Study Steady 2 Review

Years back there was a game called Study § Steady (a.k.a. “Study and Steady”), from a company called Marmalade (“Orange Marmalade”). I’ve always had a soft spot for this studio’s stuff — the early “Primal” series, and later Marshmallow. The vibe they give off is “solid”: no shitposting in the plot, just ordinary school romances with a little heartstring-tugging. Straight-up orthodox work.

But for some reason, with the previous Study § Steady they lost their damn minds and changed the whole production style, pivoting hard into engine R&D. They poured what looks to me like a shitload of effort into a not-particularly-novel Emotion tech, and sacrificed most of the game’s content for it.

So Study § Steady ended up feeling weird as hell. The story was dead simple, the pacing was a bore, and the only bright spot was the “animated heroine sprite” wobbling around like a balloon. But the tech wasn’t mature, so not only did the sprite look stiff and yank you out of the story, the game’s specs were absurdly high — no top-tier PC and you couldn’t hold a stable 30fps. Sure, plenty of people were praising the heroine’s black-tights CGs, and the game had a ton of HCGs, but those HCGs weren’t “animated” at all, which made them a total snooze…

In my book, Study § Steady is a complete failure. The weird part is it still got Fandiscs, and the even more baffling part is it got a sequel… Study § Steady 2!

I did skim the synopsis for this sequel, and if my experience isn’t failing me, this “2” is basically the same route as the first game, just with a different set of heroines.

Since being stuck in a quarantine facility was so goddamn boring, I went and played it anyway. How to put it — compared to the first game, there’s progress, there’s standing still, and there’s regression.

Let’s start with the progress. The game runs noticeably smoother — none of that “a 1070 Ti can’t run it” embarrassment from the predecessor, so at least the team learned to optimize. The heroines are still Emotion sprites, just way smoother now, no constant frame drops, and they’ll even flip you off.

And that’s it for the progress. Now the standing-still part…

The basic systems are still the predecessor’s old set, the character roster and worldbuilding are shared with the first game, and some of its characters show up too. The Emotion work on the characters is smoother than before, but the HCGs still have no Emotion, which I simply cannot understand. The story’s nothing to write home about either — same as before: meet, chat, pick a few retarded options, enter the route, start boning, end.

Only this one seems a lot filthier — loads of dirty-joke gags, which the first game’s pigeon-girl route with Miss Wang didn’t have. That was a proper Christmas confession; if I hadn’t played so many of these games as an old virgin, I might’ve even been a tiny bit moved.

And finally the regression, which is once again the Emotion sprites.

In the previous game the sprites stood “front-facing,” meaning characters could make different expressions, gestures, and body movements, so they felt reasonably expressive. But in this second game, a lot of the poses aren’t even standard — the most egregious is the big-tits Rin character, who’s stuck in a “butt-out” pose the entire time. Sure, Emotion makes her move, and she gets plenty of scene-appropriate outfit changes, but butt-out is butt-out. That pose is the one thing that never changes for the whole game; you can’t even see her head turn to the other side. What the hell is the point of such a dumbass Emotion system? Even animated eroge sprites give characters a bunch of expressions and poses to swap between. Your game is “animated” all right, but the character is locked to one pose — making your animation worse than static art. It’s infuriating and hilarious at the same time.

Study § Steady 2’s release just leaves me more confused. The way I see it, apart from slightly better performance optimization than the first game and slightly better CVs for the new heroines than some of the old ones, it’s almost worse than the first. And even the first game’s many performance complaints got fixed in later patches. Of course, I didn’t think much of the first game either, and this “sequel” that’s even less impressive than the first just confuses me more.

Marmalade isn’t a high-output galgame studio; one game takes them years of holding it in. They clearly lack technical skill and have limited funds, yet they keep banging their heads against this meaningless Emotion tech, sacrificing everything else for the so-called “animated effect” — and the funny part is the HCGs, the part that most needs “animation,” are still static. That “misplaced effort” feeling leaves me deeply puzzled. Was this game actually a big seller or something?

Would it kill them to just make a game like Marshmallow?