Sotsugyou: Graduation

Sotsugyou: Graduation is a raising sim in which the player takes on the role of homeroom teacher for a class of final-year female students, with one school year to guide them toward their final exams and toward the future they deserve. It sounds unassuming, but it's actually a surprisingly demanding management game built around a budget of time, fatigue, and moods that all affect one another.

Each week you draw up a schedule: how many hours go to which subjects, how many to sports, club activities, or rest. An overworked student starts losing motivation or falls ill; a neglected one slips in her tests and drags down the whole class's mood. Between blocks of lessons come short scenes and conversations that shape the relationships among the girls, and at the end of the year, accumulated statistics determine where each of them ends up — from university to entirely unexpected paths. It's precisely this number of endings and the need to optimize the game that make it a title built for repeated playthroughs. The system's beauty lies in the fact that the students differ in temperament, and their reactions to the same schedule are not identical; what strengthens one may break another. The player therefore isn't looking for a universal recipe but is learning several different people and adjusting the plan accordingly, sometimes sacrificing one ambition for the sake of another. Feedback arrives after every week, so it's always clear what just went wrong.

On the PC-98, the game looked clean and legible: large character portraits, well-organized statistics tables, and simple but memorable melodies. Sotsugyou became one of the most influential Japanese titles of the first half of the nineties, launching a wave of raising sims, receiving a sequel, console ports, and an anime adaptation, and its DNA can be traced in a whole series of later games where a human fate is assembled out of numbers and a schedule. Today it's a slow game, heavily dependent on tables, but mechanically still elegant and unusually calm.