Gakkou wo Tsukurou!! is a 5-game life sim series published by Victor Interactive Software, now part of Marvelous AQL Interactive or whatever it is they call themselves now. The first three games are on the Playstation, the fourth one is on the GBA and the last one came out on the PS2 in 2005.

I played a game about school-building called Dekitate High School a few months ago. It was terrible. But the school-building idea itself was very interesting, so when I heard about the Gakkou wo Tsukurou series I couldn’t wait to try it. While Gakkou wo Tsukurou!! Advance (Gakkou from now on) appears to a pared-down version of the console games, it was still enough to provide a taster of things to come. It dragged on a bit near the end of the game but it was still fun enough that I’d like to play the rest quite soon.

Story: Your grandpa owned a school but he died before he could fulfill his dream of making it the No.1 school in Japan. He leaves the school to you in his will along with a bit of money and not much else. Fortunately the formidable headteacher has been taking care of things, so while all the teachers have left and some of the students have turned delinquent, not everything has gone completely to pot. It’s up to you now to turn things around and set things right while fending off the attempts of a rival school to take over your affairs.

Battle gameplay: Battling? In a life sim? But of course! It’s totally normal in a Japanese game. One of your main tasks as the new owner is to take delinquents to task by “giving them guidance” i.e. thrashing them to within an inch of their lives. Delinquent students don’t study, don’t pay school fees and rapidly lower the morale and morals of their fellow students. Plus they multiply like cockroaches. If you don’t take care of 10 today you’ll have 20 tomorrow, so it’s important to deal with them every day.

Battles play out like your usual Dragon Quest turn-based first-person affairs. The only unusual thing is the 教師召喚 skill, which lets you summon teachers with high Morals to help you in battle. In theory, anyway. Actually they tend to run away from battle at the first sign of trouble or whenever their HP gets low. And if they’re unlucky enough to get wiped out in battle then they turn into delinquents themselves and you have to go beat them. Teachers are almost more trouble than it’s worth.

Why summon them, then? First for the little help they can give and secondly so they can earn EXP. This EXP goes towards their Sports/Academic stats. The better their stats, the more they can teach their students and the better your school ranking gets. Teachers get a set amount of EXP every day even if they don’t join you in battle, but if you want to build a good school quickly every little helps.

For the main character herself/himself, battling is a way to earn SKP – skill points used to learn new battle skills. Like this one with a high chance of putting all enemies to sleep:

There are some pretty useful skills in there. It’s not like you can’t finish the game without them, but you’ll have a really, really hard time of it. The delinquents don’t have that much HP but they’re usually much faster than you with very high ATK so again every little helps.

General gameplay: Fighting delinquents takes up a major part of your day, so it’s just as well that the school more or less runs itself once a few things are set in place. The first thing you have to do as the new owner is set up school events (to make the students happier) and then hire new teachers for every class. I learned the hard way that you should always hire the most experienced teachers you can find, regardless of cost. Less experienced teachers are okay if you hire them very early on, but it’s really best to just get uber-teachers so you have less micro-managing of their growth to do.

Once hired you have to place teachers in classes according to their personalities. For example a passionate class needs an equally hot-blooded teacher while a quieter class would do better with a cooler teacher. This is quite important because the students won’t learn as well if they don’t sync up with the teacher and the teacher’s dissatisfaction will grow every day as long as they are with that class. So this is one case where it’s better to hire a less-experienced teacher if that’s the only way to make the students happy.

The second thing you need to do is build some new facilities to bring in much-needed income every day. The school cafeteria, school farm and school ranch should be at the top of your priorities. If you play your cards right you should have that done by the end of the first year, allowing you to focus on building training grounds and other facilities.

Once all that is done, your days will consist of running around campus helping students solve their problems. You’ll have a “Principal Radar” that will give hints about students in trouble. Then you run all over campus until you find a student with a mark over their head like so:

They you find out exactly what is bothering them, e.g. they’re sick, they’re hungry, there’s a strange delinquent on the loose, they’re fighting with their boyfriend etc. and then you solve it and get a reward. This was easily my least favorite part of Gakkou wo Tsukurou, because the rewards are rarely worth the work you have to do. The clues are extremely vague and the campus is both large and filled with rooms and classes that look exactly the same. I gave up on doing all but the most obvious quests pretty quickly.

What I did get into in a major way was the sport clubs. Managing sports clubs was a relatively simple affair, but somehow it was also tons of fun. First you make them practice to exhaustion day after day after day (if you build them a facility and give them an adviser they grow really fast), then you spend the earned training points on their HP and ATK stats.

Mwahahaha! And to think these players all started out with 10 HP and 10 AT. Once a year there’s a national tournament that consists entirely of players lobbing balls at each others’ heads until someone collapses:

I suspect soccer would be rather more popular in the US if this is how the sport was actually played. And that’s about it for the complexity of sports in Gakkou, yet somehow it was just so much fun! I think I just have a thing for raising sims, that’s all. Just seeing my players grow stronger and do better with every passing year was exciting in a simple kind of way and I looked forward to training them even more every day.

Impressions: That’s it for Gakkou wo Tsukurou!! Advance’s gameplay. What did I think of the game itself? As I said it was fun enough to pique my interest in the rest of the series, but as a standalone game it was lacking a lot.

– There really isn’t much to do every day besides beating up students and training your sports team.
– Managing finances and human resources is one of the hardest parts of running a school in real life, but you don’t have to worry about any of that stuff in this game. You’re filthy rich from the start, money just keeps pouring in and there are never any unexpected crises or disasters to send you into the red.
– There isn’t much to do after the second year because you can have all facilities built long before then.
– You can also win the sports championship in the second year, making the third year tournament a curb-stomp battle.

– While the game claims that making the students like you will reduce the number of delinquents, this is a lie. Their numbers will only increase and while the bad students will address you more politely and say how excited they are to receive your guidance (!!) this won’t make them any easier to beat.
– The growing number of delinquents was a pain in the third year, when I was already close to making this the No. 1 school in Japan and just wanted to fast forward the days.
– I hear you have relative freedom to build any kind of school you want in some of the other games, but here there is only one objective to aim for and the methods you have to use to achieve them are fixed.

So for the first year the game was fun and exciting, after that it became something of a chore. It wasn’t bad enough to quit over but it definitely got tedious. I’d still recommend it as a quick, short introduction to the series but it left quite a bit to be desired in the satisfaction department. It also left me a bit scared that the other games might be more of the same: exciting at first then tiring till the end, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. I still had fun, more or less.

Currently playing: Summon Night 4! The PSP version at least is the easiest of the Summon Nights I’ve played so far, quite close to a walkover but not quite as bad as, say, Fire Emblem Awakening or Elvandia Story. It’s still Summon Night, after all. I think I’m almost done so I’ll write something on it sooner rather than later. Maybe.