Rakuen no Guardian is definitely a cute game with nice graphics and music and responsive controls. It does suffer from some problems though. Perhaps not so surprisingly they're the exact same problems Akuji the Demon suffered from. Mostly, it feels like the game never leaves tutorial mode. Games like the Zelda series do feature new goodies frequently but puzzles always require the player to apply those items in original or complicated ways or remember places to apply new items in earlier areas. Not so in Rakuen no Guardian. In fact, whenever there could be any doubt about what to do in a certain situation, the game outright tells you the solution. The few places where you are left to your own resources, the puzzles never get more complicated than trying out every spirit (the game's equivalent of Zelda's gadgets) you've collected. In addition to the puzzles never being challenging, you never actually face any dangerous enemies and the game is quite linear, featuring a progression of stages rather than randomly accessible dungeons hidden in one large connecting map, so you never have to worry about going back to places you visited earlier since that's just not possible. All in all, the game will take a seasoned gamer no more than a few hours to complete, likely without ever seeing the game-over screen. (I can't even remember whether there is one)

Unlike Akuji the Demon, once the game is finished there is no reason to play it again because it doesn't keep track of finishing time and doesn't report item collection rate or offer a way to start over at a harder difficulty.

Conclusion: excellent graphics and music, but way too easy; worth playing if you have some spare time, but don't expect more than a few hours of brainless entertainment.

Note: to get the game to correctly display text without configuring your WindowsXP installation to default to Japanese in all non-unicode applications, use Microsoft Applocale, downloadable from the Microsoft site.