A Sensei's Story

This is a rare Hosted Game that is entirely comedy-focused.

You play as an English teacher (a 'sensei') who goes to Japan, lured by the promise of a lot of yen (you didn't really understand the conversion rate, unfortunately) and a fun time living in a new place.

You meet your principal, teacher, and students, and get to it. Most of the game involves giving lessons or watching other people give lessons and interacting with your fellow teachers and students. The romances that I noticed were all with teachers and staff, many of whom are European (including a French woman that I romanced and a Scottish man who was somewhat of an enemy).

There are a lot of funny parts. The game is very self-referential, calling itself out for using fake_choice and having an extended sequence at a party where the principal urges you to reset the game while everyone else is deeply confused.

Some humor didn't land with me due to my personal experiences. A long-running gag is that the principal has bad English, not conjugating his verbs or declining his pronouns, and his writing is in dialect (so like writing 'za' instead of 'the'); in addition to this, he is long-winded. He sometimes has perfect English, but only when quoting what I presume are the author's favorite movies (which come up as tests all the time, to see if you the player are familiar with them). The choppy English grated on me for four unrelated reasons: 1) it didn't sound to me like the way people learning English talk, since they generally memorize several useful phrases perfectly and mess up on unfamiliar things instead of constantly getting the same mistake all the time; 2) I've had really great friendships with lots of East asian people who struggled with grammar and so it was weird to see our player be dismissive of what feels to me like an endearing trait; 3)every time the player talks to the principal, you have the chance to speak in complex sentences and vocabulary to purposely confuse him and feel superior; 4) I don't really enjoy reading 'dialect' where the spelling of words is changed to match the pronunciation. Ironically, I found that the Japanese used in the game (untranslated, but written in roman characters) showed many more characteristics of a weak language learner. Only very basic phrases like one might find in an old travel book were used, and no conjugations or clauses like those found in most ordinary sentence (like this one) were used.

Now, this doesn't mean "I say this game is wrong and people shouldn't play it", because it's meant to be lighthearted and you can be friendly to the principal. I've looked up a lot of discussion and reviews of this game and haven't found anyone that cared about it all, so I just happened to have a combination of traits where I found it grating.

Another experience I couldn't relate to was being annoyed with the students. I'm a teacher and have tutored the elderly and taught English classes to Cantonese speakers, and I think it's a ton of fun! But our hero, even with the flexibility choice games afford, is constantly bored of class or daydreaming while others talk.

The cast of other teachers was very memorable, with personalities that felt real to life and enjoyable.

Going to the areas around Japan was fun. In fact, most of the rest of the game was really enjoyable, the only other grating thing is that, playing as a straight man, there were a lot of options to be a kind of horn-dog loser. But fortunately, you can opt out of those.

I'd recommend people just try the first scenes. The humor and writing is very consistent, so if you like it you'll get a lot of it. Despite my complaints, I recognize the technical proficiency in the game.