Character Focus: The Blank Objection

[89157Z]

I think one of the problems of Academagia is that it's afraid to give a characterization to the player. It's supposed to be totally open-ended, but that... doesn't quite work. The random events suffer from this somewhat. They're full of artifacts and it's fairly common to get events that make you go, "What? That doesn't fit me." The adventures suffer from this most of all. They're not connected to one another. There's no sense of them all making sense for one character.

 

Something that would have been really cool is if the game had... character content packs. Mods, essentially, that cause the game to 'tighten up' on a specific character arc. I've complained in the past and struggled with the mod tools to remove content that shouldn't have been in the game. I've also struggled to remove content that should have been in the game, but should have been optional, toggleable. Academagia is not as modular as it should be. Nor is it as moddable. It packs all the content into its basic setup.

 

The result is scattered and unfocused. You end up with characters who have a huge skill list and little sense of personality. It's just so tempting to systematically work on skills. At best, diversions from that become their own monomania - accumulating absurd amounts of glory, or befriending everyone in the school. I can't count the number of times I've gone out of my way to raise the War skill to 2 for that easy Insight boost...