(Warning: There’s some slight NSFW imagery in this post)

I have long wanted to talk about Dokyuusei [ 同級生 – classmates ] as I’ve long considered it to be both one of the most important but overlooked eroge titles in all of the sub-set of gaming.

Dokyuusei is a visual novel / adventure simulation produced by Elf. Elf was a long-running game company that had existed for around twenty-seven years when it closed it’s doors. The company created roughly a half-dozen seemingly forgettable visual novel and simulation titles for the PC88 and PC98 until late 1989 when they created what was arguably their break-out hit, Dragon Knight. Dragon Knight played a lot like the typical first-person RPG dungeon crawlers of the time, but with adult elements. It was a modest hit for Elf and spurred three sequels.

Yet the game also showed that visual novels had the potential to be more dynamic than just static visual story books (something that even today they still struggle to surmount). There were little sprinkles of this ideology during that time period, including strategy eroge titles and of course the rather typical eroge puzzler. However often these games still had very set – what I like to call – ‘yes and no’ routes. Aside from the obvious, a ‘yes and no’ route can also be simple flags the game sets based on your actions (ex: for puzzlers, if you don’t win, you get the ‘no’ route). There still lacked some incredibly complex dynamics in how narratives of a visual novel could progress. Yet while the game engine itself doesn’t necessarily dictate that a game can’t have a really good narrative – games such as Fate/Stay and Steins;Gate proved that incorrect – it makes run-of-the-mill visual novels difficult to stand out from others with a need to often rely on gimmicks or meta concepts.

So here enters Dokyuusei.

Dokyuusei came around first on PC98 and DOS in very late 1992. By this time, Elf was at near two dozen titles published – in three year’s time – and had produced three of their Dragon Knight titles alone. Dokyuusei was in a field of change for the entire visual novel gaming subset. While Elf themselves were experimenting with various play types, so too were other companies such as Ganiax (Yes, the anime company Ganiax) with their Princess Maker series. Further not long after these games in ’94 we would get Tokimeki Memorial, which brought visual novel dating sims to the gaming masses where prior they had been relatively niche.

Dokyuusei starts up a lot like most circa visual novels. You wake up in your bedroom (super cliche’), there’s some self dialogue, a phone call, and you start your day. You look around, make your way outside and… you’re immediately left to your own devices. In a visual novel!

Part of how Dokyuusei functions is that whereas a typical visual novel would lead you through a narrative to set various flags, you have to go through the motions of actually setting your character up to get to those narrative points. Its up to you, the player, to determine what you will do with your given time (time steadily ticks away as you play) in a given day. The game starts you on a Sunday – everyone is off of school, so it’s like a tutorial – and allows you to explore some to get your bearings and where you can go.

Hitting locations at particular parts of the day is how you get to meet various characters and build relationships with them. Obviously you’ll attend school with a selection of the cast, but they do things outside of school and there’s chances for you to meet others throughout town. Why am I focusing on this aspect so hard? The game doesn’t give you any visual hints or clues as to where someone will be at.

That’s right; a lot like real life, everything is ultimately up to chance. In your first play thru, you won’t know at what time periods particular characters are doing what activity. You have to learn where both the best time & place to meet a character is and also how to progress their particular story branch. You can solely focus on one character, a handful of characters, or none at all (albeit that’s fairly difficult since you interact with some individuals at school.). Believe it or not, this was all pretty hardcore for a visual novel during this time period. Leaving so much up to the player, well… as we’ve covered it has it’s ups and it’s also has some serious downs.

Despite all of this however there is some narrative at play. You take on the role of Takurou (renamed Wataru in the OVA and remake). The ‘heroine’ is Mai Sakuragi, a stereotypical super-pretty girl of the school. She’s seemingly in a relationship with your rival of sorts Kenji Aihara, who are both kind of in this sphere above you thanks to their wealth and thus Kenji has a one-up on you. When Takurou is not trying to get in Mai’s pants, he has the opportunity instead to woo fellow classmates, local MILFs (seriously; there are local MILFs in his town, as his next door neighbor is a sex-deprived middle-aged woman.), and even befriend an adult sex worker. Just make sure you learn at what times you can meet each characters.

When you converse with characters there is a nice mix of full character sprites and periodic character-specific scenes. Instead of the atypical ‘look’, ‘talk’, sort of choices, your cursor changes depending on where you hover over. Want to speak with a character, you hover over their mouth. Want to attempt to pull up their skirt (the main character is a bit of a horndog), well… it’ll be obvious when you’re given the option. Secondary options such as leaving a scene or progressing into a building are a separate button press and accompanying menu. It all works decently for this game. While the game does support the Shuttle Mouse, I played it using the typical Saturn game pad.

Dokyuusei, a lot like Dragon Knight, was very successful for Elf. By the time the first Sega Saturn port, Dokyuusei If, came along both Dokyussei 2 and a sequel to the entire Dokyuusei franchise titled Kakyuusei (under classmates) was released.

The Saturn ports of the Dokyuusei franchise (these games are all-ages ports) are incredibly good games for the time period, and were handled by NEC InterChannel. Unlike some similar circa Saturn ports however Dokyuusei If would not be the first Dokyuusei port to carry voiced characters. Characters in the first game had been voiced with the PC Engine release of the game, although the Sega Saturn allowed many more lines of dialogue to carry voice over work. Attributing to the first game’s relatively short period of play, the Saturn port of Dokyuusei is only one disc, whereas both Dokyuusei 2 and Kakyuusei were multi-disc releases.

Of note also is for the time period Elf’s visual novels ported to the Sega Saturn were some of the most expensive Saturn titles. Games on the Sega Saturn in Japan would often run you roughly 4,800-5,600 yen. More expensive games typically were those that utilized multi-discs or pressed in much smaller quantities. I personally am a little surprised at how the secondary market has not particularly caught up with the discrepancy of pricing for Japanese titles. For example, Dokyuusei If upon release was 7,600 yen. The game is – believe it or not – the absolute cheapest Saturn import I’ve ever purchased. I paid eighty US cents for it in Japan when I was in Super Potato. That’s right; not even one dollar! (If you didn’t know, westerns get absolutely hosed by resellers on old stuff from Japan). Something like the Japanese release of Magic Knight Rayearth would cost ~$30-$40 US dollars and originally cost 4,800 yen, and something like Wangan Trial Love is going to cost $80-$120 US dollars, whereas when new it cost 6,800 yen. It truly is strange how the secondary market can work, considering that the Japanese release of Rayearth is much more plentiful that Dokyuusei If, the later being released in much lesser quantities.

While I’m seemingly focusing on Dokyuusei and not it’s sequel Kakyuusei, I will say that Elf got steadily better with these games as they went along, and you can further see them attempting to mimic or follow trends of other circa popular titles. Kakyuusei in particular is much more ‘homely’ than it’s Dokyuusei sibling, and like a lot of circa visual novel companies I feel Elf was trying to make something a little more closer to Tokemeki Memorial; a game that remained the defacto standard for simulation visual novel games throughout the 1990s. Myself I do enjoying playing through the Kakyuusei Saturn port, and in terms of how Elf releases go it’s one of the company’s more elaborate efforts.

The Dokyuusei franchise continued to be modestly successful for Elf. Dokyuusei was fortunate in that a lot like earlier visual novels in the 1990s it received an OVA anime, brought over to the US by ADV Films with the title End of Summer – the then-only Dokyuusei/Kakyuusei property released across the pond. Kakyuusei and it’s sequel also received animated series’ and adult-OVAs. However by this time it was difficult for a school-themed visual novel simulation game to stand out. Elf attempted various compilations, re-releases, and other themed visual novels before shutting their doors in 2015, upon which DMM picked up most of the various Elf franchises.

An even stranger legacy left behind by Dokyuusei 2 is it received a Super Famicom port of all things, but it was only available through the Japanese-only Nintendo Power (not to be confused with the magazine) SF Memory cartridge service. Don’t know what that is? In the mid to later 1990s, Nintendo had a service for owners of the Super Famicom similar to the Famicom Disc System that allowed individuals to write games to flash memory on special Super Famicom cartridges at special Nintendo kiosks. This setup is different from the Nintendo Satellaview; the online service Nintendo offered at the time. Similar to the Famicom Disc System, the intention of the Nintendo Power was to allow customers to obtain games without having to buy cartridges; they could simply re-flash their SF Memory cartridge. Many first-party titles were available for the service, and there were roughly a dozen unique third-party games that didn’t see physical retail releases with Dokyuusei 2 being one of them. Conversely an SF Memory cart loaded with Dokyuusei 2 is now exceptionally rare, as Dokyuusei 2 was likely the most mature title in the service (not to mention how odd that a game like Dokyuusei 2 would even be ported to the Super Famicom at all!).

Dokyuusei’s contribution to visual novels has not completely gone unnoticed, with a recent re-make of the first game having come out this year with a planned English ( ! ! ! ) release to come later in 2021. However similarly to how I mused in my recent Sakura Taisen piece, I don’t believe the upcoming English release of the Dokyuusei re-make (‘re-make’ is probably the incorrect term, as it’s more a ‘modernization’ with just the artwork changing) is going to do anything for these sort of games in the US. School-life ‘simulation’ visual novel games are painfully niche’ unless they go meta like Doki Doki Literature Club. Further, Elf somewhat eclipsed Dokyuusei shortly after it’s Saturn ports with the release of the much-heralded YU-NO. On the Saturn alone in a four month time span YU-NO sold an astronomical quarter of a million units; a crazy amount of sales for a ported visual novel. YU-NO recently was re-made for both the Switch and PS4, both of which receive rather mixed reviews by critics. YU-NO was remade under similar auspices to Dokyuusei, leaving most of the original game intact.

My hope for when the English release does come that Dokyuusei will at least be modestly received by critics.