Tokyo School Life is a visual novel, so there’s not a whole lot to do other than watch the story go by, aside from a few dialogue options that the game throws your way to try and convince the girls you are a good mate. The girls are actually quite well-rounded characters, aside from some kind of shared delusion that your character isn’t a total creep, so getting to know them is actually relatively interesting, even if the plot is largely quite obvious. And Sakura is the smart one of the group, but is also secretly a huge anime nerd and has some mysterious illness that causes her to pass out when the narrative decides she should. Aoi, the short, cutesy girl you spill tea all over, acts as the mother of the group, doing all the cooking and cleaning, but is also a master of karate on the quiet. Karin, the girl you grope in the opening ten minutes of the game, is at first a feisty young woman (with big, jiggly breasts, of course) who wants nothing to do with you, but is revealed to actually be an “idol”, which is essentially a Japanese pop star, who loves all things cute. All three of the girls you live with have their secrets, and they’ll reveal certain details about themselves to your character once they trust him. After a few initial instances of getting the shit kicked out of him by one of the girls, your character finally starts to realise that race doesn’t dictate personality, until he eventually forgets and starts claiming every man he meets is in the yakuza.Īnd yet, you can’t help but wonder if your bumbling idiot character is actually intended to be a terrible human being to reinforce a recurring theme in Tokyo School Life – that things shouldn’t be taken at face value. And, worst of all, he mostly gets away with it.
He remarks early on that everyone in his class has black hair, before adding “but of course they do!” He wholly buys into the myth that “gaijin” (Japanese for “foreigner”) are considered irresistible by Japanese women, and gets pissed off when the female characters don’t jump on his dick on first sight.
This isn’t exactly an unusual turn of events for a dating sim involving a Westerner heading to Japan, but I still felt decidedly uncomfortable about attaching my name to an openly racist and sexist lead character that you know for a fact will end up bedding one of these poor women. And within a few hours, he manages to accidentally grope one girl, spill tea over another, and then find out he’ll be sharing a dorm with both these girls along with another who he keeps referring to as the “perfect Japanese woman”, because she is pretty and slightly subservient. You can name the character after yourself, which is great if you don’t mind role-playing as a creepy otaku who, five minutes after setting foot in Japan, decides he can’t wait to meet cute Asian girls who’ll fall hopelessly in love with him. Tokyo School Life puts you in the shoes of a male American high-school student who, through hard work and diligence, earns a trip to Japan to study at a Japanese high school for two weeks. And the game I regret so much? Tokyo School Life. But only a few hours later, a copy of the game popped up in my inventory. I was half-joking, as I so regularly am, and never expected our own Adam B to go through with it. I asked the world if someone might buy me a game I had just noticed on Steam. My life is filled with these moments, but the one preying on my mind most recently is the result of a tweet I sent out not too long ago.
Or it could be something more serious, like dropping a used cigarette butt on the floor after a brief smoke, and suddenly causing a retirement home to blow up with your own parents inside. It could be as harmless as eating a slice of bread that went out-of-date a few days ago, before finding yourself curled up around a toilet bowl for a few hours. There are some things we do in life that don’t entirely work out, but which seem like a really great idea at the time.
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