Template!! An Angel’s Gift (Tenpure!!) is a romantic comedy by Circus. Originally launched in 2018, Kagami Games has brought this title to international audiences nearly a decade later.
Unlike Circus’s flagship franchise, Da Capo, Template!! strips away the magic and drama to center almost entirely on cozy slice-of-life moments, fun times with friends, and blossoming romance. It’s a straightforward story of sparking love, unexpected reunions, and a surprisingly irrelevant hamster from space.
This review is based on the full version, with the adult patch. You can see how to install this and how to access the various routes and additional content in our walkthrough/guide.
The Most Cliché Visual Novel?
Template!! An Angel’s Gift opens with Sora remembering watching a meteor shower with an unknown girl when he was a child. It was at this time that he met Algol, a creature from space that looks like a winged hamster. Algol, who claims to be Sora’s guardian angel, gave him Temporary Magnetic Pattern Linkage (TMPL) powers. They end up often putting Sora in situations so cliché for an anime (or visual novel) that they could fit a template.
While this sounds like it could be an interesting premise, I found it underutilized. The concept of the powers themselves isn’t mentioned that much, and when they or the situation are referred to, it’s mostly Sora complaining about a cliché situation coming up. I didn’t really feel like the clichés were significantly more frequent than in other visual novels along the same lines; it just directly pointed out when they happened, whereas they just happen relatively frequently in other visual novels within the same genre without making a point of it.
Still, the setup is certainly cliché. Sora spends his time with an affectionate childhood friend who crawls through the window to wake him up, reunites with a slightly huffy former childhood friend-turned-stepsister who poorly hides her feelings, runs into a strict class president who always seems to be watching him, and even catches an expressionless maid who seemingly falls from the sky.
Throughout the story, you will find a checklist of typical setups, such as Sora’s parents being away, leaving him alone with his new stepsister, and a male best friend who claims to have the information on the nearby girls. Anime staples like accidentally walking in on someone changing, or a wealthy family exerting their influence to make the impossible happen, are relatively regular occurrences. Standard events like club activities and investigating the school’s Seven Mysteries come up too. While these moments are amusing, the game’s self-awareness makes it feel a bit too on the nose, turning the narrative into what feels like a highlight reel of anime clichés.
While there isn’t much here to surprise you in terms of characters or plot, Template!! An Angel’s Gift shines in its everyday situations, the little moments of friendship and romance along the way, and the genuine charm of its four heroines.
Who Was That Girl, On That Starry Night?
The four heroines each have their own routes, which are reasonably unique, though Sena and Shio’s routes cover some of the same events. Shared between them all is that they cover more or less the same period of time, and dedicate time to getting to know each other first, before diving headfirst into the full-on romance.
Sena is the overly affectionate childhood friend, who also acts as an older sister figure to Sora. This creates a great dynamic, where as well as Sena acting very caring, there’s a lot of gentle teasing and an easygoing banter that really shows how close they are due to growing up together. The progression from embarrassment over her affection to romance with a little awkwardness along the way helped it feel like a believable childhood friend to love story, even if some parts were a little abrupt.
Sena’s route included quite a few moments with Shio, which I appreciated. It was the one route to deal with any of the other main heroines in a significant way. It also led to one of my favorite CGs as a bonus.
Shio fits the dual clichéd roles of a childhood friend who moved away and who upon her return is forced into the role of stepsister due to their parents marrying each other. This leads to some envy of Sora’s closeness with Sena, who now shares more memories with him, and complex feelings over being treated as a sister. She has some amusing back-and-forths with Sora due to her sometimes sulky or annoyed behavior. If you’ve played Da Capo, she’s notably reminiscent of Nemu, if less short-tempered and with her more negative traits toned down. They both share the trait of any food they create being potentially lethal though.
Like most visual novels with this sort of heroine, while the topic of being siblings (or stepsiblings) is a concern, it’s not treated with too much seriousness. It’s more about the sweet moments and the growing relationship between the two as they spend the route sharing plenty of domestic moments in their shared home.
Rinne acts as the rather strict and slightly standoffish class president, who is always jumping to conclusions about Sora being ‘impure’. Interactions with her involve a lot of teasing by Sora and embarrassment from her side, which can be fun to read. It also briefly dives into the reason for her behavior too rather than just leaving it as a character trait, which I liked.
While I liked Rinne enough, her route was probably my least favorite. A certain event at the start of her route feels very abrupt. I wasn’t a fan of how their relationship progressed, and the little drama that occurs between them isn’t particularly interesting. The ending was a bit of a letdown too.
Next up is Miyori, the expressionless maid who says her mistress fell in love with him at first sight, so she has to observe him to find out more. Even though she comes across as a little stoic, she slowly opens up. Seeing conversations become a little more casual and observing turning into asking personal questions was a nice transition.
I am perhaps biased towards Miyori as I enjoy the trope of expressionless characters with voices that match (and maid outfits), but I felt her route was the most interesting. While a certain reveal didn’t exactly come as a surprise to me, it was handled well, and the implications that followed made for one of the better conflicts in Template!! An Angel’s Gift. It also had the best romantic moments.
There’s an unlockable fifth heroine of sorts too, but she gets more of an ending than a route. I’ll leave you to discover her for yourself, but if you’re curious, take a look at the walkthrough/guide.
While it’s made clear that all of the heroines like Sora, there’s no real fighting between them in the routes. Friendship prevails and everyone is incredibly supportive of each other. Template!! An Angel’s Gift is a very low-drama story.
Standardized H Scenes
Template!! An Angel’s Gift contains 6 adult scenes each for Sena and Rinne, and 5 each for Shio and Miyori. That said, each heroine does get 8 H CGs (not counting variants) in their route, and there are a few additional nudes throughout. All adult content includes mosaic censorship, presumably since the international build includes Japanese.
Fittingly enough, they follow the very common visual novel template in that when the relationship starts, the H scenes quickly come one after another, with few scenes between them. Pacing them out a little would have been nice.
In terms of content, they tend to stay mostly on the vanilla side, with a few that veer into slightly kinky territory along the lines of being tied up or the use of feet. While the adult content adds to the relationship, narratively it’s mostly just used to further affirm the relationship, rather than for anything storywise. That and to show that Sena is surprisingly horny.
Sprites and Sound
The graphics look great in Template!! An Angel’s Gift, and they’re used particularly well. While there isn’t a huge amount of sprites moving on screen, there are lots of expression changes, sprites being put into various positions on screen based on what’s happening, rather than just the standard center, and there are frequent occurrences of all four heroines on screen. In short, it feels like a lot of consideration was put into the use of sprites. There are plenty of little touches, like a pose changing when the dialogue references a heroine looking out the corner of her eye, or one of the heroines who isn’t being talked to but is on screen reacting to something that was said. The expressions look great too. A few minor characters didn’t have sprites, which was a pity. In exchange though, the characters that did have sprites had plenty of variations of poses, including back sprites.
There are 73 regular CGs in total (including the aforementioned H CGs) and the quality feels high all around. Some of the ones featuring starry nights and a heroine are particularly eye-catching and make for some romantic scenery. The fact that the first CG for each heroine involves a pantyshot is eye-catching in another way. In addition, there are 12 super-deformed style CGs, which are accessible through the gallery which I’m told wasn’t the case with the original version and is a feature added by Kagami Games.
There are 33 backing music tracks which provide a good variety to set the scene. It’s fairly typical for a visual novel soundtrack, with a mix of high-energy and softer tracks. The background track title pops up in the corner when it changes, which is a nice feature.
The heroines and other main characters all had voices which fit them well and most were voiced by experienced voice actors, including Haruka Sora, Hanazawa Sakura, Ayumi Sarah, and Akino Hana, who you’ve likely seen in quite a few other visual novels. One character did sound a little off-putting to me, with an almost strained-sounding voice, but fortunately she only appears in a few scenes.
While I was impressed overall by the graphics and sound in Template!! An Angel’s Gift, it was a pity that a few minor characters didn’t have sprites or voices. Usually this wouldn’t matter much to me, but in a couple of cases, they were key parts of the climax of the route.
Localization (Thankfully) Doesn’t Fit the Template
It’s worth taking a moment to comment on the localization specifically for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, the more prominent Circus titles handled by other publishers have historically suffered from poor localizations. While later MangaGamer releases, such as Da Capo 3, were done well, the original Da Capo was somewhat lacking and as the starting point of the series, it may have put people off from continuing further. More recently, Da Capo Re:tune launched with a localization by Bushiroad Games which had a significant number of issues. While Bushiroad addressed some early complaints with an update, the current quality of the localization still falls far short of expectations to the point that it can’t be recommended, despite being a great title in many other ways. As such, many readers may still associate the prominent Circus titles with subpar localizations, despite different companies working on them.
Secondly, Kagami Games, who worked on Template!! An Angel’s Gift, have mostly received praise from us for their previous releases such as LOVEPICAL-POPPY! and Putrika 1st.cut:The Reason She Must Perish. We did however have some notable critique of the localization of one of their most recent releases, Karigurashi Ren’ai: Living on Borrowed Love.
Fortunately, Template!! An Angel’s Gift reads much better than any of the examples we had the stronger criticisms of mentioned above. The narrative and dialogue flow naturally, and the text is polished without many notable errors. There are occasional typos and grammatical errors, but it’s well within the line of typical visual novel localizations.
Interestingly, the visual novel has been ported to Ren’Py. Unlike some indie visual novels that use the engine, it’s all fully featured, with a backlog, scene jumps, voice replay and favoriting, and plenty of other features. There’s even a function to upload saves to the cloud temporarily, separate from Steam’s. This is intended to download them to other devices and uploaded saves expire within an hour.
Verdict
While Template!! An Angel’s Gift (Tenpure!!) fittingly doesn’t really break the mold of the standard romcom visual novels, it’s very competent in what it does. It features a selection of charming heroines, some sweet romantic moments, and plenty of enjoyable slice-of-life moments in a low-drama story. This is backed by some particularly good use of art.
There are a few things I feel it could have done better, but if you’re looking for a relaxed romance story, this will make for a good read.
TEMPLATE!! AN ANGEL’S GIFT IS RECOMMENDED
Walkthrough/Guide: Click Here
If you are looking for another visual novel, you may enjoy A Maiden’s Serenade. 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 Kagami Games for providing a PC review code for Template!! An Angel’s Gift.
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.
