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School days HQ?


Hayashi

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School Days HQ is one of my favorite eroge officially released in English.

 

I gave School Days an 8/10. This game is really polarizing, as it's both innovative yet highly flawed.
 
Pros:
Animated VN: These are really rare.
Interactivity / choices: The plot is highly branching and the the game is very responsive to your choices, providing a level of dialogue "gameplay" that's rare in VNs. The branching also makes the game highly replayable.
Semi-realistic drama: The love triangle is somewhat contrived but usually entertaining. It's fascinating how the game nudges you towards indecisiveness by reminding you that every choice has both positive and negative consequences. The way the game satirizes the typical bland and indecisive VN protagonist while drawing you into his shoes is somewhat ingenious. 
 
Cons:
Some paths through the game are nonsensical (the game's scenario's is broken into segments that are supposed to fit together like pieces in a puzzle, but sometimes the pieces don't quite fit)
The bugs: The game is unstable and crashes about once every few hours.
Low quality graphics: The animation quality is poor and cuts corners everywhere, significantly impacting the experience.
 
Overall, School Days is a diamond in the rough: a highly ambitious game that tries to do many things and doesn't do any of them very well. If you're looking for a highly polished, thoughtful, and traditional VN, School Days will not satisfy. If you're looking for something completely different, you like highly branching plots, you like the love triangle theme, at least one of the heroines appeals to you, and you're willing to put up with the crashes, then School Days may very well impress you.
 
In the end, School Days HQ is the best fully animated love triangle eroge in English. It's also the only one.
 
It's also one of JAST's best-selling titles.  Not to mention, the prequel Shiny Days is releasing in the next few weeks.
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Read the manga pretty interesting story though i don't want to spoil it to you though ive heard there's another vn coming called shiny day, someone told me  its gotten more better in the h scenes i think its coming in a few days. 

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I thought the animation was incredibly bad. The h-scenes were slightly better but still really bad. I thought those were so bad that it was impossible to find them erotic, they were actually comical. Anyways, I wrote multiple large effort posts on School Days in the "What are you playing?" thread and some are lost to the forums rollback. I won't bother recreating them but the gist of it is that I think it's a kind of bad game. Most people shit on the game with Makoto hate but I thought he was fine. I think most of the Makoto haters only watched the anime, but he's fine in the game, where you're in control and can make him do sensible things. The main areas I hated were the animation (extremely bad), the sometimes inconsistent characters, the branching structure of the game being unnecessarily convoluted, making completing multiple routes a real pain in the ass (especially with how they used both choices and relationship points to determine the paths). I also had some more specific complaints, like how the Setsuna "route" was handled. The good points include how the amount choices really does pull you into the world, and the realism of the drama. Realistic drama isn't always good, and it's not necessarily fully realistic in School Days, but it feels like the game was written by people who actually know how teenagers talk and interact with each other which is rare in eroge. Some of the plot points were just a little bit too convenient in some of the routes, though.

 

Overall I felt that the bad outweighed the good, and I don't particularly like School Days, but I didn't hate it either and I thought it was a pretty interesting experience and I don't regret my time with it. I'm now actually pretty interested in Shiny Days, too.

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I hear Down liked it :Kappa:

Bear in mind reading that review that School Days is pretty much the opposite of anything that could interest me in a VN to begin with. Teenage romantic drama is the most boring and actively painful thing to read/watch to me.

 

With that said I still maintain everything I said in that review, despite the fact that it's written in a way meant to be funny. I see some of the potentially appealing points of that game but I still can't do otherwise but say it's terrible.

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Interesting enough I bought the sequel to this game (Shiny Days) by complete accident. I forgot it was in my cart when I went to pre-order Lightning Warrior Raidy III so I ended up getting Shiny Days at the same time...I actually have very little interest in the game and am primarily keeping my purchase to support JAST. That said Setsuna was my favorite character (among a ton of awful ones) from School Days so perhaps this is less an accident than I'd like to admit.

 

School Days is hit or miss either you like it or you hate it and there really is not an in-between option. School Days route options are a lot better than what happens in the anime and the multiple options also means if you get a bad end you can always try again. The visual novel is not overly long if I remember correctly if you only plan to get one ending if you plan to replay it though then it's probably worth reading more than watching the anime. If it sounds like something you would like based on the premise then go for it.

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It is actually kind of telling that Setsuna is a lot of people's favorite character because she's practically a non-entity. She has no real personality to speak of, she's barely a character. She's just a voice of sanity and Sekai's pillar of support, but she herself seems barely existent. The fact that this non-character can be so many people's favorite maybe says a thing or two about how everyone views all of the other characters. I'm really curious how they're going to build an entire game around her. 

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Well they were talking about delays, but they were also saying the download version would still be available on the 25th despite that. Now they just said the download version will be delayed too, mere hours before it was meant to go live. gdi, JAST. Every time I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, something like this happens.

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