I’m not sure how much effect Stress has on your character and the like, but the overall management is pretty good with just a few blind spots. Boost the stats, come in at a higher number, get good. Improving readiness drops morale, dropping morale can lead to losing members, you get the idea. Meanwhile, the club work requires you improving the club morale, recruiting new (faceless) members, and improving the club’s overall readiness to compete for the glory of Mother Russia the eponymous academy. Work and class raises your Stress level, which has adverse effects, but they also can reward money, stat boosts, and so forth. Which the demo does largely accomplish, even if it falters in certain areas.īroadly, during each school day you have a block of time for club activities, then for doing whatever you want after school. It has to convey the right feel and provide characters you want to romance and see succeed. My assumption is that she does not watch, but I don’t know that for a fact.Īs much fun as I’m having making fun of the premise – and I won’t lie, it’s fun – the strength of this sort of game is going to come down to the art, the writing, and the pacing. Your ostensible goal is to have an impressive school year, which means you need to rescue the three failing clubs and have awkward, halting teenage sex to impress your kid sister. It’s all the sort of thing that you have probably seen in these games if you’ve played them before. Thus, to the great surprise of virtually no one, your gameplay comes down to recruiting for the clubs, managing your money and stress levels, raising your stats to succeed at various tasks, and so on. Which would mean that Japan is horrifying. The alternative is that the usual dating sim girls you encounter are, in fact, 100% true to the sort of people you find in Japan. Specifically, your job is to bolster three failing clubs foisted off on you by the student council president, each of which is run by someone with only the vaguest grounding in reality. Instead of taking part in a galactic war, you’re dealing with teenagers sorting out club issues and eventually doing the nasty. The characters are a bit truncated from the original game, with only four of the girls showing up in the game as planned romance companions, but the point remains.
DeviantArt has officially devoured itself. Yes, it’s the writers creating their own high school alternate universe. Sunrider Academy, meanwhile, is the same cast (almost) set in a science fiction setting… that boils down to “Japanese school but it’s the future to file off rough edges and deal with weird timeframes.” If you want to play the captain of a starship sending robots into battle piloted exclusively by cute girls with the hope of eventually seeing some boobs, well, here you are. Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius is a freeware visual novel/dating sim/tactical robot combat game that was Kickstarted and is available on Steam right now for free.
Let’s start by unraveling the backstory, though, because there is some. As it turns out, the rest of the puzzle fits together decently. That isn’t a negative verdict right off the bat, though, just a piece of the puzzle. Not entirely certain, but there are little bits and pieces hither and yon that suggest the game was made by enthusiastic fans emulating Japanese games rather than people just making a game about what they saw/experienced/etc. I bring all of this up because I am relatively certain that the developers behind Sunrider Academy are not located in Japan. But instead of taking that framework and making something new out of it, it seems like the fans making new games in the genre are just… making games that are trying their hardest to be Japanese games, complete with cultural references and behaviors and the like. Don’t get me wrong, the visual novel/dating sim sort of game never really took root in America, it’s a uniquely Japanese genre. The weird thing about a lot of Japanese video game genres is how the fans who want to make more of them want to make the same exact sorts of games you got in Japan.
Stand back, we’re going to use science on it.
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