Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Instant classic"

Kairosoft burst onto the mobile scene last year with the masterful Game Dev Story, a simulation game featuring the rise of a gaming development studio. Though it's success is attributable to a variety of reasons, most significant of those would have to be the compelling nature of designing your own video games along with the constant pressure to build your development team and to make games which break new sales records. Since the release of Game Dev Story, Kairosoft has also released Hot Springs Story. Though that particular title seemed to lack the compelling nature of the original, and though it used a new set of game mechanics which have carried over to Pocket Academy - namely building super spots - it didn't muster the same magic. Enter Pocket Academy.

For starters, Pocket Academy is another simulation game, but this time you control the fate of a start-up 3-grade Japanese high school. After hiring a teacher, a few students begin to trickle in your your freshly waxed classroom and tiny campus and begin the magical journey of education. Kairosoft's work has always seemed to rely heavily on replay value, as continued plays result in easier unlocks and better starting conditions (in this case, base student statistics), and Pocket Academy is no exception. However, even when you're early in your first playthrough, it's clear that Pocket Academy is superior to the forgettable Hot Springs Story. Is it Game Dev Story caliber? No, probably not - that game might've been a one of a kind. However, Pocket Academy holds its own quite well, and is in its own right an excellent game.

That doesn't mean it's intuitive to get into, however. Pocket Academy throws you into the thick of things with little guidance, which means you'll want to spend some time looking through menus to orient yourself properly. Part of what makes games like this work is the sense that the player can learn, master, and possibly "break" the gameplay designs in order to truly excel. Thankfully, Pocket Academy is a richly complex game that offers oodles of in-game actions to set you on your way.

There are a few basic components, though. First, you need two things to do anything: money and powers. Money is gained mostly from tuition, though some awards and contest prizes can be helpful. That means you always need to stay within your limits or you'll find yourself on your face in no time. Powers are gained from student interactions on campus with each other and with the facilities you've built. These fall into three general categories of writing (with a pencil icon), science (a test tube), and phys. ed. (a sort of ladder). As you play, you'll be able to use these powers in tandem with your funds to research new facilities, run special classes to boost test scores, and create special items which can be useful for a variety of purposes - everything from provoking a student to ask someone out, to raising their base stats.

Though you'll want to build numerous facilities, and certainly teachers are important (and both of which suck up a lot of money), the most critical part of your success is your student body. Test scores are critical to your school's standing - ranking five different subjects - but perhaps even more important are a student's base statistics, including intelligence, athletics, and attitude. Each of these core stats influence how much a student learns on a daily basis, how much they interact with their surroundings, and how they perform in athletic contests. Base statistics, however, can't be taught in class; they must be gleaned from interacting with the school's facilities. Facilities, therefore, are also very important. Just building random facilities won't really cut it, however. As you play, you'll unlock popular "spots" which result from specific combinations of facilities - for instance a library, tennis court, and woods creates a "date spot." These popular spots vastly increase the gained abilities from students making them critical to your school's success.

There are a few downbeats in Pocket Academy, though. Most importantly, funding early in the game is a big problem. For the first two to three years, student tuition doesn't account for nearly enough revenue, especially with high teacher to student ratios. This makes the early hours of the game quite challenging - much more than later stages where the game really flowers given your own predilections. Of course, I've already mentioned the generally non-existent tutorial, which also compounds this problem in the early going. And finally, one of my long-term complaints with Kairosoft's work is that in large part there is only one good way to become successful in each game. In other words, Pocket Academy seems to have a sort of "winning plan" without which you'll settle for mediocre. There isn't the scale of player creativity here that would allow vastly different strategies or differently designed educational institutions to become successful. In part, this is because the game only tracks two accomplishments at the end of play: a cumulative score (which is secretly calculated) and total end-game funds. There are no records for most of a kind of building, or best performance at the soccer tournament, or even best student produced. These oversights do tend to mean that after your second playthough, when you've figured out how to "beat" the game, you'll likely hang it up.

On the whole, however, Pocket Academy is really a great game. Though it doesn't quite match the peerless Game Dev Story for compelling content, it does a remarkable job of investing the player in the success of the school. It's complexity is robust, and it would definitely take a few playthroughs to see all the game has to offer. Though the early years of managing the school can be frustrating, eventually Pocket Academy flowers into a massive simulation that will keep you enthralled for countless hours. Kairosoft has done it again.