s distorted standards, school settings with characters in school uniforms is another huge no, no… unless your game contains gay characters like Sweet Pool, in which case your game will be allowed on the store.
Last but certainly most important, is the loli character.
Valve hates lolis with a passion.
If you have lolis in your anime-themed game, you better hope that you get a lazy curator to review your project, otherwise you will end up either having to censor and remove the character, like what Simon Creative had to do with Food Girls, or your game might get outright banned.
Again, we don’t know exactly why Valve banned Happiness! 2 Sakura Celebration, but based on their past explanations of why they banned other anime-themed visual novels, it’s pretty obvious what their criteria might have been for axing the visual novel’s outing.
Now it’s possible that the developers might censor the game and attempt to re-release it on Steam, but it’s a long shot and usually doesn’t always work. Lilith managed to get away with it for the trial version of Taimanin Asagi 1 but only because they censored the crap out of it.
However,I doubt a Windmill Oasis would feel compelled to completely rewrite their game, remove entire backdrop sequences, or redraw entire character CGs to accommodate Valve’s bigotry.
You can learn more about Happiness! 2 Sakura Celebration by visiting the official website.
(Thanks for the news tip Zero)
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