I like this fail state because it gives you a deadline for getting onto a route and with enough time in the school year for all the major story events to happen. This is explained by not getting any chocolates on the Ceran equivalent of Valentine’s day and your little sister being incredibly disappointed in you. Worth noting that the fail state that I think is implemented best is triggered if you haven’t started any of the girl’s routes by the middle of the school year. Oh, and you also have to make at least one of the girls like you enough that you can get on her route. You need to keep these numbers high enough to win club competitions and gain enough prestige each month or you hit another fail state. These have their own stats in the form of membership, readiness, and morale. I’m honestly not convinced any of the other starter packages are all that useful.Īside from your personal stats, you’ve got to manage the three trouble clubs. I always chose intelligence because it means you have one less homework assignment to do per week and gives you a leg up on the monthly exams. When you start up a new game you get to choose which stat you specialize in.

Another fail state is failing too many monthly exams. Being sick also negatively impacts how likely you are to succeed at tasks, which causes more stress and basically sends you into a death spiral. Stress is the big one because if your stress gets too high you get sick and if you stay sick too long you hit a fail state. Your personal stats are fitness, intelligence, charisma, stress, money, luck, grades, and homework.

The other half is a stat and time management game where you have to decide what activities to attempt each day to manage a few stats in order to not hit a fail state. Half of Sunrider Academy works like a regular visual novel, with you clicking through text screens and making binary choices about what to do in a few cases. Now time for me to back up and actually talk about the gameplay. I am impressed at just how many references to Sunrider managed to fit into Academy. The joke is that each of these characters is alternate universe version of a character from the original Sunrider game, which is the thing that drew me to Sunrider Academy in the first place. Each girl has their own storyline that plays out when you choose to hop on her route (worth noting that you can only do one route per playthrough). This is where the actual story comes from. So there’s four girls to choose from: the three club captains and Ava (brown hair, perpetual frown), the president of the student council and your forever disapproving childhood friend. Oh, and your little sister challenges you to get a girlfriend by the end of the year. There’s the kendo club run by Asaga (the red haired one up there), the science club run by Chigara (lavender haired with the ribbon), and the swimming club run by Sola (white hair, mostly expressionless). Your duties as the student council VP are represented in the game as needing to take care of the three most troubled clubs on campus.

On top of being a regular student you also need to handle being the vice president of the student council. The basic idea is that you (that is, Kayto Shields) are starting your third year at Sunrider Academy, the most prestigious educational institution on the planet Cera. So, like I said, I was originally not going to write this one up because my perspective kind of depends on the original Sunrider game, which I would say is not quite complete yet and therefore I’m unwilling to write it up. Sunrider Academy contains psychological abuse, domestic abuse, and rape. Lots of words and spoilers for Sunrider Academy and probably Sunrider below the doodad. And anyway I finished it recently and want to get my thoughts out while they’re still fresh. In another universe… I probably would have enjoyed this more.Īlright, so I wasn’t originally planning on writing up this one until I had written up Sunrider (edit: I have written up Sunrider! Over here!), but I also had not originally planned on going through all four routes in this game.

Sunrider academy sola