Tag: School Days HQ

#oneaday Day 945: Reviewing is Broken, August 2012 Edition

Game reviews are broken.

This is a pretty well-established fact by now, I would have thought, but the issue rears its ugly head any time something interesting but flawed such as Papo & Yo shows up and is, overall, worthy of praise but riddled with technical issues.

Let’s stay with Papo & Yo for a moment to illustrate my point. (I won’t be spoiling the game here, so read without fear.)

Papo & Yo is, technically and objectively speaking, filled with flaws. The frame rate is pretty poor at times, there’s a lot of screen tearing and the collision detection is occasionally a bit off.

Does this make it a bad game, though?

No.

Does it prevent it doing what it sets out to do?

No.

This is ultimately all that should matter. And yet IGN notes that “poor design outweighs any interesting concepts”, ultimately concluding that the game is “bad”.

Well, yes, if judged next to something that is longer, more polished and designed primarily as a “game”, I guess Papo & Yo is “bad”. The problem comes when you consider the fact that all games are not created equal. Papo & Yo was put together by an extremely small team who did not have the budget to do more than they did. It succeeds admirably in telling its powerful, emotional story despite its technical flaws, which cease to matter almost immediately after starting to play. It was also not designed to be a “good game” — it was designed to be a vehicle for telling its story.

I’m reminded of a post I wrote a while back concerning visual novels and interactive movies. Back in the dawn of the CD-ROM era, if anyone dared to release a title like this that focused on the story at the expense of what would be traditionally called “gameplay,” it was slated without mercy. The mantras of the day were “gameplay is king” and “graphics do not make the game”.

To be fair, a lot of these “interactive movies” were simply poor stories, too, largely proving that (at the time) game studios simply did not have the budgets to compete with Hollywood. But some were enjoyable, and I can’t help feeling that some of them may have had a better response had they been released today with better technology and storage capacities.

You see, gameplay isn’t king. Not all the time, anyway. In something like Geometry Wars, sure, gameplay most certainly is king, though the beautiful neon presentation certainly doesn’t hurt. But in something like School Days HQ or Papo & Yo, gameplay is not king. Gameplay is not even in the king’s court. Story is king. And alongside this comes the necessity to judge a game based on how well it is achieving its objectives rather than how “good” it is compared to all other games. In no other medium do we judge individual creative works against everything else ever created in the same medium. No; we judge bestsellers against bestsellers; literature against literature; arthouse movies against arthouse movies; blockbuster against blockbuster.

Both School Days and Papo & Yo are “bad” if we’re to judge them against other, more “gamey” experiences. In School Days all you do is watch animé sequences for 20 minutes and then occasionally get to pick between two options. In Papo & Yo all you have to do is navigate the environment and solve some fairly simple puzzles. But neither game is setting out to be a “fun” game. Both of them are setting out to do one thing and one thing only: tell a story. They accomplish this in completely different ways. And they both succeed admirably, regardless of their game mechanics and regardless of any technical issues.

Most gamers I speak to on a regular basis seem to recognise this fact. So why, exactly, do we persist in judging all games to the same standards? This isn’t about giving a “free pass” to “art games”, as I have seen a few commentators remark in the last few days. It’s about judging a game on just one thing: how well it achieves its goal. Screen tearing (which, let’s not forget, blighted the original Uncharted to a very noticeable degree) does not affect how well Papo & Yo spins its tale just as, to flip the argument around, the stupid, nonsensical story doesn’t affect the fun factor of Call of Duty.

As always, then, the best way to judge whether or not a game is something you want to play is simply to try it for yourself — or at the very least discuss it with your friends and get the opinions of people you trust. “Good” and “Bad” are relative, arbitrary and ultimately quite useless descriptors when referring to creative works, and so I firmly believe the sooner we get out of the habit of judging all games against some ill-defined “canon of greatness”, the better.

#oneaday Day 943: School Days HQ First Impressions

I mentioned a while back that I’d acquired a copy of School Days HQ from JAST USA/JList, but I didn’t play it very far due to a few rather nasty bugs that unfortunately made it on to the master CDs. Two rather hastily-deployed patches later and the game now appears to be fully playable without issue, which means I can get stuck into it. I’m now two “episodes” in — I’m not sure how many there are in total — and ready to give some first impressions.

School Days HQ, for the uninitiated, is a remake of a visual novel originally released in 2005 for Windows, PS2 and PSP. It’s unusual in the visual novel genre in that instead of static backdrops with characters and text overlaid atop them, it’s fully animated. “Fully” might be a slight exaggeration, as the game has something of a tendency to cut to images of the sky or a particularly interesting piece of ceiling whenever something that might have been difficult to animate happens, but for the most part the game looks rather convincingly like an animé series you’d watch on TV and, occasional strange cuts aside, is well-directed, with good use of split-screen and other special effects. In essence, it’s an interactive movie rather than a visual novel, but it tends to be lumped in that genre due to its similarities in structure and gameplay. And, of course, the fact it has bonking in it.

Said gameplay involves a lot of watching and occasionally making decisions that will branch the story off in different directions. You can’t afford to sit back and relax in School Days HQ, however, because decision points come without warning and “expire” after a short period of time — effectively making “say nothing” a valid option in most situations. This is an unusual feature for visual novels and for narrative-based games in general — the only other recent examples I can think of are The Walking Dead from Telltale and Heavy Rain, both of which have more in common with the visual novel genre than more “conventional” game styles. (I suppose choosing not to do the Paragon or Renegade actions in Mass Effect might sort of count, too.)

School Days HQ’s narrative is all about close personal relationships, a favourite theme of mine. Protagonist Makoto finds himself sitting next to class cutie Sekai when their seats are rearranged, and through a bit of underhanded manipulation on Sekai’s part, admits that he has a bit of a crush on the very shy Kotonoha, a girl from another class. Sekai, who firmly establishes herself early on as a complete control freak, makes it her goal to get Makoto and Kotonoha together and succeeds in her machinations.

Both Makoto and Kotonoha are almost painfully awkward together, however — extremely hung up on the conventions of polite Japanese society and not quite sure how to cope with the prospect of a relationship — it takes two dates before they’ll call each other by their first names. Sekai, meanwhile, appears to have her own designs on Makoto, but so far in the story has done nothing but help the couple — with a bit of gentle teasing along the way, however. Given that she took her “payment” for getting the two together in the form of a kiss from Makoto and then spent her train journey home crying, however, it’s clear that all is not as it seems with Sekai, and I’m expecting a distinctly messy love triangle as the story proceeds — something which has already been rather strongly foreshadowed.

So far I’ve very much enjoyed what I’ve seen. The animation and voice acting is decent quality, the subtitles appear to be well-translated and the timed decision points give the player a strong feeling of involvement even though, as usual for the genre, they’re relatively infrequent. The characters are interesting, and the plot, while seemingly mundane, certainly has a lot of potential to head off in a bunch of different directions — including, as I understand it, some distinctly fucked-up ones. Which is nice.

As with many visual novels, the game is specifically for adults and features explicit sexual scenes. There haven’t been any yet, but given that the game supports bona fide wanking machines for both sexes, it’s fair to expect that there will be at least a few on the game’s various paths. There’s also the usual unnecessary (but seemingly expected) “fanservice” throughout — there were two rather gratuitous shots of shimapan in the first episode alone, though the second episode seemed to restrain itself from further pervertedness — fitting, since it largely revolved around Makoto worrying whether or not him attempting to hold Kotonoha’s hand would make her see him as a “pervert”.

I’m looking forward to continuing through the story. Its episodic nature means that it can be easily digested in small chunks like a TV series — and I mean this literally, as each episode opens with a short teaser, plays an opening title sequence and ends with a credits crawl. As such, it’s an experience that can easily be fit around other things or marathoned all in one go.

Will I get a good or bad ending, though? That remains to be seen. I hope I get a good one. I kind of like these characters.