Original Release: JAST, 2002, PC
The last of the late 90s/early 00s JAST USA titles, and the last that they bothered Westernizing until 2011 (save one random “yaoi” game), Transfer Student suffers from a generic setting and more limited gameplay than prior releases
Transfer Student (PC, JAST, 2002)
Where to Buy: Play free online at Project Asenheim
Review by: Master-B
Transfer Student comes to us from JAST, who were noteworthy in being among an extremely small group of hentai game outfits in the 90s-early 00s both porting titles to the West in English and developing games that had actual strong gameplay elements: stuff like True Love, Three Sisters Story and so on. So Transfer Student is a bit more intriguing than the usual “college kid VNs his way laboriously through sexo” titles of the period.
Unfortunately, it ends up having less actual gameplay than usual. First of all, with rare exceptions and outside of the game’s endings, you don’t REALLY have sex. I mean, there are uncensored hentai sex scenes galore, you get one right at the outset of the game. But they’re this kid’s fantasies rather than taking place in reality. The central gameplay conceit is that he charges up his horny meter through his everyday interactions with girls about town, and the level of charge determines the length and lewdness of his eventual fantasy.
This does kinda add some utility to the usual VN process of having to click through every menu option repeatedly, though the game mostly limits this to choosing which bits to ogle when you run into the girls. There are some branching choices, which are pretty much to determine which girl you woo and ending you wind up with. But in the end it’s just an awful lot of tedious passive reading. The game’s intro makes you think the character will be some sort of sassy NEET and genre subversion of the usual earnest college kid who bumbles into a harem, but it doesn’t actually end up going anywhere with this, it’s all stock stuff for most of the game.
Add in unusually repetitive and annoying music, and kind of an odd art style, and for me it’s a hard pass.
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