Sentou Gakuen: Revival - or - Kitten's Got Claws

Yesterday's post , listing the seven demos I'd picked for this Autumn's Next Fest, ended with an exhortation to myself to "go and get on with it" and for once I took my own advice. By the end of the evening I'd made an attempt at four of the demos, some more successfully than others.

The first I tried was Spire Horizon. That didn't get far. The servers were down. I tried again a few hours later and they were still down. Not the best look for a game trying to pick up some traction from a limited-time event. 

Later in the evening, while I was attempting to update the New World client to New World Aeternum, which I knew would need a full download but which in my case also required me to uninstall and reinstall the game on top of that because the new client wouldn't verify, I saw that Spire Horizon needed an 8GB update too. I did that but by then it was too late to see if the servers were up.  I'll try again later today.

Which brings us to the three demos I was able to play. Usually, I try to play demos right to the end before writing about them (Unless they're the open-ended, kind, of course.) but I haven't finished any of these. I clocked up about an hour in two and forty-five minutes in the third. I may well go back to any or all of them for a second look but what I've seen so far has given me more than enough to talk about. 

Sentou Gakuen: Revival 

After my failure with Spire Horizon, I moved on to this one next because I was very curious about it. As I said in a comment at MassivelyOP yesterday, SG:R is "a visual novel “with MMORPG elements”", whatever the heck that means. 

I couldn't quite figure out what to expect from the description and having played the thing for an hour, I'm still not exactly clear on what it is or wants to be. After a very brief visit to Character Creation, the demo begins with a lengthy introduction in which your character arrives at a very busy train station and walks through some even busier city streets on the way to their new High School, where they're about to start as a transfer student.

This part is quite literally a "visual novel" or at least a visual short story. Scene after scene appears, with lines of text at the bottom giving an internal monologue, describing what you're seeing and feeling. Except you aren't seeing any of it.  

I tried to start a new game to get a screenshot of the text but it seems you can't restart, only continue, so just imagine a caption telling you how incredibly, overwhelmingly busy the street scene above is, people everywhere, lots of noise, cars roaring by...

 

The descriptions continually focus on the chaos and clutter of the environment, attempting to conjure an impression of a bustling city, overfull to the point of chaos. Meanwhile, the pictures show serene scenes of completely empty streets with no-one anywhere to be seen. 

The writing is pretty good. It does a fine job of eliciting the sensations of struggling to find your way in a crowded city you don't know. The artists don't seem to have read any of it.

After quite a bit of that you find your way to some suburban avenues that are actually supposed to be quiet. Except they aren't because that's where the action is. Action so bizarre I could hardly believe I was seeing it. I'll summarize: 

As you walk along the street, you step in something squishy. Looking down, you see it's a half-eaten fish. It belongs to a scraggly black cat. The cat takes this interruption to its meal badly and hisses at you. You try to talk your way out of the confrontation but the cat is not to be persuaded. It attacks. You fight the cat and lose. You end up in the school infirmary, hooked up to an IV drip. 

You and me both, sister!

 

Let me make this clear. It's a cat. Not a giant cat or a magic cat or a cat-like monster. Just a cat. 

You, the player character, are a full-sized, human girl (Or boy, you can choose at character creation.). Your age isn't specified but is most likely mid-to-late teens. 

Fit, healthy teenagers do not lose fights to cats. They might, at the very worst, get badly scratched or bitten, which would be unpleasant and potentially dangerous if not treated, but since no-one gets attacked by a cat in the street, something like that could only happen if the teenager tried to pick the cat up or otherwise interfere with it. 

The cat would not, under any imaginable circumstances, pick a fight with the teenager and even if it did the teenager would not fight back.  And even even if all of that actually, through some indescribably unlikely chain of circumstances, was to happen, the teenager would not lose the fight, let alone "get their ass kicked".

I thought for a while that the game might turn out to have some kind of fantasy element that would make sense of the cat fight but no. It's supposed to be a naturalistic setting or close enough. I'm wondering now if cats in Indonesia behave radically differently from cats in Europe or the UK. Or maybe its cats in Japan, since that's where the game is set. Or maybe people in Indonesia believe Japanese cats are peculiarly aggressive and/or Japanese teenagers exceptionally fragile...

What she said...

Whatever. It happens. And what happens next isn't much less disturbing. 

You wake up with the nurse standing over you only she turns out to be both the school nurse and the biology teacher because that's a thing that happens. Maybe in Indonesia. Or Japan. 

She's very sinister and scary, her bedside manner clearly modeled on Nurse Ratched. Not only is she deeply unsympathetic, she also makes her own medicines. Unlicensed ones that she tells you, almost gleefully, are not sanctioned by any authority but her own. She makes you take one of her concoctions...

And it makes you feel much better. Anticlimax! 

That's it for the Infirmary. At least it for now. But don't worry. You'll be seeing plenty more of that hospital bed. It's basically your respawn point. Every time you get knocked out, which is going to be often unless you learn to fight a lot better than I did, that's where you'll wake up.  

May as well get used to it. You'll be back.

And you'll stay there, too, because every time you lose a fight or get caught doing something you shouldn't be doing (Which sends to the Detention Room instead of the Infirmary but same difference.) you get a timer that prevents you doing much of anything until it runs down. 

I think it may also get longer the more times you "die", too. I wasn't keeping track but I think my timer started out at about a minute and ended up closer to two and half by the time I logged out. I know it felt like a long time to just stare at the screen and not be able to do anything.

After you get out of the Infirmary, the first thing that happens is you walk into a riot. In the corridor outside, kids are fighting over lockers. There are factions, some dressed all in white, some all in black, some in cosplay or regular clothes. One guy is in full plate armor with a sword but its all plastic. 

They fight with weapons including baseball bats. It's anarchy.

All of this, once again, is in the text and only in the text. On the screen all you see is a pristine, entirely empty corridor. Once in a while a single character will appear and stand while what they have to say scrolls along the bottom of the screen. Then they disappear again. Mostly, though, you just stare down that empty hallway into the vanishing point. 

I'm not seeing it. Are you?

And it kinda works? The writing is good enough that I got the full impact of the chaotic, violent scene without needing to see it. Which means I might as well have been reading an actual novel, I suppose.

So how about that gameplay, then? Is there any? 

Quite a lot as it turns out but you really have to go look for it. I'd call this a sandbox, near as makes no difference. Or possibly a sim. There's plenty to do but don't expect anyone to tell you what it is.

I only began to get the idea once the math teacher turned up, threw some chalk around (Which, now that I come to think about it, did sparkle and leave glowing marks on the walls, so maybe there is a fantasy element in play after all...) and told everyone to get to class. 

The next station stop is: Math Class.

I thought it was going to lead to some more structured content but it didn't. Instead I slowly figured out that from this point on you're largely free to roam around the school looking at stuff, fighting other students, picking up anything that's lying around, slipping on banana skins and starting "Investigations".   

Movement took me a while to figure out. It's like an old Text Adventure game. You can go into any of the adjacent rooms. There's a little grid at the bottom right that shows you which is available. 

I found out later you can also go by train to any location. Yes, you can go to a third floor school room by train... It's the game's version of Fast Travel.  Like a lot of things in the game, it's probably best not to think about how it works.

It'd be strange enough if it was an instruction manual but it's a coloring book.

Absolutely none of this is explained, except for the combat, instructions for which come by way of a coloring book featuring Kungfu Komodo given to you by Nurse Eiko. My character was unconvinced by these idiosyncratic teaching methods and I regret to say I didn't pay much attention to them either, which is why I kept ending up in the Infirmary. 

Combat consists of some kind of symbol-matching game but I never figured it out and for once button-mashing wasn't enough. After being decked by a couple of students in the hallways and an angry Salaryman in the street when I went outside for a breath of fresh air, I gave up trying to fight people.

Also, is Salaryman an acceptable term? I seem to remember reading it had gone out of fashion but it's the one the game uses. And whether or not it's acceptable to call a middle-aged man by that term, whatever you call him is it okay for him to punch a teenage girl in the face hard enough to knock her out and leave her needing hospital treatment? 

Just because he's having a bad day? 

Seems harsh. 

Just say yes and don't think about it too hard.

It's the kind of thing that happens all the time in Sentou Gakuen, though. I know that because of those aforementioned "MMORPG elements". 

There's a box you can tick to give permission for your character to be used by the game as an NPC. It defaults to "Yes" so it's an opt-out, really. As far as I can tell, what it means is that everything your character does, like be hit in the face by a Salaryman or falling over after stepping on a banana skin, is going to be reported to every other player, using your character name, either in a window called "Info" or as a small pop-up on screen. 

I'm fairly sure your character can also appear as one of the NPCs other players fight, although I'm not so sure you'd know about it until you read the result in the Info report. I don't think it interrupts your own gameplay. Certainly, if anyone called me out I never noticed. I insulted several of my fellow students to provoke a fight so I apologize if does actually yoink you out of class for an ass-kicking. Not that it's likely to be your ass that gets kicked if it's me that's calling you out.

Besides starting fights with random schoolmates and passers-by, gameplay options come in a pop-up window for each room and include Info, Upgrade, Encounter, Nearby Students and Investigation. Not every room has all of them. Although the tabs are always available, often some of them are empty when checked. You need to check all of them in every room if you want to be sure of not missing any.

See? I told you he punched me in the face!

As well as the four tabs there are also icons that appear at the top of the screen. They do change as you move from room to room. If you mouse over them you get an explanatory tool-tip like "Do something stupid to provoke someone to fight with you." or "Buy ticket". There are quite a lot of locations outside the school grounds - shops, cafes, parks - all with their own potential activities.

You can start an Investigation in any room. Investigations can last an hour or several hours or a whole day. And that's real time. I had two complete overnight but then I couldn't figure out how to see if my investigation had uncovered anything. Maybe you have to go back to the same room to check. I just thought of that!

There are two factions you can join and actions you take affect your standing with both of them. I joined Yami, whose motto is Freedom, Diversity, Laissez-Faire. The other faction is the authoritarian one that goes about the hallways telling everyone else what to do. We hate them.

You can form a Club, which I think is like a guild in other games and you get an apartment, where as far as I can tell you can do absolutely nothing. I think your Club may get a room of its own too. If so, I bet you can't do anything there either.

I logged back in after I'd finished the post to take a screenshot and in five minutes I discovered enough new information to write a whole other post. Like there's a train for fast travel and a shop and a cafe and a whole woodland area with a "dungeon" you have to be Level 15 and get a permission slip from the Principal to enter...

 

All of which, I realize, doesn't really make it clear whether or not I liked the demo. Or whether I had fun playing it. That's because I don't know, either.

I know I was intrigued by it. Fascinated, even. I was certainly never bored. So much of it made little or no sense. It so often went places I wasn't expecting. It made me think. 

And it was well-writen, in perfect English, and the pictures were pretty to look at. So there's all of that, which is a lot. 

I just never had the least feeling I knew what I was doing or even what I was meant to be doing.

It's very likely that had more to do with my lack of familiarity with the kind of game Sentou Gakuen: Revival is than it has to do with the game itself. I'm guessing it's part of a sub-genre that has, until now, completely passed me by, meaning I have no idea what it's intending to achieve or what it expects of me.Meanwhile the developers clearly expect their audience to be extremely familiar with the whole thing and to be happy to get on with it on their own.

Either that or it's just nuts, which is always a possibility. 

I'm beginning to see how this is an MMORPG now. Just a really weird one.

Whichever it is, I'd say the demo is definitely worth a look, especially if you haven't come across this kind of thing before. It kept me fully engaged and entertained for an hour and I only stopped because it felt like I'd taken the whole thing about as far as I could without going and doing some secondary research. I'd pressed all the buttons and found out what they did. (I hadn't. There were more and it turned out I didn't really know what some of the ones I'd found did, either.) but I didn't know why I was pressing them or what I was hoping to achieve by doing it.

I may go back and play some more when I've looked into things a bit. I think I most probably will do that. Or I might just call it quits, add it to the experience pile and move on. There's a lot going on in gaming just now. I'm not sure I have the time for experimenting with unfamiliar genres just now.

More to the point, I've gone on about it for so long here that I don't have time to talk about the other two demos I was going to write about today so that's going to have to wait until next time. Or maybe the time after that.

I'm off to see if Spire Horizon is up yet. Then I ought to check out New World Aeternum. And tomorrow is the start of the Big New Season in Once Human.

It's going to be a busy week.