news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

Among the numerous domestic games last year, "Gakuen Conceptionists" was considered a dark horse.

The low-polygon graphics may make it look less eye-catching, but many creative mechanisms still help it create a Chinese-style campus management experience that is different from traditional simulation construction games and is down-to-earth enough.

Precisely because it is unique enough, "Gakuen Conceptionists" has made it into the top 20 of the annual domestic game sales list despite not having too much publicity and a small amount of content.

After a year, it finally officially launched the NS version. For players who have not yet come into contact with it, this is undoubtedly a good opportunity to play "Gakuen Conceptionist" - after all, a simulation game with a relatively slow pace like this can be said to complement the NS.

And if you are already an old player of "Gakuen Conceptionists", perhaps this is also an opportunity for you to get to know it again, because within a year after its release, many updates launched for this game have made significant changes to the entire gaming experience.

The war over the origin of the people has died down

Let us first recall "Gakuen Conceptionist": it is essentially a school management game like "Two Point School" or Cairo Games' "Pocket Academy Story", but its construction system is much more playable than the above two.

Because you can not only freely adjust the size and shape of each classroom, but also easily build multi-story buildings, and choose to build stairs from the inside or outside, and then build a magnificent and exquisite roof. Small facilities such as central air conditioning, vending machines, sweeping robots, or various decorations are all available in the game, leaving you ample room for creativity.

However, at the beginning, you still have to start from the ruins with nothing, and gradually develop and expand the school by establishing classes and building supporting facilities, so as to recruit more and better students, train them into talents and win reputation for the school.

This must first mention the unique "student source" system of "Gakuen Conceptionist". At first, only those forgetful children from the small village next door were willing to come to your school to be close to home. They couldn't afford the tuition, there were not many of them, and the volunteers they applied for were all third-rate colleges.

Therefore, if you want to seek better development, you must go to other places where students come from and compete with famous schools to recruit those children with better family conditions and more potential to your school.

Therefore, we used the term "inter-school war for students" in the first version of the review of "Gakuen Conceptionists" - in order to obtain more talent resources, it was common to invest money in student sources, even to the point of snatching away all the students and causing other schools to close down one after another.

But what is surprising is that "Gakuen Conceptionist" adjusted the investment-related mechanisms in subsequent updates, making it less easy to spend money now.

Your investment is no longer directly linked to the favorability of the students' place of origin, but can only be achieved by spending a large number of subject points to slightly improve the children's initial attributes, or by injecting a huge sum of money to directly invest in increasing the students' wealth and persuading them to apply for better majors.

This may be because the production team wanted to make the schools more "peaceful", but if they only changed this mechanism without adjusting other related values, it would cause a series of chain reactions.

Since the method of increasing favorability through investment is almost useless, you can only increase the favorability of your place of origin by successfully training students. However, in intermediate or higher places of origin, every year, at the default "normal" difficulty, the favorability you increase will be easily offset by the investment of other schools.

For places like "Theater District", under the premise of my 100% graduation rate every year, the favorability has not improved after five or six years - because you can only recruit 3 people from the place, and the overall growth is very limited. For some high-level places that are rich enough not to invest, you can recruit even fewer students.

Therefore, just for those one or two senior students, you have to build senior facilities and hire senior teachers for them... If you are not specifically aiming for the victory goal of "cultivating five-star graduates", then spending this huge amount of money is simply not worth it for you. This also makes the later experience of "Gakuen Conceptionist" a little unreasonable now.

Fortunately, this new mechanism still leaves you with some means of compensation, because you can now invest in low-level student sources to develop them into high-level student sources with larger populations and easier access to students.

But the problem remains: the investment cost is too high, so high that it may have to be cut in half to make it reasonable for me. And when changing your preferences, you are not completely free to decide, you can only choose one of the two or three predetermined options. In other words, if you want the "Longmen Village" children who are weak in liberal arts to give up liberal arts and choose other types of majors, it is impossible, because the predetermined options do not provide you with this possibility. This is undoubtedly frustrating.

Other new changes

In addition, the update that has the greatest impact on "Gakuen Conceptionists" is the club system.

It allows you to establish a light music club and a basketball club, and by organizing students to play games, the club's ranking will rise, from the first in the district, the first in the city, and finally the first in the province. At this time, you can also complete a new victory goal in the game - club victory.

It is not easy to beat other schools in the competition, because club members graduate and leave every year, which greatly reduces the strength of the club that was originally accumulated through hard training. And when it becomes more difficult to obtain students from the source area, it is also difficult to gather enough top students in art or sports to create an invincible club.

Therefore, club victory may be one of the most difficult goals to achieve in "Gakuen Conceptionist". It is not suitable as your primary goal when starting a new game, because if you only focus on elite students such as art students and sports students, and ignore the large number of basic students nearby, then the school's funds will soon be insufficient to make ends meet, making it difficult to make any progress in recruiting students. Fortunately, this system is relatively independent. Even if you do not establish clubs and manage their student union organizations, it will not affect your completion of the other three victory goals.

But what surprised me the most was that when you organize student activities for the Light Music Club, you can also enter a manual music notation interface and freely compose music with vocals, guitar, bass, piano, drums and other instruments. Although you can only compose a few bars for each song, the composed songs can not only be played during performances and practice, but can also be manually set as school songs or bells for classes.

The most distinctive organizational management system in "Gakuen Conceptionist" has also been optimized. Not only has the speed of opening and the fluency of operation been improved, but the management organizations under the principal's office will also automatically store other facilities under them, making the entire organizational chart look more refreshing. The student union organization mentioned above can also assist in managing the clubs on behalf of teachers, slightly reducing the management burden for you.

It is worth mentioning that "School Conceptionist" now has various "seasonal activities" that rotate every year. Every time a new semester begins, you can choose one of the festivals such as Halloween, Mid-Autumn Festival, Christmas, etc. as the theme of this semester. During this period, not only will new furniture and facilities be opened, but students will also come to school in festive costumes, making your school look more festive. And if you don't like those fancy festivals, you can also choose to directly hold activities such as study week and hygiene day to let students focus on school affairs.

Pros and cons of the NS version

When Gakuen Dreamers was first released, it didn't support controllers, and it wasn't until around April this year that it was updated to support controller operations. This is not an easy task, because Gakuen Dreamers has many and complex operation buttons, and was designed almost entirely for keyboard and mouse.

Therefore, whether you use Joy-con or NS Pro controller on NS, the operating efficiency of playing "Gakuen Dreamers" may be lower than that of keyboard and mouse. However, after gradually getting used to the key positions, the gaming experience of the controller is still quite satisfactory - the function wheel opened by the two shoulder buttons still adds a lot of convenience to the operation.

However, when precise clicks are required, using a joystick to simulate mouse operations may still make people feel inadequate. For example, when an earthquake occurs, you still need to switch floors up and down within a limited time and click on students' help bubbles, which may seem a bit limited for the handle.

Obviously, Gakuen Conceptionists has considered this issue, because compared with the PC version, the NS version has almost deleted all bubble events such as picking up stray cats and student fights that require precise clicks, and it has also borne a considerable price for this - after all, they are still relatively interesting gameplay. But this simplification does not seem to be complete. In addition to the earthquake mentioned above and the entire contraband system, the initial task of dismantling a wasp nest that requires precise clicks has also been retained.

In general, the experience of playing "Gakuen Conceptionist" in handheld mode may not be as good as that on PC, because its fonts are too small on the NS screen, and many contents almost require people to put their faces in front of the screen to see them clearly. Considering the usage environment of NS, this situation is still acceptable, but if you have the conditions, it is better to plug in the dock and connect it to a screen.

However, there are some advantages to playing "Gakuen Conceptionist" on the NS handheld. For example, it is more convenient to make money by hanging up. You can put down the NS in two operations and look up at the computer screen to do other things, so that you can do both. If you are tired of playing, you can just press the lock screen button and throw the NS aside without having to think about saving the game.

Overall

In the year since its release, "Gakuen Conceptionist" has launched many impressive updates. For example, the adjustment of the student origin system has made investment and growth the mainstream in the current version, and also given those early student origins a chance to counterattack. The addition of the club and activity system has also added a lot of new content to the game. However, the overall experience of the NS version can only be said to have advantages and disadvantages compared to the PC version.