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Brooktown High: Senior Year Review
Written by Elmer Concepcion on Thursday, June 21, 2007
Unique Western foray into a distinctly Japanese genre; Large number of potential dates or friends,;Cannot see everything on one play through
Characters are of questionable appearance; Dialog repeats itself far too often; Unsatisfactory Endings; Shallow Character Arcs; Paradoxically the days are too short and the year is too long
Here's the deal on this game, you create your character who's a new transfer student to the fictitious Brooktown High somewhere in perpetually sunny California. You start as your basic nobody from the middle of nowhere. And you've got one year to make this the best year of your life, mackin' it to everyone of the opposite sex that you can. Keep your grades up, show the ladies or the gents that you're worth a damn, keep your talk smooth and you might just make it to first base. Yep, that's it. First base.
Go on the boards anywhere about this game, and one common comment comes first and foremost. The screenshots are ugly and the characters are plain fugly. I'm inclined to agree. But I'm also rather happy to report that the game looks quite a ways better in action. Look at any of the kids from their profile, and the shape of their heads is confoundingly unappealing. But looking at them straight on, during the plentiful conversations you'll be having, and the characters are somewhat more palatable. Perhaps, dare I say it, they're attractive. It's all subjective, I recommend finding a gameplay video before making a final judgment.
You have a lot of girls or guys you can talk to. And each of them, for the most part, have dozens of unique dialog branches involving their own quirks and side stories that you can discover if you befriend them. Conversations are handled simply and mostly you'll be the one initiating them. They'll say something either related to their likes or dislikes, or comment on your shoes or how well you're doing in gym, and then you'll get the chance to respond with two or three choices, but having so few choices of response, leads to conversations that are rather uninteresting and simplistic. Each person you talk to is usually easy to figure out, the rebel loves it when you dis the school, the princess loves compliments, and all of them love it when you compliment their artwork. A few times you'll say something you didn't mean, the wordings for the choices being rather vague, and it can ruin any date. Usually it's just a matter of finding the compliment they like and repeating it whenever your choices come up again. Sometimes you'll need to boost your stats in whatever category between strength, smarts, charm, or originality. But most dating goes by just fine if you press the right buttons. Actually, that sounds pretty much like the real thing...
Everything else between dating and conversations (which essentially play the same way) is made up of stat building and running around all of two 3D environments. The 3D running around bit is the game's weakest mechanic and from a gameplay perspective it's utterly useless, being more frustrating than entertaining. You have your bedroom, and you have the school hallway, both of which could have been easily represented by a menu with a different background, like the Japanese dating sims this game takes inspiration from. I wouldn't complain if I hadn't often lost precious time accidentally talking to the wrong person in a crowded group, loosing even more precious time running around in circles trying to find that next person you want to talk to without straying too far from that classroom you need to be at. And the game's clock is mercilessly fast, the time from getting out of bed Monday morning at 8:00 am to class starting at 8:30 is about one minute of real world time. Every conversation you have, or accidentally have, takes up about five minutes of game world time. It leaves you with roughly 30 seconds to do all the running.
So cross your fingers that you find who you want right away because those thirty seconds are about the only time you get to see your classmates. Once you're in the classroom, the week simply disappears dropping you off back at your bedroom on Friday, or Saturday if you've got a job or club to go to on Friday. Saturday is your only full day off, but for some reason unless you have a date that night it ends at the early 5:00 pm. Your time is so short for the few minutes of play you have in a week that management of everything becomes the hardest part of the game as your stats and grades degrade at increasingly quick levels while your boosts become equally weaker over time. Someone apparently destroyed Sunday in Brooktown, so don't count on that extra day to get that homework in.
Honestly, what the hell is that chick wearing to high school? That's ... illegal.
For the most part, that's going to be how you'll have to spend your year. Then you find a character you like, and you click even without pretending to be someone else. It's kind of nice for awhile, and you go on dates and kiss every now and then. You might even ignore the fact that your romantic success is more weighted towards just hitting the right dialog rather than all that hard work stat building. You take her to the winter dance (or where ever) and you fall in true love. But that's as far as that relationship will ever get. By the way, you don't even get to see the kiss. While the little videos that play, a mish mash of real life video representing all sorts of either victory or defeat are each rather interesting, it's ultimately disappointing to not see your avatar actually get to lock lips with that person you'd spent weeks wooing.
So it's victory? Not really, there's still a whole another half year till Prom. But that's okay, I found my sweetheart to spend the rest of the year with right? Well, yes and no. Trouble is, once you've had three or four dates with one girl you've officially finished her story arc until another school dance comes along. And only the Prom offers anything significant character wise. She will no longer be available for dates, and every time you talk to her it will be the same response over and over again. Asking her out merely results in denial. Helpfully, my avatar thought to himself something akin to, "Hrmm, looks like this is a dead end. Seems like it's time to play the field." But I didn't want to! Call me old fashioned, but I didn't feel like cheating on the poor virtual girl. But see, the game's really designed for you to be a playa as the only way to keep the whole very long year with interesting gameplay is to try and date every girl in sight and trying from the ground up to discover their quirks. And even if you do get caught cheating, it's really very easy to apologize to a jilted lover especially if you memorize the couple of conversation choices that brings her from "hatred" back to "going steady."
All it takes is a couple hours of play to have gotten to that point. As you go along, even cheating and playing the whole field, interest quickly wanes as new dialog trees grow fewer and farther in between. Early on, I was willing to look past the poor writing if only just to laugh with the extreme caricatures of high school students but that will quickly go away seeing the same lines three or more times. There's no reprieve from that same weekly schedule I described with hardly any variance whatsoever. The months may change but the weather is always sunny in Brooktown. Events like Winter Vacation or Spring Break are represented by a couple stock postcards before returning to the same exact weekly schedule. The three minigames had throughout; a dancing one, a kissing one, and the strip blackjack offer little distraction as they too never really change. While I'll admit that by the end, not every avenue will have been explored nor every potential date be had, it'll take a far more forgiving player than I to ignore the overall shallowness of the experience.
There are parts of the game that are successful, and if you like your dating to be cartoonish and over the top with dialog it can be an enjoyable experience. But then I would remember the repeating dialog and the disappointment that comes with completing a character's short dating arc. There's sort of an infinite number of endings, but they're simply a report card of what you've done or didn't do rather than anything actually creative and cool to learn about your avatar's post high school life. It's disappointing, it really is.
