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Renai Kyoushitsu


Clephas

995 views

Yes, despite myself, I played this.  Renai Kyoushitsu is the first VN from an entirely new company (the writer and artist are both new to VNs as well), and it seems to be, in concept, a simple charage of the type where a male protagonist goes to a newly-coed former girls' school and finds himself the only guy (a fairly normal situation in VNs, though less so in the last few years).  The VN has a really weird atmosphere (not psycho-weird, but rather just plain weird) at first, primarily because the writer goes out of her way to present all the girls as knowing something the protagonist doesn't. 

Art-wise, this game uses a style I like to think of as 'old style moe', where the personalities of the heroines are mostly shown through their eyes and extreme expressions (it was common early in the moege genre's development for a VN heroine to only have three or four expressions, each that could be used for several emotions when accompanied by a VA and several separate eye color swatches to express a wider degree of emotion than facial expressions could alone).  This style is very primitive compared to the modern style, but it is still quite functional... if not something that will blow you away.  Considering the budget a new company generally manages to raise and the lack of any truly famous names in the production end of the staff (writer, artist, director) it was perhaps inevitable that they would have used a tactic like this to reduce costs.  Though, that same theory falls apart a little, since all of the girls are given unique sprites, though several of them only have two expressions (deliberately simple character portrayals being standard in moege). 

Supposedly, there is opposition to a male presence in the school, but you wouldn't think so from how the game actually progresses.  The girls are mostly ojousama, but again you almost never feel it from the atmosphere save when they actually talk about the school itself.  The writer seems to want you to feel that the protagonist's striking presence alone is enough to change their minds, but I honestly thought this was pushing things a bit, in retrospect.

The protagonist is a thoughtful adult young man with a sharp eye for people's personalities but as dense as the lead covering on a nuclear reactor's core when it comes to romance.  He spouts complements like a broken faucet does water, and very little bothers him on the surface (though he has his weaknesses underneath).  In combination with his semi-albino appearance, this seems to draw the girls like flies to shit (yes, I used that comparison, lol).

One issue that I noticed several times is that the written words of the dialog don't always match the VA, which is a critical mistake, no matter how you look at it.  I understand that this is a new company, but that is the kind of amateur mistake you generally want to avoid when you are making a first impression.

However, the fatal mistake this VN makes is the horrible weakness of the heroine paths... I'm not saying that the points (story elements) are bad... I'm saying the execution and pacing are horrible.  Any heroine path you can finish in an hour is crap.  I can say this flat out.  It doesn't matter how good a common route the game has, if you only spend one hour of unique text on a heroine, that means you didn't even feel like putting in the effort.  Heck, this game even managed to make incest boring!

 

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