Game:

Japanese School Life (2016)

Duration: 18:41

1,545 views

13

Welcome to Part 2 of Japanese School Life’s feature on New Release Friday. We finally see some tits in this episode, but I don’t know that it is enough to save the game at this point. I have had a pretty good time playing through the game thus far but only because it allows for some pretty funny interactions. If I were going to be playing this by myself and wasn’t particularly interested in Japanese culture then I would probably be pretty bored by now and would have peaced out. Yet, here I am uploading a second episode of it to my channel for you fine people.
I'm thinking I might just continue this on my channel as its own independent thing, dependent upon viewer interest. I has been a pretty hilarious playthough for me.
New Release Friday is a series in which (hopefully) every week I will hop over to the “New Releases” section of Steam and pick-up a game to play for a few hours and give a first-thought review on. This series is an attempt to not only keep content fresh and relevant around the channel by covering current games in a concise and genuine fashion, but also to offer exposure to new games via a relaxed review format to inform potential, unsure buyers.
In the first episode we just sort of covered the presentation of the story and the characters. In this one I actually wrap up the section and talk about some of the key points and more specifically address the review portion of NRF. Starting right off, let’s talk about the “plot” issue at hand and how it might have served the game a bit better even if it wasn’t the ultimate goal at hand. Boobs are great and no one can deny that. This game doesn’t revolve around sexuality for its presentation though and seems to have a heavier focus on teaching you about Japanese culture and that is cool and all… but just imagine if there were tits in all of your high school classes. You’d be much more willing to go to class and learn than you probably were without boobs. I feel like the developer could have learned a thing or two from this concept.
The game very obviously knew what it was getting into when it made a visual novel of this sort, because it disguises a lot of romance, slice-of-life, emotions, and lewdness in the presentation of the game. It’s almost like they just tried to cram a little bit of fan service inside of the game without putting a real focus on one side or the other: education or boobs. As the game alone stands, I don’t think it is inherently bad, but is maybe misleading to fans of visual novels. Most people even slightly familiar with the concept are probably going to have certain expectations that are not going to be satiated by this game. This is probably more the fault of the player than the developer though, since the dev seems to give no real indication that you are going to be plowing sexy anime girls as a part of the game.
Since Japanese School Life is a bit in the middle ground, I feel like it is suffering in other ways as well. Rather than capitalizing upon its indecision and adapting all aspects of both an educational tool and a visual novel, it missed the boat by literally going half and half on the aspects of each genre. You get virtually no choices throughout the game from what I can see aside from one, which strips the meaning out of anything occurring around you. This makes it questionable as to why they even tried to shoehorn a relationship/emotional aspect into the game in the first place if it is just going to be half-assed. Additionally, the educational aspects are cool because they are there, but honestly speaking, they aren’t the most interesting thing in the world in presentation and are pretty forgettable since there is no retention training or interactive testing to make sure you weren’t just being bedazzled by the kawaii anime girls.
I think that a pretty cool way to handle this would have been to implement a scoring system for each girl. Have them both teach you things about Japan and then ask you about it later. Depending on how you score, each girl will like you more or less and then also include aspects that allow YOU to choose who you want to focus on, this would increase interaction, learning, and emotions. As I said, the presentation isn’t horrible in its current state, I simply think that some refinements would really do the game well. Of course, some people like to just have their boobs handed to them on a platter and accordingly, they would be annoyed by the testing aspects. You can’t please everyone with this sort of thing, but if you don’t want to work for your “plot” then go to Google Search, man. WE EARN OUR KEEP HERE.
If you live visual novels and don’t mind a shallow emotional story line but would greatly enjoy a small course on obscure Japanese culture then I think the game would be an okay buy on sale. At its current cost, I don’t really know that I would recommend it though unless you are really into what they are doing. That being said I already own it… so lemme know if I should do more.

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