Thanks to PQube for the review code
Title: Tokyo School Life
System: Nintendo Switch
Price: $14.99
Release Date: 02/14/2019
Story
In this visual novel, M2 delivers an experience where you are a transfer student, and must go on a journey of friendship to interact with your new friends as you stay over in Japan for a few months! A fairly weird, yet enjoyable story that provides the right amount of silliness, even if the plot isn’t all that engaging and is more or less an excuse for M2 to get utterly absurd.
Presentation
Interestingly, this game is powered by M2’s Emote engine, which seems to have been made mainly for games like this, but the last time we saw that in use here on SFG was in Sega Ages Herzog Zwei, of all things. Still, the engine leads to Tokyo School Life having a great presentation, with colorful menus and lots of character animation during dialogue, and considering the genre, that’s the bulk of what you’ll be looking at, so it’s great the emote engine can provide the needed variety here for the characters. Every now and then you’ll get a full-screen art piece during key parts of the story, and these are well illustrated, too, and are automatically saved to the in-game gallery.
The character interactions and dialogue sequences here really do shine, and there’s even a very nifty option to turn on secondary subtitling in a Japanese style of your choice. Being that Hiragana is the Japanese text I can actually somewhat read, I happily turned it on and used the game as a bit of a long-overdue warmup for my rusty skills, so big kudos for friendly subtitling in that regard.
The music is fairly decent too, and is well composed, and the voice acting is overall very solid, with lots of the lines being voiced. I was a bit taken aback at first by the absurdity of the plot and how the VA really were going full-in with it, but eventually I grew to enjoy the VA performances and the actors clearly had a lot of fun recording for this game.
Gameplay
Being back in the VN review hole again, I’ll once again reiterate that covering a game like this on a gameplay level is incredibly tricky to do without feeling like I’m repeating myself, especially if there’s little in the way of adventure elements. That doesn’t mean Tokyo School Life is a straight boring railroad, as it definitely has a lot of charm put into it and isn’t afraid to be silly.
The game kicks off having your main character act like the most stereotypical foreigner imaginable, to pretty cringeworthy results. Still, after the game gets some annoying cliches over and done with, the main focus shifts to the three girls you’ll interact with for the duration of the game, being Aoi, Sakura, and Karin, and the overall plot revolves around you spending time with the three of them on your student trip, learning more about the culture, customs and wacky shenanigans going on within this world.
M2 definitely knows how to get silly, since while the plot does feature some semi-serious aspects and isn’t afraid to put a focus on some tougher subjects such as medical problems and familial expectations, a lot of the game is just goofy. A character who likes a franchise so much they analyze both the manga and anime to catch every minor difference? Check. A character who focuses on bettering herself with a hobby they’re passionate about, despite being seemingly all alone in it? Check. A character living a double life with dreams to make it big? Check. Some of these aspects you can honestly see from miles away, but that doesn’t make the writing any less fun at points, and the game does give you choices on how to act during key scenes, so you can focus your relationship on a certain girl of the three if you so desire.
Otherwise, that’s about all I can say on a gameplay perspective. The menus are snappy, controlling the text and progressing the dialogue is super easy and perfect for instant-reading, and the save/load features are quick and effective, making this a good game to put down on a whim when you’re done for the night. Rinse and repeat until you burn out or see an ending, and you have yourself a decent little game, even if I can’t help but feel the writing can get so silly at times that it felt like a parody. Still, the fact that your choices do matter in getting one of the main three to prefer you gives this enough interactivity that you’ll at least be able to figure out which of them will be your favorite to stick with as you read on, and the heavy amount of voice acting really enhances the experience.
Conclusion
Of the games in my “Data Loss Queue”, Tokyo School Life might have had the worst luck outta all of them, as several times I’ve taken notes on this game, only to then lose them. The last time I got progress on writing a review done, before the data crash last year, that was also lost. So this time around I just went in raw from the beginning to have the game fresh on my mind and easier to focus on without relying on old notes, and I found this VN to be decently enjoyable, with me getting much more farther in the game than I did previously!
However, as cool as the animations are and despite the music being solid throughout to accompany some fun character moments, I still can’t help but feel that Tokyo School Life lacks some oomph to it. The navigation and controls are great for letting you play this at your own pace, but the overall story is pretty silly, and while some aspects such as the side-by-side Japanese text display work as basic teaching tools, I still can’t help but feel like the game is punching down a bit much now and then, and it definitely could have been a more engaging story overall with some more twists and turns, rather than being something largely silly that pokes fun at cliches to the point of predictability.
I give a Tokyo School Life a 6 out of 10.