The Adventure of Hourai High School

The Adventure of Hourai High School

released on Apr 19, 1996

The Adventure of Hourai High School

released on Apr 19, 1996

You assume the role of a student (whose gender you can choose) still aboard the flight towards the fictional Utsuho Island of Southern Japan, the location of the strangest school of the country: Hourai High School. This huge educational complex, which houses more than one million students and personnel (how is that even possible?), seems to acts as a magnet for weird youngsters and nonsensical events. And you get the privilege of a great start. Indeed, an irritated stewardess decides to send you to your destination via a shortcut... by throwing you out of the plane with a parachute. After a forced landing through a ceiling, here you are, at Hourai High School. The year hasn't started yet and teachers already have you in their sights. You'll get to meet new friends real soon however, particularly the guys behind the school's newspaper "Hourai Sports". You'll even get the chance to take the place of the editor, even though you are the one who sent him to hospital by landing on his head. But the course of your new school year will soon be disrupted by the establishment of extravagantly oppressive school laws, which seem to be manipulated from behind the throne. Some may compare this game to Mother 2, seeing the delirious scenario and modern setting. They wouldn't be entirely wrong, as Hourai Gakuen no Bouken, more than its atypical universe, shares with it classical RPG gameplay and first-person battles. The progression is pretty different, though. It's based on the school campus's map, with each of its parts constituting "villages" of some sort, and to which the player will be required to come back regularly to use the services housed in the main buildings. The limits of the world map will widen as the chapters that lead us through the school year unfold, and more exotic and less "academic" regions will gradually make their apparition.


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Game Review - originally writtenby Spinner 8

This is an RPG. Apparently it’s one of those fabled wacky, or, dare I say it, quirky RPGs. I don’t know much about it, except you attend this school, and you can join clubs, and gain abilities from those clubs, FFV-style. So cool. Yeah.

Dynamite adapted JRPG gameplay to a remote island school setting for The Adventures of Hourai High, whose zany chapters ran the gamut from occult rituals to Santa impersonators. Several genre staples (enemies, status ailments, battle commands, churches, etc.) are framed in a light and parodic manner that almost recalls EarthBound's bizarro-world RPG. Its summon mechanic (leveraging player-invested, battle-earned FP) is unique in performing ally-exclusive techniques rather than AoE spells, but a better case of revision is probably found in their School Clubs, a class change system that allows for up to three 'jobs' (and accompanying skillsets) per unit. Unfortunately, the lack of balance undermines its potential. Despite the options available, combat is far too easy to encourage anything other than basic attacks, a problem further exposed by its high encounter rate, and - in general, a problem that turns goofy charm into button-abuse ad nauseam.

This game is neat conceptually, but it's way too undercooked in every aspect to be anything more than that. Having the class system be school clubs is a really cool idea, but it doesn't matter because I just mashed normal attack and met no resistance at any point. This game is embarrassingly easy.

Who can equip what can feel completely random here, for example I played a female protagonist, fully levelled the kendo club, yet I was never able to equip the wooden sword, but I could equip the fake masamune.

Characters are whatever, they fall under the 'neat conceptually' umbrella, but you're never given anything to really chew on. Each chapter starts by having a problem needing to be solved, which do start with a feeling it could be interesting but always feels flat by the end, even when it get whacky.

I can't recommend this, which is sad because 'RPG set at a high school you would find in a Shonen battle manga' feels criminally underused.

Great concept but ultimately too broken to play. Not just because of the few bugs from the English fan translation hack but the game itself is just a mess. There's no actual benefit to equipping any weapons or equipment, it does nothing to your states. Combat gets repetitive really quickly, with a high encounter rate (but fairly trivial difficulty, I assume a last minute bodge fix on the aforementioned equipment bug) and it's really easy to just completely miss stuff. The class system is a clever idea but a chore in practice. The game is incredibly funny though, which is what makes its utterly broken state so frustrating and disappointing.