It seems like PixelFade really did want it to be important at first, only to lose interest in it with time. Nearly every character introduced is brought in strictly to help this team pull itself together in time to compete in their school. Entire scenes are spent on tactics and strategies, or classes dealing with these machines. What makes this empty pit so much darker is that the first third of the game tries to sell the audience on the idea that these matches are a big deal and worth your attention. It’s like Gargantia on the Verdurous Plane t all over again. Oh the woodland creatures and rainbows that spring from my withered shell of a heart typing that. The game goes out of its way to take any energy this rivalry could have brought to the mix by making it clear that any hostility is strictly one-sided: making the fight more about friendship than the giant robots with friendship winning in the end yet again. The singular attempt to actually create narrative tension happens thanks to Kaori, the resident tsundere. Hell, the story makes zero effort to even pretend that the protagonist and their team could lose or had a challenging opponent. This is largely because there are no strong rivalries of note and, worse, no real stakes to any of the matches that we see. Instead, they seemed absolutely lost in trying to make the GEAR matches important to the overall story. Ace Academy could’ve easily pulled from any of those to learn from and deliver a solid experience. The Mecha genre has one of the greatest lineages in fiction with plenty of good examples for any tone and situation whether they be romance ( Macross Plus ), comedy ( Megas XLR ), mystery ( The Big O ), and yes even high school/slice-of-life ( Robotics Notes ). There is no viable reason why it had to be this way, in my humble opinion. That’s because that side of the story, including the various twist and turns that’s supposed to make up the more ‘dramatic’ storyline of the game, is an absolute dud. The familiar readers will notice that none of the tags in the ‘Genre’ part of the infobar mentioned ‘Action-Adventure’, or ‘Mecha’ or anything having to do with ‘high-octane, giant robot battles’ despite that being one of the major original selling points of this visual novel. However, being the Gundam fan I am, I have to start with what I didn’t like. I will eventually get into what I like about Ace Academy, because there is good here. That is, until he finds a group of pilots just desperate enough for another member. When compared to the sleek, robust, and advanced technologies of the Japanese counterparts, his search feels utterly hopeless. He struggles to find a team willing to accept him and his outdated “American” GEAR to compete in the intramural tournament. Trust me: this is important –ĭue to unforeseeable circumstances, the protagonist finds himself transferring to ACE Academy, a premier school for Cenorobotics studies in Japan. Genre: High-School Slice-Of-Life, Comedy, Dramaįor the purposes of this review, instead of doing my patented summations of the plot I’m just going to link the synopsis as written by the developer. So, I abandoned the goal of following-along with feature reviews and instead started taking notes on the process PixelFade took from Early Access to release with a single goal in mind: review. So, after years of development, how does Ace Academy stack up? Let’s find out together! Originally I fully intended to follow each episodic release on Early Access, but it was around Episode Two that I realized I was going to be repeating myself a lot if I did that. And, to be fair to me, after the first episode I was about as forgiving as I could be while pointing out some fundamental flaws in a way that I hoped PixelFade could use. So when I got a note asking me if I’d consider joining the Early Access beta on Steam, I said yes. Considering my preferred aesthetic, it seemed like it was a perfect fit. Shortly after PixelFade removed Kendo Crush and revamped it under the title of ACE Academy: same basic idea, just set in the future with giant robots. We first crossed paths when it was Kendo Crush two years ago. Ace Academy actually has a long history with VNs Now.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |