What game is it? O_o
Sunrider Academy...it's a dating sim based off the Sunrider franchise (the first game of which I gushed over so much back in December). To be fair, the characters, their interactions, and the more erotic stuff are exquisite, but they're like tiny oases in a vast wasteland of resource and time management. 85% of the game is spent going to locations to improve various stats, and the process is pretty much the same each of the hundreds of times you do it. Really, the problem is that the game is too long for the content it has...my first successful play-through was 8 hours, when it could have easily been half that long without changing much in the game.
A more minor problem that plays into it is the lack of interactions or supporting characters. You would think that the entire school this takes places in consists of nothing but your character and the four girls you can aim to get involved with. Besides interactions that take part of the story, you'll also run into the girls randomly as you go to locations, and in those instances your 'interactions' consist of choosing a topic of discussion ('politics', 'sports', 'weather', and getting feedback on if the girl enjoyed the discussion or not...more often than not, you don't run into anyone and you're just notified of how going to that location/doing that action changed your stats. The game would have benefited immensely from improved conversations, random situations you have to resolve, and supporting characters that your character could interact with, even if they weren't dateable. It would have cut into the tedium and at least given the hope of discovering something new in the game. As it is, large portions of the game just feel bare.
Even worse though is the fact that your success in the game depends on essentially being at the right place at the right time...you have to go to certain locations during specific periods in order to unlock character interactions will allow you to finish the game, locations and times that the game gives no effort to provide you with. If you fail to be at the right places enough, none of the girls will give you chocolate on "Pure Day" and you get a bad end right then and there...halfway through the game, with only the option to load a save or start over from the beginning. That's especially frustrating when halfway is four hours into the game.
I finally got through a game by finding a guide and following it
to the letter, but you shouldn't need a guide just to be able to finish a game. In fact, this is the first dating sim I've ever played that required you to end up with a girl to even proceed with the rest of the game, much less requiring such specific actions to end up with one. I have to admit, I'm surprised it's rated so highly on Steam...between that and how impressed I was with Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius, I really expected better. Besides relaxing how strict the unspoken requirements are, they should have taken a good month just to produce more content for the game before releasing it. =/
