When Dekitate High School came out on the SNES in 1995, it marketed itself as “the first high school simulation game on the SNES.” According to j-wiki, this wasn’t true because a game called Houkago in Beppin Jogakuin (After School in the Beautiful Girl’s Academy)  had come out a few months before. It was also a meaningless achievement, because the vastly superior Tokimeki Memorial was already making waves on the PC at the time and was ported to the SNES shortly afterwards.

Once you realize all that, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Dekitate High School is a half-assed joke of a game. The premise is that you’re the heir to a rich family. As part of your training, your grandfather establishes a school and asks you to manage it for three years while disguised as a regular teacher. That’s right, you’re a teacher, not a student. This puts any dating between you and your students firmly in unethical territory, which is why, to its credit, DHS never lets you date anyone.

So despite the misleading cover, this is not a dating sim but a school development sim, and a poor one at that. The way you develop your school is by raising your student’s educational stats to match or exceed the national average.

The only way to do this is to build classroom after classroom after classroom higgledy-piggledy on your compound. Ignore aesthetics, pay no mind to accessibility, just build facilities on every square inch of ground and your students will automatically perform better. In theory.

I know someone who runs a preschool, and she assures me that it takes way more than that to make a school better. Staff hiring, training, supplies, wages, utilities, parent complaints, maintenance, inspections, and on and on and on. It’s not a matter of throwing money at the problem and walking away. But you knew all that already. Too bad the developers didn’t. Even in 1995 there were decent management sims out there that they should have copied instead of trying and failing to ride on Tokimemo‘s coattails.

In any case all my efforts were in vain, because nothing I built made any difference to the girl I picked. I think Emiri was a little… specially-abled, because she failed my class roughly 70% of the time. I must have built at least 10 music rooms and labs because my adviser insisted they would make her smarter but she remained dumb till the day she graduated. This part is realistic, at least.

In the ending I got, she failed the exams for the institute she wanted, so she’s spending a year studying to get into a regular university. I’m sure she’ll have better luck on her own than in my trainwreck of a school. I thought I must have done something wrong, so I checked around in Japanese FAQs and stuff. No, you’re just supposed to build compulsively all year long. The only thing the FAQs could offer was a money cheat to build more things faster.

What about the romance aspect of the game? You pick one girl at the start of the game and you’re stuck with her. It doesn’t matter which, because they’re all ugly. Every week or so, you get the choice to either scold or compliment her. I have no idea what this affects. It can’t be affection because she’s sweet on you in the cutscenes regardless of what you do. It can’t be grades because, like I said, she sucks. Once in a while you’ll run into her outside school, like at the pool, and you’ll get to make a multiple choice response. The feedback is usually so vague you can’t tell whether you answered right or wrong, and this was presumably in the age before quicksave/load so it’s too much trouble to reset and try again.

The art was pretty dreadful, but it is SNES and it is 1995 so I can’t be too fussy. The music I kind of liked because it felt very ‘video-gamey,’ all whiny and tinny and looping the same 5 seconds of music over and over-ish. That doesn’t mean it was good, of course. I just liked it because I’ve been playing games with good soundtracks lately and was longing for the bad old days. This music really takes me back.

Anyway, enough rambling. I was just killing time with Dekitate High School in between bouts of EarthBound, which I like but can never play for more than 30 minutes at a time. I was expecting something more substantial than three dull ‘years’ of building, building, building and watching my student fail, fail, fail at class, but I didn’t have my hopes up that high. I’ll have to find something else to play now, hopefully something that’s actually worth 5 hours of my life.

Related posts:

Ranshima Monogatari – Rare Land Story (1) Tokimeki Memorial 3 – Emi Tachibana GET! Kanuchi: Futatsu no Tsubasa – Should have known it was too good to be true (spoilers) La Corda d’oro – Forever alone! (spoilers)