Study§Steady (スタディ§ステディ) Review

My name is “Miss Wang.” Sex: male.

Don’t get the wrong idea. Wang is my surname, “Miss” is my given name, Miss Wang is what I’m called, and I am indeed a man.

Originally I should’ve been lurking around Jiangsu and Zhejiang, but a love triangle with Pigeon Girl and the lady teacher left me so wrecked I decided to take an impromptu trip. I headed north, to a snow-covered place, and was told I’d be going to school here.

I have no friends. I only have my “Koogle.” Koogle is my phone’s voice assistant, and I talk to her like an idiot on the regular.

This godforsaken freezing hellhole, and I have to live here? Absolutely ridiculous.

Good thing I’m not alone here — I’ve got a shot at meeting several girls.

There’s a white-haired rich girl working part-time at Lawson, a black-long-straight-hair, black-tights, quietly-horny senpai, a tiny little seamstress girl, and a hyperthyroid girl who wants to be a vet.

And miraculously, all four of them develop a keen interest in me at the same time. I have to wonder if this school is actually a girls’ school, or if every other guy here is just tragically under-endowed.

Naturally I’m still a virgin. I’d always figured nobody loved me, so suddenly being surrounded by four girls left me kinda lost. Through some twist of fate, I followed my heart and tipped the scales toward the shortest one — the seamstress girl.

Because the seamstress looks so young, sometimes she reminds me of Pigeon Girl, my old true love. We rowed a boat out to the sea to feed the seagulls, and in that moment I hallucinated — I saw the seagulls as pigeons. Watching her silhouette, it gradually morphed into the shape of Pigeon Girl, and my chest gave a throb.

The romance between me and the seamstress girl sprouted very suddenly. Suddenly she wants to cook for me. Suddenly she’s hinting at a date. Suddenly she’s giving me a Christmas present.

And suddenly — boom, it’s fucking Christmas, and somehow I find her under a Christmas tree.

Honestly I’d forgotten I even promised to come here, and I was late too. But she just said “Being late is nice too.”

God, where in the world do you find a bigger doofus than this doofus? I was genuinely touched.

Then she gives me a scarf and passionately confesses her love.

“Ahh~”

I was a bit stunned, not really sure what kind of confession this was.

“Actually I’ve always thought of you as a little sister… but since you’ve gone and said it, I guess I’ll reluctantly agree to go out with you.”

I responded to the seamstress girl’s confession very seriously, and just like that, we were dating.

As a virgin, I’d finally escaped singledom for the first time — way better than some loser who posts horny tweets every day claiming to be a sex master but hasn’t touched a girl’s hand.

Little did I know this was the beginning of a nightmare.

Soon I discovered that this seamstress girl, despite constantly claiming she’s “dating for the first time” and doesn’t understand “love,” actually knows way more than I do.

After a few dates, she starts hinting we should go fuck, and the first time we did it several rounds.

Her desires only grew stronger from there. Every time she’d drag me to different positions, different outfits, different poses, different numbers of rounds — sometimes I felt like she was about to wring me dry.

And the seamstress girl shows almost no sign of letting up. My dick is constantly working overtime, practically no days off.

Who knows how long this life would go on. And so the seamstress girl and I fell into the rhythm of life together, embarking on our long, wet, salty journey.

(Miss Wang’s Love Story — End)

Afterword:

Study § Steady is Mamareido’s new title from 2019. I’ve actually got a soft spot for Mamareido — after all, Ouchi ni Kaeru Made ga Mashimaro desu (お家に帰るまでがましまろです) was pretty warm and cozy to play. This game also has a lot of shadows of the company’s earlier works, which made me more interested. When this new title came out this year I had no time to play it, and I just saw a bunch of people on X hyping it to the heavens… but nobody ever said what was good about it. The only thing I could confirm was:

This game’s HCGs are probably very usable.

When I finally had time to actually play it, it hit me — I realized what this game actually is.

Study § Steady is different from all previous Mamareido games. It abandons “telling a story” and becomes purely a “romance simulation.” Meaning this game has basically no plot — you just play the male protagonist, meet different girls and get to know them, then date and fuck. That’s it. And Mamareido isn’t SMEE either; they can’t write comedy bits, so all you see in the dialogue is the heroine throwing herself at the protagonist from every conceivable angle, while the protagonist acts like a dense idiot. This makes people with actual experience (like Miss Wang and Xu Zijin) watch it and feel very annoyed — very unrealistic. But for otaku who can’t get a girl themselves yet delusionally believe they can land a pretty one, it’s probably excellent feed.

Overall the game is very short. A very short common route where you meet the four girls, some choices to decide who you’ll pursue, then the standard confession, and after the confession it’s just a dense bombardment of HCGs. A lot of people say this game’s HCGs are highly practical, but that’s exactly what I want to complain about.

This game’s HCGs have no sincerity at all!

Study § Steady uses Emote technology, and to make all the heroines move, they made the Emote so resource-hungry that without a beefy computer, the heroines look “laggy” to you. Some Japanese players said you need a 1060 just to barely run it smoothly — I don’t have a machine that good so I gave up. Eventually the developer was forced to release an update patch to fix the game’s “excessive hardware requirements” issue. From what I saw, the patch basically cut a lot of the heroines’ “little movements” and replaced them with fade-ins/fade-outs to reduce GPU load, so it’s barely playable. But if you went to all this trouble to make the heroines move, to put in Emote…

Then why don’t the HCGs use Emote?

I’ve seen plenty of games where the heroine is static normally and becomes animated during HCGs — practicality skyrockets. But this game does the opposite. And then you tell me the HCGs are practical? Even if you say the art style in the HCGs is drawn well enough to be practical, as a “flagship annual title” whose whole selling point is Emote, isn’t this kind of favoritism completely wrong? It really feels like they picked up the sesame seed and dropped the watermelon.

Meanwhile the game, touting its “romance” feel, also pushes the concept of “Steady Girl” — a “fixed girlfriend” — meaning the protagonist makes his choice and it’s just the two of them, no harem route.

But the choices in this game are genuinely stupid. There aren’t many, but most of them feel like they were written by someone with a critical deficiency in emotional intelligence.

For example, the heroine confesses to you, hands you a love letter, and asks whether you’ll read it or not…

For example, the heroine is moving cargo and looks like she’s struggling, and asks whether you’ll help or not?

For example, the heroine falls down, you see her, she sees you, and asks whether you’ll help her up or not?

Holy shit, what the fuck kind of choices are these? What level of brain damage do you need to pick the wrong one? Even if you don’t want to bang that girl, a normal person would help someone out, right?

Anyway, in Study § Steady I feel like the developer probably put 90% of their effort into how to do Emote — fair enough, it’s Mamareido’s first time doing this effect — but whether it was worth it really fills me with doubt. Never mind the massive hardware demands (a porn game demanding a 1060), the shrinking content also makes this game feel full of “not worth it.” The game’s very name is arguably a ripoff too — go search it, there was a 2004 romance game with the same name, just missing one symbol.

Oh right, since Mamareido wants to do simulation, my suggestion is either learn from SMEE and enrich the protagonist-heroine dialogue, or learn from Purely Cation and add a real simulation system — and while you’re at it, draw the girls prettier instead of more pornographic.

As someone who’s been around, I can tell you: in a two-person world, sex is indispensable, but it’s also fleeting. What really makes you fall in love with someone, and be willing to give everything for her, isn’t the look on her face at orgasm — it’s that slightly awkward smile when she sees you show up in front of her.

Of course, in Miss Wang’s love story, none of that exists.