Ren'Py - School Tales [v9.7] [Kenzi Shinyuiki]

as of version v9.7:
Revisited just yesterday (23.12.25, v9.7) after more than a year (03.09.24, v5.2) and thus 20+ updates in between.

I only rate it 2/5 becuase there are regular updates and the dev does seem to put in the (minimal) effort, which is pretty rare to begin with. But given that the release is originally gated behind Patreon and this guy gets ~600$ (as of 23.12.25) monthly that is the bare minimum I guess. Content wise it is absolutely 1/5.

tldr:
Even though you could probably read the whole thing in about 3-4h, do not bother. There is no substance to any part of this.
Unpack the Archive.rpa and do your thing with the renders/videos.

Length:
I am usually a rather slow reader/player and like to enjoy the art and little details, explore all choices on the fly and such. But I've read through all those 20+ updates in about 1,5-2h. For 15 months worth of regular updates, that is so little content, considering that about 10-20% of that time was navigating the menus and walking around to find the events because the provided hints are often lacking information. Resulting on average in about 6-8min of content per month including navigating the map.

**since the last read as more than a year ago take everything from here with a grain of salt regarding everything pre v5.9**
Writing:
The English is not good, but it is understandable to me, a non native english speaker and does not seem to be AI translated.
The dialog is really shallow, like literally has no substance at all. There is some sort of character development, but it mostly happens like you flip a switch.
Nothing ever really has consequences and it seems like literally every character, even the ones MC has never met, knows he is a 'pervert' (= pedophile) and just goes with it right from the spot. I am gonna admit that I do not recall the beginning of this story very well so there might be an explaination for that, but given the non-fantasy setting I strongly doubt that.
There also does not seem to be any form of overarching story, drive or anything like that.

Characters:
Calling the girls characters is kinda a stretch, they are merely fuck-puppets for MC with a slightly different flavor each. Every single one literally jumps on MCs dick as soon as she has a moment with him alone. A funny example of that would be
There are no relationships being built, no struggles, no tension at all. Hell there literally is .
There are a lot of characters, but literally most of them have no dedicated events. At the end of my last read there were 11 main girls and 5 side girls without any events, after the 20+ Updates there are now still 10 main and 5 side without but they added 5 new side girls with one short event chain each.

Gameplay:
The sandbox is completely obsolte and actually a big hassle since it is really buggy. For the areas with sub-areas the provided "quick access" to locations often does not trigger the events, because you seemingly have to enter the scene a certain way for them to occur.
Since the Story seems to be 95% linear, with most events being gated behind other events there really is no need for the sandbox.
With the linear Story you HAVE to get every girl (even the 'side girls') to progress the story, meaning you do not have any agency as a player.
There are a lot of minigames which also seem to serve no actual purpose and are terribly coded. Same goes for the Inventory and all those different stats the girls can gain. Maybe there are some events gated behind certain stats, but i unlocked every event and never encountered any form of barrier (besides 'finish x's story first').

And yes this is still a work in progress, but it makes little sense to me to implement all those systems from the get go and not actually use them in any way in 2.5+ years of development.

Visuals:
The design of the girls is kinda cute and somewhat diverse but nothing out of the ordinary, I would struggle to place them in this game, if i encountered a picture of them without context.

H-Scenes:
I struggle to call them even 'scenes'. Yes there is nudity and a small variety of sexual content among the renders. But every single one of those is completely devoid of meaning, context, tension, sense of relationship/closeness, substance, consequence/weight and character. Every single scene consists of about 5-10 lines of repetetive "dialog" and 1-3 differently paced animations. They are literally over in about 30-60s. In most cases there is no build up or anything, just straight from day-to-day dialog to "hey lets fuck".
The animations are 100% cookie cutter from koikatsu with absolutely 0 customization.

BAD English translations. No guide directing you where to go - wandering around the school with no idea where I was or where I had to go. I can forgive the Engrish, mostly, as I get it's not everyone's first language, but if you're going to make a game, at least give people a sense of direction, of where to go and how to progress.

played an earlier version of this game. and, i loved it. glad to know its still being updated. the characters have been all appealing and cute. im very curious to see how the story progresses and how each of the characters play their parts down the line. and, just overall world building and lore. Thank you for still updating this game. youre the best =')

Grammar is bad, especially at the beginning. But there's not much story, so I just kinda clicked through and skimmed anyway, so it didn't matter. Still, -1 star.

Hint system kinda sucks. Could be better. Also, you have to manually click each of the 30 girls to see if they even *have* content, there's no "Content is done!" icon or "Event ready!" icon or anything on them. Huge waste of time. -1 star.

Beyond that, was what I expected. Fairly cute. Each girl could use more repeatable events. Also, maybe I'm stupid, but after the initial T/TH events those days you literally have to go home and take a nap, or find another time skip, because there isn't a convenient one at school or on the menu. Annoying.

Review as of 4.1

I saw the other reviewers and decided to see how bad the Engrish is. It's pretty bad. Grammar and punctuation are abundantly horrific. Weird choice of words is also quite common. However, because I went into this knowing that the Engrish is bad, it was actually quite funny. Now for the most part, you can understand the gist of what's going on.

My problem with this title is elsewhere. The game starts you off with multiple choice selection to go places but once you get to class and start teaching, suddenly everything turns to point and click these arrows to navigate. And to enter rooms, you need to mouse over certain doors. I accidentally found out about that so exploring wasn't too bad but this was definitely a minus for me. Anywhere else in the game is through multiple choice selection, choose one navigation theme and stick with it.

The grind and flow is quite messed up. In order to progress, you have to do certain actions every day to increase the characters' Love but the way the story flow sometimes goes like this: You wake up, go speak with sister in this story event and go to school. After that's done, you can wander back home and your sister is there cooking breakfast but at the same time she's also at school.

There's also a specific part where you see twins in a swimming pool playing around. Then you can walk into the dressing room and they're also inside playing around. If not for their names, one would think it's quadruplets.

The sex scenes are nice but the developer can definitely use BetterPenetration mod to make the penis actually go in. Or at least make use of the camera angles to hide the penetration I mean the dick is just flopping around...

If you just want to get into this for the sex, it takes a while. You have to shut your brain down and not read most of the text unless you want something comedic.

I have to agree with people who pointed out that the English translation is worse than what you get from machine translation. It's mystifying when there's free machine translation available. The dev would do well to learn from the design of other games -- for instance, the description of the specific LI's could have functionality to move from one person's details to the next person's details without going back to the overall listing. It's difficult enough to follow the story that I don't have an opinion of that at this point.

It's has a good start, but it's not a complete game yet.
The qualities are low in some places and have bugs.
The girls characters looks great, but the map need fix.

Might get a better or worse rating later on, but for now 3 stars for V2.7

I personally am perfectly fine with koikatsu, and I didn't come in expecting much of a story in the first place. If you in the mood for some quick, cheap loli hentai, this is not a bad choice. However, I agree with the buggy hint system. It actually go stuck on screen an I had to start from an earlier save. I got to the end just fine without it however. Again, though, I have to reiterate, there really isn't much to the story, and if that's something you want, this is definitely NOT the game for you. Also, the text is definitely not the best, but its not the worst either. I have seen MUCH worse in mtl. You can understand what's going on just fine, really its mostly just bad grammer.

Has a lot of potential, however that's about all it has at this point. the "hint" window that happens to be the only way to know what to do to progress bugs out and blocks the screen. this makes it so if you want to actually do anything without getting lucky while blindly clicking you have to save before you look at the hint menu and reload after it bugs out. when its all said and done this should never have been shared anywhere in its current state.

The idea of the game itself is certainly not new.
But in any case, in the genre of school teacher can build a lot of interesting plot, etc.
But apparently this is not about this game.

I can only give one plus to the game that there are lolis. A lot of lolis.

This is where the pluses end.
Next comes the horrible UI, too plain graphics, standard Koikatsu animations, bad English translation and very mediocre story.

In the end, I didn't open all the event sequences to the end and just unzipped the rpa archive. I can say that there is nothing interesting there.

ok. i like rape. 2nd picture a loli seems to get raped. sign me up.

damn. this game is absolute garbage. i didn't want to believe the negative reviews, i thought they just hate rape in games.

the english is even worse than you can imagine. literally without exaggeration: every sentence has at least 1 mistake. usually more. typos, critical grammar errors, phrases which don't mean anything. absolute garbage. auto translator would have been 50 times better. i don't know how it was translated but literally typing in the whole vietnamese sentence in google would definitely leave better results than what is in here.


it's not enough that translation is garbage, the game is garbage too. but if you are lucky enough that you can get where you want by clicking on everything... then you get a critical error... i literally got critical error in 3minutes of playing. there is no way anybody in the world would have the mental strength to get to the rape scenes when the game is so shit.

unless you have some masochistic tendencies, don't play the game, it's worse than some common physical tortures.

You can play it... I guess. Though I strongly advise against reading it unless you are at odds with your brain, the English used in this game is terrible so much so that you are most likely better off coming up with your own narration for each and every panel, can't really say much more since this single aspect killed this title for me.

eh, this game is soo weird XD
many actions from the ass, like 0 dialogues or choices or whatever, sex happening from the ass is really weird. The animations are also aren't too good so more like the author is so lazy even if doing it alone. + for a lot of lolis but that's all. So sadly I give up this game (the only thing that can keep it up are even smaller girls in the next updates but proly not possible) it is really too simple game nothing to do.
one more thing this game have also a lot of glitches that reset a lot of things in the story.