Transfer Student Drama Bomb!

Got another weird one today, both in its content and because I don't know how to feel about it. 

Adventures of Hourai High was not initially on my playlist. It seemed more of a gimmick than an actual game. However, doing research for this quest brought me to several YouTube videos, some from people I've been subscribed to for a while. PixaAfterDark raved about Hourai High, and it caught just enough of my interest to make me expand my horizons. Worst case scenario, it'll be a way to break up all the dark, mysterious, and brooding stuff I gravitate towards. After finally finishing it, I see where he's coming from. But I also think we have very different opinions on video games. 

Let's start with the obvious. In Hourai High, you play as a transfer student who makes a bombastic entrance on his first day of school by literally falling from the sky, through the roof, and into another student. You pick your name, blood type, birth month, and gender. Gender does decide some different characters and story beats, so it does matter. But this leads your instant celebrity into a series of wacky, slapstick events with you and your underground newspaper friends forcing your way in. Keep in mind, you're all in high school, and this is a grounded plot. Just ignore your skydiving antics, million high student body campus, and principal just out of university. Okay, so it's not THAT grounded. But the student council is always changing the rules to wild ideas around bathroom limits, gender segregation, and replacing names with numbers. It's low stakes, but it's a comedy game, so who cares. 

Skills are also learned via traditional school shenanigans. To learn new attacks or gain passive skill boosts, you must join clubs! The kendo club boasts bashing weapons and teaches Triple Strike, and the medic club turns your characters into a white mage, for example. There's a secret occult club that grants access to quasi black mage spells. Each club only has three levels, so it isn't particularly deep, and leveling them up is done entirely through traditional battles. That's where I begin to fall off. It's cool that learning new skills is passive, but I want more of a club feel to them. There's a mini game in chapter two or three with a strange jousting mechanic, so there's certainly something they could have done out of the box to increase levels or, at the very least, master a skill. 

And with the amount of battles in the game, you're gonna master skills very fast. Hourai High has a very high encounter rate. And the battles aren't particularly hard, so it's easy to overlevel. There's even an auto battle option, so hit that and hold down the emulation speed up button. I might be a weird one, but I didn't mind the encounter rate. It felt like passive grinding and made the endgame dungeons and bosses a breeze. But that also meant I stopped caring about the clubs. I had my attack skills and a few magic and healing, so let's get this done with. And most of the advanced clubs deal with status effects stuff, which... who cares? I got sick once from an enemy. Status effects do work in boss battles, so there can be some depth here. But if you want to experience it, you'll need to download a rom hack that lowers it. It does exist, so maybe that'll be fun if I ever play the girl's route. There are so many clubs, including secret ones, and it's a bit of a shame I barely bothered with them. 

The same can be said for the characters. Only four matter: you and your three other Hospo newspaper group. And you're a mute... I collected fourteen other friends, but I know I missed a few more. There's a starfish out there somewhere... But that's four relevant people out of fifteen. The other hanger ons don't do anything in cutscenes, and they rarely have unique clubs. Or maybe they do, and I just didn't care. Julia does, so shout out to the fellow American. What was the point of them? They could have helped make the clubs feel bigger. They could have made student life feel bigger too, as even that felt flat. Student council elections are brought up early, but you never participate in them. They simply pass. Several festivals are relegated to a small scene. You never take any tests, talk to friends outside of missions, or make non combat friends. It's just shallow. 

Believe it or not, the villains are... also along those lines. They're a monster-of-the-week type, so they lack the means to be deep. The final boss is very Dragon Questy, but the main organization at least has some lasting impact. 

Visually, the game is also limited. There's one cave tile set, you roam the jungles a tad too often, and buildings are all the same. That last one probably makes sense, seeing as the entire campus is on one island, which should have a cohesive architectural design. Mob pallet swaps are because of school uniform regulations too. It can be hand waved away, I guess. 

The music is... fine. It's background noise with little variety. If there was speech over it, it would be perfectly suited. I really could imagine this being the soundtrack to an anime. 

Which I think the devs were trying to go for. If anyone wanted to, they could turn Adventures of Hourai High into a pretty solid show. It would be a slice of life with plenty of sophomoric humor. It would be Angel Beats meets CLANNAD without the crying. There's plenty of NPCs to fill out the cast. The world is huge and filled with so much side content. I found zero of the seven wonders! I enjoyed repairing the rail lines; cool side content. Studios wouldn't need to change a thing. There's plenty of charm here, but a SNES RPG probably shouldn't have been made. There's a damn good basis here; it's Persona ten years before Persona as we know it. 

So it's an ambitious game filled with plenty to do. Maybe I skipped a lot (because of the encounter rate), but I see the humor, the vision, and the attempt. I just like stories and characters. I'm not high on Hourai High, but I think it's actually kinda solid. I'm giving it only 33/50 points, but my super secret new rating system says it's a top twenty RPG on the system.