Ren'Py - Academy: Live! [v0.05 Alpha] [passhonQ]

This game is definitely worth checking out. It might have some familiar settings, but the way it's put together really raises the bar. In headmaster, I just couldn't get invested enough to want to read through the text, but this game really nails it.

The characters here are unique and interesting, not just lifeless mannequins. This makes for some funny dialogues and scenes that keep you entertained. Even though it's still early in development, there are already enough hot scenes and content to keep you busy for a day.

The gameplay is still a work in progress, but it looks promising and should add a lot to the game, which for now feels more like a visual novel.

Is it worth the download? At the time I'm writing this review (v0.05 alpha), yes it is worth the download. It's not too long partly because it's still in early development but it has enough content to give you a very concrete idea of where the dev is going with this game. if you want some more details on the game, well, let me list them as much as I can without spoiling the important details of the story.

Positives

• The writing for the sex scenes is excellent. I mean that in every way, the angles the camera takes, the dirty talking that happens thorought the scene, the storytelling through background and position changes to tell the passage of time instead of fading to black or straight up cutting thorought is much appreciated.
• IT HAS GAMEPLAY!? Biggest surprise here, it's not a cut and dry vn where you ONLY make closed question type of choices (which mind you, can still be ok if it were, many games pull it off decently well). Academy: Live! features an actual management simulation game that has you making a few choices of how to lead your school, reviewing your objectives for the week,checking students stats and bios which do change. And somehow, this doesn't feel like an overwhelming system. It's fairly easy to grasp and adds another layer of choices that have the chance of varying your gameplay or run. Bear in mind, however, that it's still evidently in the works as one of the most interesting functions is still just there without having much impact if at all, more on this later at the Negatives list.
• The character writing is good. It's not stellar, definitely not DrPinkCake level of character writing, but this game sells you the current characters' personalities quite well. As of now, many characters in the student body are barebones in their personality mostly because some of them we haven't even met properly. Some of the ones we do get to know are even stereotypically anime. BUT, it's pulled off decently so they do come out as perfectly different for now. Haruka is the one that stands out the most and shows that passhonQ knows how to write good characters that feel like their own person.So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we have to let him cook, as many characters here could end up being surprisingly well written. It's not the main point of an eroge (), but good character writing is always appreciated imo.
• It has animations and they're good. Not much needs to be added here, I'd even blend this point into my first point but I think this is still a good thing to point out since I wouldn't mind if it had no animations, but I know many othersdo, so there you go, the tag doesn't lie, there are animations, and they're goodso they don't detract from the amazing writing for the sex scenes.

Negatives

• Character design feels too basic. This is almost a nothingburger complaint, and while it is appreciated that character design is not a fiesta of over the top looking students. I found myself confused at who some of the characters were because their design made it so they blended into eachother. Nanako, Sayoko and Satsuki were near impossible for me to distinguish from one another. HOWEVER, I want to believe it's because there's no content for those girls so that would explain why we haven't properly met them, thus they blend together as "the people we don't actually know yet".
• No way of knowing what student will have an interaction when called. I mentioned this in the Positives list, during the management game phase, you can call a student to your office and check for how their studies are going or go for a special interaction. I did mention and the game does tell you that this system is still in the works and it's mostly there to show you how it will work. Well, as of now, IT DOES HAVE a special interaction implemented that I lucked into because of all my available calls to do during this version, I happened to call a student that had a scene attached to the Call Student game mechanic, I was just trying to see if any of them had dialogue or reacted to current/recent events, well they do, and I don't recall getting any clear indicator telling me that I should call that student myself for a special interaction. This tells me that there's a big chance that in the future, I could call the wrong students and miss out on scenes because you can only call one per day. And with no indication, it's very likely you don't choose the 1 student out of the 17 or 18 students that have a pending interaction. This should be solved pronto, as I really don't like the idea of missing out, and I doubt other people would think differently.
• Too much ambition and that is scary. Writting a game with multiple characters that react to dialogue and events is difficult. There's ~27 named characters in this story. That just spells writter ticking time bomb to me as a fellow aspiring VN writer. Juggling that amount of characters will make writting and coding the dialogue a lengthier process for all scenes, not just sex scenes, while this is manageable at first. As a story progresses, it becomes an exponentially bigger mess. I know that the setting calls for many characters to be in the story, and I know the game explicitly tells you it will only focus majorly on the story of 3 or 4 students at most. Which is wise, and a temporary solve, but it will only delay the problem because these characters still exist and can still be called an interacted with, they will all obviously have scenes of their own and have their own bio to boot. Make your cast too big and your updates will grow exponentially slower each update because stories and events will intertwine and will need to check many flags and change accordingly. I HOPE that psshonQ has a plan to avoid falling into an extreme update slowdown due to the size of the character cast, because it would be sad to see another game with tons of potential fall into the "1 or 2 updates per year" territory.

LASTLY AND MOST IMPORTANTLY:
Don't let these negatives I listed deter you from Watching this thread or supporting passhonQ (the Dev). Academy: Live! is very interesting idea for a VN. The first negative, as I said, is mostly a nothingburger, the second negative will most likely be solved by the time the Student Call function is properly implemented. And while the third negative is actually scary to think about, I believe this game and the dev are worth supporting. Thanks for reading through my comprehensive review. Academy: Live! has tons of potential and for this version, on massive potential alone, I believe it deserves a rating of

5/5

I love the scenes, especially the ones with Haruka. but I feel like MC needs a better personality where he commands more power. Seems to me he lets everyone run over him, even tho he is the highest-position staff in the school. Hopefully, in future releases, MC will become more dominant and more self-assured when he adjusts to the position. At this point, he behaves like a student rather than a Principal.

(Also game has really heavy opening sequence, that really needs to be fixed, it drags on for far too long.)

Will come back after a few more updates, don't let the negative comments demoralize you, I think the game has promise, Good Luck.

Promising start and a lot of potential imho, girls are cute, scenes are nice, looks like our choices will matter and we will have to balance between love/corruption and what our employers want.

Just keep in mind it's not a power fantasy, MC is more like normal guy that found himself out in this weird situation and trying to get the best out of it for himself - and it's the same for other characters.

review for v.0.0.5a.

was expecting so much more due to the premise, but got some boring barely any degen weak ass corruption, where everyone just seems to jump on mc's cock at first sight.
mc exists i guess, not much to say about him, barely a character, bit too passive for the type of character he supposed to be tho.
girls are cute, scenes are mid at best.

Very decent quality 'management-style-lite' school game where you play as a teacher of an already corrupt (but wait, there's more.. ) school.

The scenes and animation is good (providing you like the art style, I realise there's plenty of people who don't).

The writing is decent although it's easy to argue there's a little too much for a porn game (but hey, that's what the skip function is for if you don't like it).

Altogether, a decent start to a fairly high quality game in this genre. Looking forward to more to come.

Worth noting that it seems as though most non-vanilla kinks are avoidable through choice in the game (so far I've seen urination/choking/ntr all as optional, as an example). Also worth noting that I think there's implied NTR that isn't skippable (this is assuming you class NTR as literally anybody other than MC having sex with a woman in the game, I know opinions differ).

Man, it's rough writing reviews objectively.

tl;dr, Game good, worth a look.

A poor attempt to recreate the headmaster but using honey come instead of honey select, at least there there was some kind of sense to how the MC became the headmaster, unlike the complete nonsense here.
Another writer that stands firm in the belief that "more words = better writing", the prologue takes three times longer than it should, the tutorial is immediately followed by ANOTHER repeat of it, not a single character in the game is endearing or makes you want to care for them, most of all the weak MC that spends almost every scene being a deer in headlights, utterly passive and completely pathetic. None of the characters act logically or befitting the situation, some random fucking nerd tries to blackmail and coerce the principal, "pure" girls jumping on a dick first opportunity and deus ex machina info dumps out of nowhere about what you should do.
Waste of time, unlikely to change unless an actually competent writer will be brought on the team. I'd say at least there are no bugs, but that is not an achievement when there is no content either.

Very good start for a game. Easy to get and plentiful sec scenes, my only criticism is the MC is a bit underwhelming for a guy who is supposed to be the boss. I would like him to be a bit more able to corrupt the girls or enrich then.

v0.04.2 Alpha

Visual: 5*
The VN looks pretty good, the renders are above average for novels shared on the site that were made using koikatsu. The animations are not Illusion's default, which is very welcome and rare.

Novel: 3*
Despite being well written, it unfortunately lacks originality: basically it is "The Headmaster" with fewer options, at least until this version.

Characters: 4*
The girls are hot and don't suffer from the use-the-same-model-on-each-girl-with-different-hair syndrome that plagues most vns that were made using Illusion games. Their background stories are interesting and their personalities well defined.

v0.04.2 Alpha review: 2.5 stars.

The idea of corrupting and pimping out schoolgirls sounded interesting but I fired it up and sat through several minutes of tedious prologue before calling it quits.

Edit: Couldn't find anything else to play so reinstalled and skipped/skimmed through most of the text dump.

Plot is kind of wonky. You've been hired as a teacher at a school for misfits. The twist is that the school is secretly selling footage of the female students to a mysterious group. Also, members of the group will sometimes offer a bounty on a particular girl. So there are three main girls who have large standing bounties and then the promise of various side women.

There are a few problems with this. First, the game proposes to be a management / sandbox type game where you find ways to increase affection and/or corruption to activate events but none of that is implemented yet so it's just a VN for now.

Second, none of it seems to matter. You have a girl with 0 affection and 5 corruption (which is labeled "pure") who gives you a blowjob and has sex with you (and she enjoys being choked) on the first meeting. Another girl with 0 affection and 2 corruption (also pure) finds you creeping in the women's locker room and demands you engage in consensual non-consent sex with her. I can't imagine what levels of depravity they'll get up to if they ever actually like you or become corrupted.

There also just aren't any stakes. I realize most people will say "eh, it's porn logic" but when you're able to punish students whenever you want and do whatever you want and everyone's constantly demanding to have sex with you... what's even the point? Why even bother with pretending to be a real school? I think it'd make a lot more sense if you were secretly working for the shadowy group but the entire school faculty wasn't in on it and you had to stay on the down low, for example. It would also be nice if it were paced a lot slower--maybe a girl agrees to not wear a bra for the rest of the day to avoid her first strike instead of going straight to sex.

I'd like to check back in once the management stuff has been added but for now it feels like a generic koikatsu sex fest.

It's a great game. Very well done animations and sex scenes. I don't really like the open world system with this table, but that's a small thing. Netorase is very intriguing.We have a lot of choices and we can pointwise build relationships with characters and choose the content we are interested in.

Story had potential and it was ok at the start, but playing an extreemly submissive MC that is supposed to be the boss setting the rules and controle the students is a huge fail, MC feels brainless and the students play him when it should be the other way around.
It makes the game boring and pointless, and the lack of choices hurts the game even more, you cant deside to act tuff and be the boss you just follow this sad excuse of a MC around while he acts like an idiot.

Even first student you call to your office gets her way with MC, she acts like a bitch and couldent care less about what MC says and what does MC do...he allows her to kiss her and he kiss her back and tells her he enjoys it, pure submissive and ends up with getting a footjob and a fuck.
Personaly i wouldent have touched her with a 10ft pole, dident like her looks or how she acted towards MC, so clearly i cant play this game.

Doing all of this you have 0 choices so game will be a pure fuckfest game where nothing you do as the player will matter, MC will fuck anyone no matter if you hate them or not, had it been up to me i would have put the bitch in her place and the last thing i would ever is reward her by fucking her for how she acted, and yeah i am just not in to submissive MCs one bit.

First page on forum for this game it says:
"Will the Principal use his position to satisfy the ever controlling Board, or will he get too close to the girls and choose another approach?"

Which might lead you to think its a game with choices, but i dont see that at all, considering you have 0 controle over who MC fucks or how he acts hes path is already set and out of your controle.

v0.03.1
Normally I don't review games this early, but this is a good enough start to bother.
The presentation in the UI and character designs are both done well.
The actual scenes are more than just stock koikatsu animations. They tend to be fairly long, with multiple angles to view from and have a lot of dialogue rather than just 'stick dick in hole'.
The girls vary heavily in personality. Mostly they're just 'anime stereotype', but they're done fairly well so far. The slut is a slut for a reason, the class rep is uptight but not to an unreasonable degree, the 'crazy' girl is just desperate for affection, etc.

Its not really much of an NTR game so far. I've been able to keep nearly (one seen showing board of director shows 2 girls on his bed, but I don't know if those are students) every girl to the MC without issue I would hope this remains possible, aka 'ntr avoidable' as it currently is.
The board wants to see perverted acts, they don't have to be with people other than the mc.
And the MC isn't spineless, you can basically always decide if you'll go with a plan or not and he literally chasing a guy through the entire building at one point. Not too sure what the other reviews are talking about.

Biggest issue with this game is that the current scenes are so long, varied in posing and such that I'm not sure the current format is really suitable for it.
You're supposed to be doing 3 actions per day + calling girls, all of which would have scenes, which is just too much work load to realistically get anywhere in any reasonable period of time.
But that's an issue for the future.

0.002 Alpha. Very early, we pretty much only get through the introduction of main characters and the general direction this game will head in. It was pretty good for what it was, if you like the corruption theme this game has potential. Too early to say how the actual corruption mechanics will work as it gets more fleshed out but I'll be keeping an eye on this.

Pretty naive concept, copied from a much popular game, but the execution is very poor.
The MC here has no spine. Gets jerked around by students, shows no authority and goes along with anything that people tell him to do. Few choices sprinkled here and there, but needs more choices to actually make the MC behave like a principal and not some high school student.

The only good thing was that there is no sandbox, but otherwise its pretty bad. Not recommended at all.