Will you fall in love with PlayStation VR?
So, PlayStation VR came out last week and one of the big launch titles is Summer Lesson, made by Team Tekken and Bandai Namco. Summer Lesson originated as an early tech-demo for the PlayStation VR itself, but got so much positive feedback from the Japanese audience, that it ended up as this retail product, which is billed as a series of small, personal experiences, that in many ways are different from anything else that we've seen so far in VR.
The full title the initial release is Summer Lesson: Hikari Miyamoto Seven Days Room. It's the last week of the summer vacation and because Hikari's grades have dropped, it's your job as a teacher to try and get her grades back up again, in mere seven days.
You start your day at a café, where you plan out what work you want her to do during the day and then you go to her house and watch over her as she studies in the chosen subject, which seems to range from normal book stuff to stacking cards or solving magic puzzles. You can even make her practice her drawing skills, which doesn't really seem to improve all that much throughout the game, but regardless of the chosen lesson, you get three different prompts to try and encourage her. One of the options is incorrect, another one is correct and the final one is super correct and if you end up picking that one, you get a little bonus animation and an extra boost to her stats by the end of the day.
After the studies are over, you get a chance to ask her a question about herself, which can be stuff like ”What music do you like?” or ”Did you do anything cool with your friends recently?”. Now, I don't really know any Japanese, but I did pick up that she likes softball and sharks. She has pictures of sharks, she has a shark calendar, there's shark plushies strewn about her room and one of her alternate outfits even has a cute shark on it.
Sometimes you might also trigger a random event at the end of the day, where she announces that you have some extra time and asks if you want to do something. This can range from listening to music together to doing light stretching exercises.
When you come back to the café at the end of the day, you are presented with a results screen. Here you can see your stat growth, depending on the choice you made during study time. If you chose incorrectly, her motivation will go down and if you answered super correctly, you'll get the aforementioned stat boost. Depending on what personal question you asked her, you will also receive a number of cards. During planning of the next day, you can use these cards to further boost her stats. I think there might be some kind of correlation between the cards and the various study fields, but I haven't quite been able to figure it out yet. For each time you choose a subject field, you'll also increase the rank of it and the ranks carry over between multiple playthroughs, so while you might only end at a C rank after your first playthrough, you can grind you way to an A or an S grade by playing through the game multiple times. Your grade will also allow you to unlock new outfits for Hikari, mixing up the visuals of the game ever so slightly.
These kinds of rearing and teaching simulations aren't really anything new in Japan. They've made plenty of them over the years and over the last decade Idolm@ster is probably one of the biggest games in the genre. These games are all about trying to make the player feel some sort of emotional attachment to the character, which is still something that is relatively new to Western gaming, at least in this capacity. The closest analogue is probably Dragon Age, where you spend hours chatting up characters until you ultimately get to bang them and while Japanese games, especially on the PC in the 90's, were all about that, a lot of them have gone a step further and isn't as much about sexual relations as it is about falling in love.
Will Summer Lesson make you fall in love? Probably not. I don't think a handful of canned animations and lines of dialogue will make anyone fall in love, but there is some impressive tech going on: Hikari will tilt her head and shift her body naturally to face you, even as you move about in your seat. Of course the most novel thing about this game is that it's in virtual reality and it might not be apparent from screenshots or footage, but it feels like she's standing really close to you at all times. This is obviously something that you cannot replicate on a 2D screen, which probably is why we are seeing so much of it in the initial batch of PlayStation VR games, which includes games where you are being really close to a spooky man, a bald man and a Batman and while that is cool and all, this is the only game that tries to make it a pleasant experience. This is why I think Summer Lesson is worth checking out.
At just under 3000 yen, it's a little pricey for what you get, but that seems to be par for the course of Virtual Reality games, which I suppose makes sense since it is new tech and all.
Namco Bandai has already announced further scenarios, like one where you are outside, one where she serves you food and drinks at a café and one where you are watching fireworks together at a summer festival. An Asian release with English subtitles has also been announced for early 2017, so if you don't know any Japanese and want the full experience, it might be worth holding out for that.
Summer Lesson is hardly the ”killer app” that VR has been waiting for, but it is a unique and interesting experience in the sea of pong clones and horror games that make up the brunt of VR gaming right now.