Get Laid or Die Trying

Sorry, it's been a while. I was uh... *blush, mumble* playing School Days. Yes, School Days, the worst video game ever. It's like, the Plan Nine from Outer Space of video games. Yes, it is almost that awful. And the sad part is, if the game were any worse, it would probably actually be better. As it is, it's bad, but not quite "so bad it's good."

Virginity is not an option in this game. Literally. You cannot avoid it. I tried to, just to see if it could be done. Nope. You just delay the inevitable until you get fucked or get butchered.

I know that I normally do my reviews on Hubages but the nature of this game means, you'll have to deal with it here where I can still get some advertising revenue, so bear with me on this.

First, the voice acting is awful. I don't even speak Japanese, and I could tell it was awful. Secondly, I found it hard to empathize with someone as wishy-washy as Motoko, the main character. Because I try deliberately to NOT be wishy-washy, and he does it anyways. And thirdly, it just doesn't play like a visual novel. Not just because it's fully animated, but because the options are really meaningless story-wise until you get to the ending. The episodic formula doesn't work. At all. It's inconsistent. One episode, it becomes official I'm not dating Sekai, and everyone knows who Sekai's boyfriend is, next episode, everyone is fucking pissed at me because they assume I'm with Sekai. I mean, what the hell?

It just.. it fails. It fails so hard. The point of playing a visual novel is that you make moral and ethical decisions to get a desired outcome, and as one friend of mine put it, playing the game in the first place in not the ethical one. I kind of guilty. I feel bad for the girls in the game, I feel awful for the shitty voice actors who attached (what I hope were false) names to the project, I feel awful for the localization team that had to put up with the bullshit of every scenario while translating.

Also, for the record, unlike most visual novels, the fact this is fully animated ACTUALLY hurts the project. Nobody watches the same episode of a show over and over and over again. we may watch an episode frequently, or a movie often, but we don't watch the same episode daily. The fact that School Days is fully animated means there is much less replayability value.

In the end, this game misses the mark. Then again, I can safely assume that there really wasn't a "mark" they were aiming for. I think the creators just blindfolded themselves, spun themselves around and threw darts at the wall, and if they hit the lawn, or another co-creator, or their own foot, they just went with it. and that's exactly what this is: The game that shot itself in the foot.