Hourai High School Adventure, for SNES

Rating: 6.0/10; Above average

Not recommended to play. Maybe check out a video to experience the story

This is a Japan only Dragon Quest clone style of Jrpg that is extremely quirky and comedic. To illustrate the tone of the game, the opening begins with you flying to the school on a jet liner. The pilots wake up from a nap to go "oops my bad, we went way off course while we were asleep", after which a stewardess throws the protagonist out the door with a parachute, which fails to open and you survive by landing on another student in front of the entire school on opening assembly. Many of the enemies encountered in the frequent random battles are students and teachers. What kind of school is this where giant animals, dinosaurs, robots, ghost trains and similar roam the country side while the students and teachers regularly beat the crap out of each other to the point of having a major hospital on site and clinics in almost every building? Doctors and nurses are used as save points by the way, which is an interesting change from weirdly mystical objects that may or may not actually exist for the characters.

You can choose some features of the protagonist at the beginning, including gender. Gender has gameplay effects on the story and access to different dorms, equipment and clubs. There is a fairly large roster of characters to recruit with 4 active party members, 4 more in reserve that all gain xp and job points, can be freely swapped in battle and who automatically take over the battle if the first 4 wipe, and others that just hang around at their home until you ask them to replace a party member. There is a core team of 3 + the protagonist, who are very well characterized with much interesting and hilarious dialogue. I exclusively used that core team so I have no idea if the other party members have interesting dialogue. If they do that is some replay potential. Each character has their own "class" as defined by what equipment they can use and what clubs they can join. Clubs are kind of like jobs from other rpgs but much simplified. Really, a club offers up to 3 abilities (which can be passive boosts or spell like abilities that cost mana) which are unlocked as you gain club points and that you get to keep after leaving the club if the club is mastered. The entire club system is a good progression hook and has significant player agency to plan out builds. The protagonist is like a Hero class, who can join every club but starts with only blunt weapons and light armor (clubs can unlock the ability to use new types of equipment). The first character to join you is a jock who can only join Sports clubs and can use better weapons and armor. The girl is like a cleric or white mage who can join the Culture and Science clubs while being more limited in armor. The last of the core team is a nerd who can only join Science clubs, has poor armor selection and can use ranged weapons despite never being able to join the archery club. The other characters have their own combination of clubs and equipment, and some are not able to use clubs at all and/or have their own unique equipment type.

Unfortunately there is a lot of user unfriendliness. Shops show who in the party can equip an item and if it is an upgrade, but not how much of an upgrade. Your inventory does not indicate who can use an item or even what type of equipment it is. Finding a new item involves going into the equip menu for each character and hitting auto to see if it is an upgrade for anyone, though you might want to use something other than the auto selection. The many consumable items and club skills have descriptions of what they do but only outside of combat. Which item cures which status ailment? What do these skills do again? Better learn and memorize before combat. I thought only the characters were in school here. At least the game will not let you use a skill (maybe items too?) if no one needs it. I found there to be too many items and skills, making it even more difficult to keep track of what everything does. There are a ton of different health and mana restore items and even different accessories that have the same benefit, all of which clutter up the limited inventory. At least the skill list in combat remembers what you last used, since it can be tedious to scroll through the pages of mostly useless skills to find the one you want. Most things in the game are outright useless because of the complete lack of balance and challenge. I never once had to use items to restore health or mana and only at the beginning had to stay at the inn to heal. Even white magic equivalent was barely ever needed. Early on I felt there was enough challenge in random battles to manually focus down enemies rather than using the random targeting auto battle, but for the rest of the game I steamrolled everything without the characters even breaking a sweat, including bosses and the final boss. What little damage they did take was easily recovered during frequent level ups. One club grants a passive boost to xp that seems to affect the entire party, possibly even stacking from multiple characters having it. I suspect that this may have been a run away snowball that completely destroyed the balance of the game but I cannot be sure without playing through again while avoiding that club. Regardless it is a failure of game design to render so much content useless and brain dead easy.

Despite this, the game shines at setting, story and characters. This is a game that should be played more like an adventure game for the story and not if you are looking to scratch a Jrpg mechanics itch. I should point out that the English translation I used broke the game at the very end of 4 chapters, where there is a newspaper summary of what happened followed by the save screen. I had to use the in game saving system and switch to the Japanese version to get past those parts. Beware that the chapter about exploring the ruins in the jungle has a point of no return just before the end and I had to redo the entire chapter because I neglected to save.