SCHOOL DAYS (2005)

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surprisingly ambitious, what with its fully animated scenes that render the whole thing less a visual novel and more an interactive season of anime, school days is a surprising product. while the idea of a vn looking completely like an anime theoretically sounds cool, the end result is the player has to sit through hundreds of scenes all using the same 3 or 4 faces/poses each character has (much like an actual vn, but far less appealing here). it gets old real quick and, because the game is presented like an anime, you can't just mash through dialogue as you read it, either, so you're just stuck with these boring 2d cutouts you've seen a million times. in this sense, you become desperate for the actual bite sized scenes where there is a modicum of animated effort on display, where a character does more than stare awkwardly while flapping their gums to "uhhh" and "umm"s.

the writing is pretty bad. the main character is a spineless, gutless scumbag, but i hesitate to call him a lovable one because there's virtually no personality to him. the player receives the tiniest snippets of what COULD be personality defining--in one specific route, he reveals his pot making hobby, and in another, he's able to cook. other than that, he's a self insert puppet... which isn't usually that bad of a thing in visual novels, given the medium, but it's made so much more offensive by all the decisions he makes that the player is NOT able to control or direct. on top of that, he acts depressed, dejected, and moody over literally every event, acting ridiculously soft spoken to a fault and spending most of his dialogue fumbling through ellipses. it's not really in a cute way, either. just aggravating, and it makes it harder to believe that he's unintentionally built up such a harem, too!

every girl loves the player, and unconditionally, too. i played through as many routes as i could, and only one of them really gave the main character, makoto, an actual punishment for his scumbaggery and inability to control which warm hole his penis finds itself in. even on routes where i specifically aimed to be a piece of shit, makoto still got away with all sorts of crap that love interests merely brushed off and continued loving him despite of. in this sense, school days appears to exist in some sort of bizarro world where you can just sort of fuck whoever you want, wherever you want, and still maintain the admiration and infatuation of girls everywhere. their personalities suck, by the way, and are easily defined by "this one is shy, but loves makoto" and "this one is timid, but loves makoto" or "this one is feisty and sarcastic and playful... at first, and then she becomes overly dramatic and loves makoto." in almost all girl-to-girl conversations, nearly none of them are able to pass the bechdel test save for ONE who manages to stir up a conversation about burgers and milkshakes.

i said i went on as many paths as i could and, truthfully, that was kind of a fun experience. don't get me wrong, the initial main routes of the two main girls are completely boring and melodramatic, but deviating from them purposefully (using the huge green love meter at the top) meant that i had to play a sort of balancing act while navigating choices to nudge the characters along in ways i wanted them to go. often times, things spiraled out in ways i really didn't expect. two endings even culminated in flat out disturbing (but appreciable) scenes where one girl, quite pregnant, got a little handsy with a knife, and another where a girl's head exploded like a plump tomato dropped from the sky. those were cool. one ending that really surprised me was it resulting from me making zero choices through the whole game (which is, in and of itself, another choice). it netted me a unique scene! how about that. after this review, i'll probably hit up a route guide out of curiosity to see what i missed, but i felt using that before a review would harm the experience somewhat.

anyway, the writing sucks, it's all very melodramatic, the main character is, frankly, a bitch, and no one in school days has any real personality or merit to them. but hey, it's kind of an interesting experiment, and you do bang some women.