Boob sliders, customizable characters, and schoolgirl uniforms, oh my!
Hello everyone! I am going to be your new resident ecchi/hentai game expert. Let me just give you a quick run-down of my posting procedure before I begin with the goodies. First of all, I am a minimum-wage-slave college student, so my schedule is pretty tight. I will try to have a review every Sunday or around that time, I will always try to have at least one review done a week at some point unless there’s a test or something.
So what am I doing here? I am going to do my best to review various ecchi/hentai games from just about anywhere. This may include visual novels and eroges down the line, but I am admittedly rather inexperienced in those kinds of media. To start with I will do an assortment of 3D hentai games, like those from the eroge company Illusion based out of Japan. Since I am doing this once-weekly, and Illusion has released some pretty juicy titles, it will probably be a while before I start expanding elsewhere, though I will certainly do my best to try and expand my horizon.
So without further adieu, I present to you my very first ecchi game review of the Illusion game Artificial Academy 2. Many of you may be asking why I am not starting with the first game? One answer is quite simply that there isn’t a big difference between the two. In fact this second game feels a lot more like an expansion set than a wholly different game. Another reason is simply because my opinion of the first game is pretty much identical to this one, save that I think this installment was a great improvement.
The classoom/roster screen where you select your character for the day.
So let’s get right into the key features of this game. Artificial Academy 2 (often referred to as AA2) is an interactive high school simulator with fully customizable characters, everything from hairstyle, breast size, height, and body-type, all the way down to sexuality, quirks, personality, and voice sets. The point of the game is to populate a single classroom of anywhere from one to twenty-five students (all of which you can create from scratch), choose one of the characters to control for that day, and watch as the various antics unfold.
Let’s start with customization. When creating a new character you will be bombarded with various options to make a unique character. Female characters can be especially varied, as they have more options, but male characters are surprisingly well-varied too.
From left: The “Smart”, “Harsh”, and “Joyful” female personalities.
The game not only lets you change the breast size of female characters, but many aspects of the breast as well, including the nipple placement, the shape of the breast, the size of the nipple, and even the softness of the breast as a whole (which typically determines how much they bounce with the built-in jiggle physics engine). You’re given three body heights: short, medium, and tall; and three body types: skinny, normal, and chubby. You can select any eye or hair color you like, and can even customize skin-tones and add tan-lines if you like that sort of thing. The eye customization is pretty intense too, giving lots of options for shape, placement and size. You pretty much have everything you need to make your dream girl… and then some more dream girls… and then some more. The game has well over 20 female personalities to choose from, all of which are clear representations of many different kinds of anime personality tropes. You have the typical tsundere, the typical kuudere, the mature teacher/school nurse personality, even a more manly personality.
From left: The “Gentle”, “Savage”, and “Otaku” male personalities.
The male customization is much less expansive, but still rather impressive. Instead of mixing and matching height with body type, you just choose from four options: delicate (which is more feminine-like), normal, tall, and fat (which is also tall). You can’t change your eye shape as much as the females, but you can have any hairstyle you want, including the options given to females. Once again you have all the color options. When it comes to personality, you don’t have much, only about five different ones (more if you get extra DLC). You have the typical energetic always positive personality; the quiet, blunt, and deep-voiced personality, the typical otaku nerd guy, a violent and dark brooding guy, and basically a shota boy personality (also high-pitched enough to be a very feminine boy, if you like that stuff).
A classroom full of students.
Now that you have created your dream class full of students, it’s time to start actually playing the game. The important thing to know is that this game has no plot, no story, no linear movement at all. It’s basically a Japanese-school themed Sims game with sex. You basically just watch what happens and see how relationships unfold. The game has a pretty complex and deep AI and conversation system that is fairly impressive. The characters in the class will interact with each other just as much as they will interact with the character you’ve chosen to control, and relationships between those characters will blossom all around you without any input from you at all.
A typical conversation.
It should be noted that this game requires patience to play legitimately. Don’t expect to be going right into a sex scene on your first day of class; this game makes you work for your sex. Once you get the ball rolling and get a decent relationship with someone sex becomes quite frequent. Another thing worthy of note (and one of the reasons this game is so great in my opinion) is that it doesn’t discriminate based on sexuality. You can play as a girl and have a relationship with another girl, you can even be a boy and fawn over another boy (the latter won’t have any sex scenes associated with it though). As long as your sexualities match up (chosen at character creation) then you can do it. This allows for some pretty diverse possibilities for relationships that crop up in your classroom over time.
Bow-chika-wow-wow
So now the juicy bits: the sex scenes. The sex scenes in this game are actually uncharacteristically simple for an Illusion game. Illusion games typically have very difficult sex scenes that are confusing to control and clunky, and this game by contrast is very simple: just click on the position you want from the menu, and watch the characters go. Click on the orgasm options to make them cum when you’re finished. My guess is the reason the sex scenes are so simple and easy compared to others in the series is simply because of how difficult it is to finally get a sex scene. In the other illusion titles the sex scene IS the gameplay, so it has to have some difficulty associated with it.
The characters in this game can be really cute sometimes.
So what do I think of the game? I think it’s fantastic. It’s my favorite of the Illusion games. To me there are so many things that the company could have done wrong when they made this game, and they did almost none of those things. Even without the sexy stuff the game still manages to be interesting if only for the social simulation and AI aspects alone. You could play this game legitimately even without the sex scenes (they can be turned off via an in-game option) and still enjoy it, especially if you like Sims games and other life-simulators.
One thing I will try to do with each review is give a brief paragraph detailing how each game I play could have been better. Maybe content that was missed out on that could have elevated my opinion of it. To be clear, these are just my opinions and just things that would have made them more enjoyable to me. There is very little to talk about when it comes to this game, as it is a pretty solid game. I have a few hang-ups with it, one being the lack of male customization compared to female. At the very least more personalities for male characters would be appreciated. Another nice idea would be to allow male characters to use female clothing, for people who like the whole trap concept. In fact allowing a third “futanari” option to gender would have been nice, though I can understand the complications of doing such a thing.
All in all, I give this game 9.5 out of 10. The content I have described here is only the tip of the iceberg, and I don’t want to ramble on for too long. One thing I need to make clear, I will not provide links to the download sites for most of the games I review, this is for two reasons: I can’t be arsed to go and hunt down each and every one of them, and secondly I don’t want to get this site in trouble for posting torrent links to pirated material. If you want to find the game, a simple google search can suffice to find your preferred download method. Thanks for bearing with me and I will see you next weekend.
