VN - Ren'Py - Completed - Sunrider Academy [1.02] [Love in Space]

Absolutely great, -1/2 if you did not play the other parts of the game series but one would expect you did.

One the only times I ever liked a OVA / What if / Spin off etc... sort of deal soo fully deserves +2 for that as typically I absolutely hate them.

Its not extreme and not a massive fap or anything like that, just good quality and a good thing made to further add too on the side of a terrific 2 part game series.

It is a bit long and grindy though

+ Well written dialogue and story
+ Management isn't too complicated
- Grindy
- Takes a lot of time to get relatively few sex scenes
I only ended up playing one route (Asaga), as it was too vanilla for my taste. But if you want a sweet visual novel with sex at the end, then Sunrider is the way to go.

Extremely tedious and a pain to get a single scene, even on the story only difficulty.
Honestly one of the worse dating sims, like i have no idea who thought it was a good idea to make this such a pain to even get a single scene.
Just avoid this, it's not worth the effort and time.

Just one development mistake killed this game. All the elements of dating sim, resource manager there with great storylines and nice (if limited in number) artwork.

Unfortunately they made the girls locations to build up relationship random instead of having them at fixed locations at lunch and after school. This then led to stretching the resource management to allow time to build up relationships. So this meant game severely overextended and dragged out for the limited storyline content (450 days and 5 actions a day for a very short story for each girl was ridiculous). Simply making resource management targets a lot lower and putting girls at set locations would have made this a great game with free flowing story.

Most of triggers for story automatic and those that weren't made sense as long as you reading story so walkthrough not really needed.

Some of stats seemed redundant, for example strength affected some jobs but didn't seem to affect anything else or give any advantage in storylines. Intelligence on other hand gave good income in museum and carried you through the monthly exams. I didn't notice if Charisma gave better points with girls relationships so can't comment on its value.

I usually love management/dating sims regardless of whether it has h content or not(the art simply being a nice bonus) but not in this case, the game play elements really feel like they should've been completely left out, this game would've been far more enjoyable without them, they essentially just amount to endless "boring/repetitive" grinding, that you "can" cheat to get over with faster but, there's no point...

The girl's start out with fun/interesting personalities for the first 3 months(what is essentially the tutorial/common route end date) but as soon as the 4 month mark is hit the writing just takes a major hit in terms of quality, to the point that reading the story becomes more of a chore than the grinding...

So... what's left at this point? the unlock-able art/h-content. But is it worth it? in my opinion no, the art is nice but there's barely any... if you still want to play this, I recommend you use the cheats talked about in this thread's page 2 to skip directly to the events you want to see, you can at least save yourself from feeling jaded towards the events by the time you get to them, or regretting the time wasted grinding, who knows you might enjoy the story that I didn't.

Lastly why did I give it 2 stars?
Pros: It's complete and it has nice art, so 2 stars
Cons:Bad/boring game play mechanics(skip-able via cheats so I won't give it 1 star for this), bad writing*
*the writing is mostly quite good at first(first 3 months) but it devolves heavily when month 4 arrives and stays that way, through out the majority of the story.

While hentai CG art is meh at best (generally 3 small scenes per girl) and the gameplay is too grindy (really grindy and boring - real nightmare), the story makes each route something to remeber! While game enforce only one girl at a time, each story is filled with emotions and plot twists. Each girl is lovely and charming (eventually) and it's impossible to tell who is better in the end... but to see their character in depth you have tochoose her as your love interest and play to the end (theircharacter starts to develop around 8 month). Without that they a shallow typical anime stereotype. Unfortunatelly, the game filled with a lot of meaningless grind and empty repetitive activities, so even with cheats the game could easily take a full day to play one route from the start till the end.