Lust Academy S2 v1.7.1d
So I finished playing through the entirety of Season 1 and all of the available Season 2 content, and it's been a mixed experience. For ease of access, I will break down my review into some categories.
Story
The game's premise follows Harry Potter rather closely and is a solid mixture of interesting new ground while still falling into many of the same tropes you would expect. For example, the main character is incredibly talented and good at everything but also has unreasonably evil adoptive parents raising him that hate him for no reason. This includes the unlikable stepdad that goes from being a bit of a dick in the beginning to a cheating, abusive, and controlling father who sexually assaults his child because the writers weren't confident enough that you would hate him, so they kept adding negative traits to be sure. There's also the cruel and overtly sexual stepmom that hates the protagonist and seems to be down to bang him at a moment's notice, as is tradition. It is important to say that not a single choice you make in this game matters outside of choosing to have sex with a character when you reach the sex scene. They do an okay job of trying to hide this during Season 1, and you'll get a couple of screens of unique dialogue for each choice. They give up in Season 2, and each option only gives you one or two screens of unique dialogue before taking you back to the main path.
The game starts to come into its own when it gets to the actual Wizarding School. I am a big fan of world-building and lore exposition, two areas in which the game excels. The problem is that the game promises the world and delivers almost nothing to you. Characters talk about how large and fancy the school is, but you can only travel to 4 locations and do things in 2 of them. There's talk about crazy parties, and you never see a single one. You are an ex-athlete with injured legs, and the game tells you how and where to fix your legs, but you cannot fix them. The story is the rough equivalent of seeing a beautifully decorated fancy cake in a TV Show and then realizing it was all fondant with nearly no cake. There is a town you can go to during the weekends as a reward for winning the weekly house tournament, but there's almost nothing to do there except a fishing minigame (For season 1), some non-canon character interactions, and watching one of two stripping scenes. Everything else you can burn through in one or two weekends.
The same thing happens with a lot of the characters. In Season 1, you are introduced to about 20 characters; out of all of them, only about 6 have any actual substance, and at the end of Season 1, they write out 2 of the more fleshed-out characters and replace them with more side characters. You can finish a character's entire route by having two conversations with them or solving some problem for them. It also suffers from "Game Released in Seasons" Syndrome, where the character that got a single conversation in Season 1 receives an out-of-nowhere sex scene in Season 2 because they were popular. That would be fine, but there are only a few sex scenes in either season.
Both the central plot and the character writing sound good on paper, but the writing is all over the place, and you never feel like there's any consistency. You can complete an entire character's route and find absolutely nothing of substance, or midway through a character's route, you both will uncover some horrific magical secret hidden for years and resolve it in less than 3 minutes. For Season 1, the central story beats consist of running a bunch of tasks for various students until one of the tasks involves you grabbing a powerful artifact for a shady teacher who decides at that moment to be evil and also totally possessed by an evil being called the Overlord. He tries to open a portal to the Overlord, but you stop him and unpossess him, and he reveals that he is your real father. Then Season 1 abruptly ends, and Season 2 begins, and they reveal that actually, the plan wasn't to open the portal to the Overlord but to have him suck the power of the founders of the school, and they are all currently trapped and need fetch quest items to save them. Also, your newly revealed father lives for 15 minutes before being killed by a different Overlord worshipper. All of this happens in 6 minutes, and the other 4 hours of the main story are slowly plodding along. The character quests are written the same way. You'll have 6 steps where nothing happens, then for step 7, a character will reveal their secret heritage or a systemic issue in the school system, and it'll be resolved by step 8. My favorite example would be rescuing a student's long-lost brother after he tried to escape homophobia by living on an island where he accidentally killed his gay lover. (It was all covered up by the school and his homophobic dad). After saving him, they never talk about any of that ever again. The character is just an NPC that replaces the NPC functions of the dead dad teacher. Nothing about corruption or homophobia or anything. It all comes out of nowhere and has no consequences. There's another section where dragon poachers are built up as a threat for an entire route, and it turns out to be one dude with a gun that you immediately beat the first time that you meet him by erasing his memory and then just leaving without even checking on the dragons the girl had been worried about. And that's it, that's the end.
The main character also looks like the single most generic man to have ever existed, and in quite a few renders, his goofy expression will pull you out of the story. The MC is also a pushover; you can tell this man has never had a single thought in his entire life. He tends to believe what everyone tells him immediately, which takes him down several wacky misunderstandings, and crazy situations like becoming magically indebted to a teacher hinted to be malicious in exchange for a small amount of information that he knows isn't very important. Or the time he becomes magically indebted to an extremely shady cult in exchange for an item that would save the soul of their founder, something that directly benefits them.
The best example of the type of storytelling in this game would be the special Christmas update. In the special Christmas update, the MC and several other characters are all transported to a magical cabin in the snowy mountains, where they encounter a woman who has been separated from her group in the cabin. In the spirit of Christmas, they decide to take her in. From there, you have several scenes with each of the side characters dedicated to minor encounters. For example, you bake a cake with one girl, which turns out poorly. You decorate, but there's some mild fighting. You can choose to build a Snowman or go take a bath with a Succubus. (The succubus bath is the only bit of sexual content with the main cast in this update and it is just the two of you awkwardly masturbating next to each other.) Fortunately, even if you picked building the snowman, you can take the bath afterward. Finally, at the very end of the Christmas update, you are alerted by the strange woman (who has not been seen or mentioned since her intro scene) that you are the reincarnated version of an elder god who has descended into this world and given humanity magic. She also says she was your lover then but that you couldn't find a body suitable for you until now. And then, out of nowhere, you start having sex with her as if to fill a quota. All of this in the last 4 minutes of an hour-long story.
The Structure
It's important to say that, technically speaking, this is a very well-built game. It introduces many different features that initially seem overwhelming, but almost immediately, they all begin to click for you, and it seems incredibly simple. You are given a calendar that tells you where each interactable character is and lets you teleport to them instantly. The menus are all clear and precisely built, so you can tell exactly where you are and what's happening. Everything feels crisp and nice. There are even built-in character bios to tell you exactly how far you still have to progress on each character's plot and let you know when it's over. The only major gripe that I have with the game is that the writing could be smoother, it feels machine-translated or at least translated by someone who isn't primarily an English speaker. It's nothing terrible, but it happens often enough that you will be lightly distracted by it, especially if you get invested in the story. Many strange word choices and half-sentences are scattered throughout the game, and they detract from the experience. I never encountered any game-breaking bug, occasionally, a day would repeat instead of progressing, and sometimes the models looked especially wacky, but I have no real complaints. The music they chose was excellent, and it fits the theme most of the time. However, sometimes it would just cut out and only restart once you interacted with a different character or finished the event you were on.
Overall the biggest problem with the structure is that everything feels unfinished, like I'm looking at a first draft pushed out the door as fast as they could get it done. So many concepts and plot points are dropped or changed either because they forgot or didn't want to implement them. I know that the game isn't finished, but they are finished with Season 1, and many of the complaints I have are from the parts they claim to have completely finished. Altogether, it is an extremely well-built shell, but the issue is that it doesn't have anything of particular substance. There are no systems or minigames that are particularly complex or fun, and not a single choice that you make across the course of the entire game matters even the slightest bit. I realized this right away since I'm a completionist, and I prefer to see everything the game offers. I would make save states at each choice and pick each of them, and I would always see the exact same outcome, with maybe a line of dialogue changing.
The Content
Overall, I would label this game as a slow-burn type of game if the burn at the end was someone implying that they had a lighter. The renders are all done beautifully and are some of the best I've ever seen; the problem is that they never do anything with any of them. Multiple characters are given arcs that end in absolutely nothing, and even when you get to the sex bit, it feels like nothing has changed. Congrats, you finally had sex with this girl; complete ten more steps where she acts the same towards you as she did in the beginning, and maybe you'll get to feel her boobs once or twice. It feels more like they're writing off of a checklist and throwing in enough scenes to call it a sex game. Oh, this girl didn't get any scenes in season one, better give her one at the beginning of her route in season 2, and then after that initial one, nothing else for the rest of her route. It also doesn't help that the quality of the sex scenes does vary compared to how high-quality everything else is. Some sex scenes are well-made, and others look more thrown together than anything else, with strange angles and model contortions.
As for the actual sexual content itself, if I was someone that loved incredibly tame and underwhelming sex with a hint of foot fetishism, I would be blown away by this game's content. It is all very vanilla missionary with the lights off style sex. Occasionally there will be a blowjob, but most of the time, it consists of stripteases, boob caressing, cunnilingus, and maybe sex. This holds true for nearly every character if the character gets any content at all. I am fairly certain the game contains more footjobs than actual sex, and there's nothing I love more than sitting through 2 hours of quasi-English dialogue to be rewarded with my 12th glimpse of boobs or 6th footjob. If you like feet, though, the game might be for you. I also did like how they let you sexually harass every single other person in your dorm at night for season 2 to make up for dropping a character from season 1.
The TLDR
Overall, despite all of the bad I mentioned, I can see why many people really like this game. It's creative, it's beautiful, everything is easily accessible and understandable, and the characters are all decently likable; it's also just a game with many flaws that include poor English and writing and lack of content. It's like getting a massive, beautifully wrapped Christmas present shaped like a car, but when you open it up, you realize it was just a very sexily wrapped motor scooter. Motor scooters are still dope, but when you trained me to expect so much more than what I got, I'm going to walk away disappointed.
Overall I would rank it as an above-average game with a couple of major flaws, so assuming a 5/10 is average, probably a 6/10, maybe 6.5. However, since we use a 5-point scale and people treat things rated 3.7 as terrible, I'd give it a 4/5.
