What’s A Massively Multiplayer Online Visual Novel? Ask Sentou Gakuen

When someone says “Massively Multiplayer Online Visual Novel,” you can’t help but get curious. I saw a press release for Sentou Gakuen, an MMOVN go out this morning and decided to look the game up, since I’d never heard of it before.

Developed by a group of indie developers, PST Team, based in Indonesia, Sentou Gakuen will try to combine features of visual novels and MMORPGs into a single web-browser game. You’re a freshman at Sentou High School, and while there’s a “story mode” consisting of quests, you don’t have to follow the game’s story at all.

Instead you’ll have the freedom to do whatever you like. You can study, cause trouble at school, protect or harass the weak, spend money on your friends, horde it for yourself, form a club, be a delinquent and so on.

Players will have stats, which are affected by various classes. For example, increasing your strength will require attending Physical Education classes. Other stats are Willpower, Energy, Action Points (needed to perform actions), Health etc. If you think you’re going to face trouble, you can equip yourself with weapons like pencils, ball point pens, tweezers, rulers, staplers, scissors, pepper spray and so on. This is supposedly the game’s equivalent of PvP.

There’s different ways to make money, too. Effectively everything you’d expect from an anime-esque story set in school. You can earn money the honest way, or by, say, peeping in on female schoolmates while they change and selling their photos.

Sentou Gakuen will go live on January 1st, 2012. Here’s the game’s official site.

Food for thought:

Interestingly, since PST Team lack the manpower and resources, they say they’re “borrowing” backgrounds from other existing visual novels. These are: Little Busters, Go Go Nippon, G Senjou no Maou, and Da Capo 2. The key point to remember here, though, is that the game doesn’t appear to be a profit-based venture.