Hakoniwa no Gakuen (箱庭の学園) Review

Generally speaking, Japanese doujin games come in all shapes and sizes, but apart from the ones with no story that you just play, most of the story-driven ones are short, have mediocre artists, so-so music, and amateur voice acting. Story is usually the only thing they can win on, since it’s relatively easy to throw together. Good artists, good voice actors, and good composers don’t exactly grow on trees.

Put simply, most doujin game circles don’t have much money, so they can only afford small-scale projects. If they actually had cash, they’d just set up a proper company and sell real games instead of operating as some awkward in-between doujin circle.

But there are exceptions to everything. I’ve played some genuinely impressive doujin games, and even doujin galge can be surprisingly luxurious—like Unmanto’s Hakoniwa no Gakuen.

First off, the character art for Hakoniwa no Gakuen is by Kuwabara Riko. That alone is enough to sell it, and on top of that there’s an absurdly stacked voice cast: Hidaka Rina, Tokui Sora, Kakihara Tetsuya, Numakura Manami…

Everything’s in place—all it needs is a halfway decent script and this game could stand alongside proper company releases. But… reality is cruel, and the story ruins the whole thing.

The game isn’t long, but it has plenty of branches, though the overall plot direction stays the same. It’s about a protagonist attending a closed school deep in the mountains. The school has seven mysteries, and on the eve of the school festival these legends start coming true. On the second day of the festival, a large number of students go missing or die, and these incidents are all tied to the seven mysteries.

So before this year’s festival arrives, the protagonist inexplicably passes out and wakes up to find the campus almost completely deserted, with only a few main characters left. His friend Orimoto Itsuki suggests it might be connected to the school’s “seven mysteries,” so the group starts investigating what appears to be an empty school.

During the investigation, the protagonist’s childhood friend Sakura Ayana begins to grow emotionally unstable. A mysterious girl named Shibatani Sei also shows up and starts acting bizarrely, having crazy outbursts. Meanwhile, Koto Rio, who claims she’s about to enroll, stays calm, and Orimoto Itsuki keeps watching Koto Rio with suspicion.

Eventually, when they investigate the principal’s office, Orimoto Itsuki suddenly locks the protagonist and the others up and tells them they’ve “forgotten things they once remembered.” Through a series of flashbacks, the protagonist and Sakura Ayana recall their past: Sakura Ayana killed her own parents, and the protagonist knew about it but forgot. Then Orimoto Itsuki’s voice tells them to go to the school pond and reveal the truth to everyone.

When they get there, Orimoto Itsuki is confronting Koto Rio. After some back-and-forth, the truth comes out: the whole school is basically a lab rat facility. Koto Rio’s mother was researching a drug that controls people’s minds and memories. Since drugs need test subjects, they built this school and used students as experiments. The drug works, but it has side effects—memories keep resurfacing, or people become unstable and lose control. For the failed subjects who react badly, the school quietly disposes of them and slaps the label “school mystery” on it, usually before the school festival.

Sakura Ayana was drugged and sent to this school after killing her parents, and Shibatani Sei went through the same thing. In the principal’s office they find a student roster with red boxes around certain names—those are the school’s test subjects.

Koto Rio and Orimoto Itsuki aren’t test subjects. The former’s parents were involved in the drug’s development, so she was never exposed; the latter’s parents were killed by the drug experiments, so he infiltrated the school for revenge.

After some more bullshit, the protagonist escapes the school with Sakura Ayana, leaving Koto Rio and Orimoto Itsuki to kill each other as atonement. Game END. There are probably multiple ENDs, and a Happy END isn’t out of the question.

But I really don’t want to keep playing. The story is just too damn silly.

Maybe because of the small file size and short length, the early pacing is a total rollercoaster, and in the middle every character starts going crazy for no reason, leaving you completely lost. Then when the truth finally comes out it’s overly violent—one flashback sequence and it’s over. There are plenty of CGs and the art style is nice, but they skip illustrations at the key moments. Like why is there no CG of Tokui Sora’s character dying?

Ah, honestly this game feels like Kuwabara Riko personally pulled in a bunch of friends to help make it—people from Lump of Sugar, and her beloved Tokui Sora’s Yazawa Nico (same voice here, by the way). The voice actors are all big names, the artist is a big name, the music is passable, and the game even has separate OP and ED tracks.

It’s just that the story is too stiff and too silly. It’s fine for a quick play, and at least it’s short—even if you end up feeling ripped off, it won’t waste much of your time.