Overview: School Days HQ - Standard Edition (Visual Novel) [NSFW]

Well, well, well.. I bet you didn't expect me to actually own the game now did you? (well except I owned this game for quite a while now, heh). Translated by the now popular Sekai Project (whom are currently working on releasing Clannad and The Grisaia Trilogy in English) and released by visual novel publisher JAST USA. I present to you all - School Days or Nice Boat Days, whatever you like to call it.

Disclaimer - This Visual Novel is an eroge and is only suitable for a very mature audience (meaning only for ages 18 and over). Some of the photos below may contain elements that are Not Safe For Work.

School Days is a Japanese eroge visual novel released back in 2005 and then later received ports to PS2 and DVD (interesting enough it sold really well on those formats despite having to censor the H-scenes, but they added more 'interesting' endings to make up for it). School Days follows your simple slice of life story about our main 'protagonist' who wants to ask someone out and receives help from his classmate in order to achieve his dream, however it eventually turns into a fuckfest, I'm not kidding (well that depends on what choice you make). School Days is rather unique in the visual novel genre as it's actually one of the only few games to use an interactive anime visual style rather than have tons of text to read on-screen, simply put you're basically watching an anime with the ability to choose what move Makoto (the main guy) should do next.

School Days is widely known as a dramatic game with some violent endings, or as a poorly handled anime. Most of the hate for the series is mainly due to the anime itself but to be honest folks, I think it was intentional that they wanted the audience to hate Makoto and have him get with most of the girls in the series (I say most because a few of them aren't actually in the anime) since either way it's promoting the original source material anyway. Overall, just go for the visual novel and ignore the anime if you want a good idea at what School Days is all about.

The version I own is known as School Days HQ. HQ is basically a remaster of the original game with better visuals and some improvements to the game. This version also has some alterations made to the endings. Unlike the Japanese version, the English version of School Days HQ is actually uncensored completely if you like that kind of stuff.

Visual Novel Specs:

Format: PC

Language: English text, Japanese voices

Exclusive: Yes (In English)

DRM: Free

Eroge Content: Yes

PC Requirement Specs:

OS: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1

CPU: Dual Core 2.0GHz

Memory: 1GB

Resolution: 1024x768

Colors: ???

Sound: ???

Graphics: VRAM 64MB

HDD Space: 12GB

DirectX: 9.0c

By the way, there is one thing that some people may find to be a problem with regards to the installation. When you install School Days HQ, you may come across a bug where it will stop at 10409MB. There are two ways to fix this issue, however it depends on what way you get the game. If you downloaded the game, there is a solution available online that provides a patch to this the issue which you can probably easily find by searching for it on google. However if you own a retail version (i.e. disc) like I do, there is in fact a much simpler way to fix this - Just copy the files from the disc to the folder where the installation is trying to place them (Packs I think it's called). You only need to do this with Disc 2 since Disc 1 has no problems whatsoever. You'll figure out what I mean when you notice it.

School Days HQ was released by JAST USA for SRP $39.95 (£27.00) from June 27th 2012.