School Fight is a turn-based action game in where we play as Karen, an ordinary girl who now has to contend with a school where all the males have suddenly turned into rapists. As her friends are sexually assaulted one after another, Karen sets off to defeat the person responsible for this outbreak across a five-stage journey. With the intro cutscene out of the way, we are then taken to a tutorial area to learn how to play. The prior term of ‘turn-based action game’ will more than likely have you tilting your head in confusion. It is turn-based in that you and your foe take turns attacking, then defending. Action because it is context-sensitive, where correct button timing can lead to longer combos and being able to block incoming attacks.
A very good comparison to this combat system is Paper Mario, but instead of selecting actions via a menu, you do so in real-time. I was expecting your standard beat ’em up experience and this gameplay both surprised and deeply intrigued me. It should be a selling feature talked about on their store page or made clearer in the short trailer. The only ones that likely know what they are walking into are those that try the demo beforehand. Regardless, you initially only have one button to worry about. The Z key. It moves your character when not in combat, attacks, defends, and just about does everything. Over time, Karen will learn different techniques and you’ll have another three additional buttons to mix into your fighting arsenal.
The required inputs for combos are quite simple. Your most advanced attacks simply require you to press Z twice and another button three times. It is generous in the time it gives you to press them, too. I can’t imagine anyone having trouble chaining together combos. Most of the challenge comes from defending yourself against incoming blows. You have a brief window of time to block strikes to reduce damage taken, and briefer still when it comes to parrying them. To parry, you need to wait until the last possible second to press the Z key. Mistiming it will have the enemy strike you directly, but getting it right will have you uppercut him before he can touch you. It is a risk-reward system that is a good deal of fun.
As you fight your way throughout the school, your opponents will begin to strike harder and contain more health. A few healing items can be found in a level, but not enough to compensate for playing carelessly. By that point, you’ll likely have the feel of the gameplay down. Your foes will never strike more than once per turn from the beginning of the journey to the end, so while they hit harder, their techniques never improve or challenge your defense timing. It has enough challenge to keep you involved and is easy enough for the casual player to get through. For the 30 minute duration it takes to beat this title, I wholly enjoyed the combat despite the lack of much variety.
To encourage the player to mix up their attacks, rather than sticking to the one that does the most damage, there is a scoring system at the end of a stage. It is something to strive for, but has no actual effect or even marks the stage you beat with the rank you received. After defeating all five stages, you will unlock access to the CG mode where you can view the artwork and H animations. The big thing to note here is that it only unlocks the mode itself, not any of the content you’ve missed. Unlocking the animations requires you to not throw off an opponent grappling you. The timing that lets you defend from it is so large that you’d have to purposelessly allow it to happen rather than uppercutting him into the stratosphere. To receive a CG, you need to lose that specific stage for one of the five unique artworks. The latter is more likely to happen, but not guaranteed if you have a half-decent sense of timing.
School Fight’s hentai aspect isn’t well integrated into the gameplay, which is hardly rare. The problem comes with how much of a pain it is to unlock them. You’d think activating them once would be enough, yet you actually need to beat the entire stage for it to unlock in the CG Mode. On top of that, it’s difficult to tell what you’re missing. The artwork is simple enough since you only need to lose on each stage. With the enemy-specific H animations, it becomes far more confusing to grind out all the lewd content as you have no info about the missed content or what stage to find them in. If the goal was to add some replay value, it still wouldn’t have been a bad idea to add a cheat code or a way to unlock all the H content for those that choose to do so.
With all that said, both the lewd animations and CGs are pretty well done. They are definitely worth seeing, which makes going through all that effort to do just that all the more unfortunate. School Fight has never been translated from Japanese. Despite that, nearly all the text is in English, minus the brief story sections. You will have no trouble picking it up and playing right away. One thing that most impressed me is how often the background scenery changes as you advance throughout the school. It gives a clearer sense of progression as you 1v1 the entire male population with your increasingly escalating levels of attack. By the end of it, you pretty much become a Dragon Ball character as you go around Ki Blasting other students. School Fight is a silly and creative game that is more than worth the $4.68 asking price.
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