Original Release: Champion Soft, 1988, MSX
Other Releases: PC (2023)
An obscure MSX adventure from Champion Soft, made just before AliceSoft would split off into the “hentai division,” this game is a little side story that technically takes place in the Rance universe
Gakuen Senki (PC, Champion Soft, 2023)
Where to Buy: Freeware – download at AliceSoft Wiki
Review by: Master-B
I should confess up front, Gakuen Senki is not strictly an “adult” game. In fact, it barely meets the qualifications with a tiny amount of nudity and suggestiveness sprinkled about in the form of incidental stuff and Easter Eggs.
However, it’s being cobbled into Plumflower for a couple reasons. One is just that I don’t have a site for standard adventure games as of this writing. The other is the direct connection to the vastly more lewd Rance series; this game was made by core members of the eventual AliceSoft team, and technically takes place in the Rance universe. We play as Wataru, brother of the Kentarou who starred in the Little Princess games and eventually had a big supporting role in Sengoku Rance. While Kentarou has gone on to lewder dimensions, Wataru remains on Earth and starts his first year of college in Japan.
You wind up being appointed head of the student council, and that ends up being basically an amateur detective job as you investigate various complaints from the student body. Turns out this is no ordinary college, however, as your very first complaint leads to a shady biology researcher making weird mutant creatures, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the school’s hidden secrets.
The game is one of Champion/Alice’s rare exclusives for the MSX, and naturally never made it out of Japan. It was recently fan-translated and made to work with the “System32” PC framework used for the Windows ports of various old AliceSoft games. So you have to go in expecting some limitations, namely 1980s visual novel design and just one piece of really annoying music that blares through the entire game. Fortunately that can be turned off, also it’s in MP3 form in the port’s directory so you might be able to replace it as well.
If you’re not acquainted with old-school visual novel design, what that means is clicking through locations repetitively and sometimes repeating commands unnecessarily without any real logic just to progress the game. Gakuen Senki is actually kinda better structured than most from this antiquated period in this sense, with lots of in-game hints and reminders, a “Think” command that often helps orient you, locking you on important screens until you’ve done everything you’re supposed to, and some locations simply walled off to you when they presently aren’t useful. But it has its hangups, the biggest one simply being a sprawling game environment tied together by basic menus that can leave you disoriented if you aren’t manually mapping everything out.
A lot of the game just boils down to combing the environment to run into the next person you need to talk to, maybe with or without some hints or specific direction. On occasion you detour into dangerous areas, where there are some nasty “gotchas” that can waste some progress if you didn’t bring an item from somewhere farther back (make multiple saves, they aren’t frequent but the games does have a few “dead man walking” scenarios). Toward the end of the game there’s suddenly some random swerve into very basic RPG combat, but this seems to rely on a great deal of luck and save-scumming, there’s no way to level characters and only a couple optional items about that improve their fighting prowess.
Gakuen Senki is a little clunky, but actually pretty doable as games from this period go, and the mystery is kind of interesting (if you’re not setting the bar high for logic and intricacy and don’t mind a big dose of animu silliness). It has that rough charm and humor of early AliceSoft games that I like, just minus like 95% of the lewdness and crudeness.
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