Ok, so, I like this idea. In theory. I have to say, I was hooked at the start and the early game was pretty good. The worst class in the Norvux Academy has a new teacher, Mr. Sensei (the "very clever" name I gave the player character) and while the game doesn't really seem to have a specific goal, I was ready to transform a class of rejects into the schools pride and joy.
However, that all fell apart a few days after a few days when I discovered that nothing really seems to matter that much and the only option that seemed to somewhat work was pick two favorite subjects and keep repeating lectures over and over. The game also doesn't have a very good tutorial, you know what you CAN do, but you don't know what you SHOULD be doing and when.
The normal day starts in Homeroom, where you can talk to students and get some bonus Affection score with the students by talking to them and selecting the right answers. This is a nice idea, however, their dialogue stays the same with each day.
Leo always wants to know who owns that sports car in the parking lot, despite Mr. Sensei telling him that it's his literally every day. That boy really has a terrible long-term memory. But he's not the only one. Each day, some other student asks Mr. Sensei if he likes fishing. Each day, the student with crutches panics because he tripped over the principal (at this point, he HAS to be doing it on purpose). It gets old pretty fast, yet you still do it because you can raise your Affection levels with the characters that way. It might have been better to take out the relationship points from talking to the characters in the homeroom from the game jam version atleast. You could atleast ignore it then.
So, as I said, when you actually start a class, you can either give the students a Lecture in one subject, which somewhat increases their skill in that subject, you can give them a test, which if they succeed gives you some faculty XP per successful student. You can also Cram to temporarily boost one students skill in one subject (everyone else is apparently exiled from the classroom while the cramming sessions goes on). It might be better to have the Cram action affect everyone, it seems like something you should do before you give the students a test.
The problem is, you basically have to do lectures for weeks before the students have even a chance to pass the lowest difficulty quiz and that's even when you focus on two subjects. And despite being within the required skill levels for the easiest test level, all of them but one still fail, resulting in negligible XP.
Then there's Lunch, where you can buy food to give to students to recharge their energy and get some Affection points with them. Basically, you see who's the lowest at energy and affection and buy them food.
Afterwards, it's just a constant lecture after lecture while buying food to students. Each day, it was Math and Language, always. Yet after 2 weeks of that, they still failed both tests when I tried them. When I tried the Language, only one passed the test, despite it having a 20-60 skill rate required for success and all of them being well over 20 in skill, with Leo being over 60. When I tried Math, everyone failed. They all had well over 20 Math skill. Proxima had around 70, but she failed, because she filled the test with joke answers, despite having 100 Affection with Mr. Sensei. Maybe she needs a higher Affection Level to stop doing that, I don't know, but I figured that she'd actually try to do good in the one subject she presumably cares about.
This game could really use a tutorial that tells you what to do and maybe even more complexity. The goal is also unclear. I assume that it's to transform Mr. Sensei's class from the worst class of Norvux Academy to the elite of the school, but the game doesn't really say that. Or maybe you are just supposed to make sure they pass the final exams. But then there's that Cram action, that only affects 1 student. Maybe it's to help someone who falls behind, but it doesn't help much. Am I supposed to also have one favorite student who knows everything so that he/she can compete with and maybe even supplant the Student Council President later on? Everyone seems to hate her. Or am I supposed to get to the max Faculty Level?
I've restarted this game a few times, trying different things, and still I don't feel like I'm making any progress. These kids are just doomed to be dumb for the rest of their lives. Maybe Mr. Sensei is just a terrible teacher. Or maybe it's the student's fault.
Mr. Sensei really gives his all to these kids. He spends literally all of his salary on books to study so that he can teach them new things. He also buys them food every day, because they don't have money to buy their own apparently. He hangs out with them at weekends, even though he surely has better things to do, like grade tests, essays and prepare lectures. He puts up with their terrible memory and being asked the same questions every day.
He eventually had to sell his sweet sports car, subsists on a diet of bread and water and sleeps in his office because he couldn't afford this months rent. Yet those damn brats still don't appreciate what he's doing for them and keep failing or not even trying.
Maybe this story is actually supposed to be a clever commentary on the school system, I don't know. It's certainly a tragic tale :D