Kango Shicyauzo Review

Contributed by J. Sarunski aka Unicorn

Story:
The player takes the role of a brand-new doctor at an hospital. His foster mother teaches nurses at a nursing school, that belongs to the hospital. Because of a shortage of teachers, she could arrange that he has to help out as a teacher at the school instead of working as a doctor in the hospital, much against his wishes. The story tells several more or less funny events, that occur during the time, he stays at the school, teaching young girls to become nurses.

Gameplay:
Once again, nothing special: During the story, sometimes a decision beteween two or three choices has to be made and the story continues according to that decision.

Sound:
This game has a CD-DA-soundtrack consisting of the title song ("Nursing Samba") and 15 different themes, expressing the mood of the current scene. However, the characters have no voice-acting (and this is strange, because, I thought, voice-acting has become state-of-the-art some years ago, but the original of this game has been released in japan in the first half of the last year (04/2001)).

Graphics:
The quality of graphics in this game is also on a similar level as in the well known PeaPri-games "Tokimeki CheckIn" and "Snow Drop" (maybe a little bit lower, but not much). Again, the usual two kinds of graphics are used: Backgrounds on which graphics of the currently talking charcters are pasted and graphics, drawn for special scenes and only used in them.

Animations:
Except of changing expressions of the pasted characters on the backgrounds, there is no animation in this game.

User Interface:
The user Interface is also a usual one: The graphics fill the whole screen and a transparent texwindow floats on the graphic. The textwindow may be moved around or complete hidden from display. If a decision is to be made, all possible choices are displayed in the textwindow and the desired choice has to be picked by clicking.

Extras:
The extra menu contains galleries of the graphics and h-scenes, already seen in the game, and a jukebox, that plays all themes and two differnt versions of the title song. A special feature of this game is a hint-system, that may be used before making a decision. However, I would most advise to leave it deactivated, because the game itself is easy enough to be played without this kind of help and it would perhaps even spoil some of the fun, finding the paths throught this game on ones own.

My personal opinion:
I enjoyed this game almost as much as "Tokimeki CheckIn", even if the variety of characters (only 5 "female targets" and each of them has only one ending).

On the other hand, depending on which nurse the player chooses the main character to fall in love with, the story changes quite more, than in TCI: complete chapters are added or removed from the storyline, according to this decision.

Without skipping the text, each go through the story takes about 4 hours. So,overall playing time would be at least 20 hours. Because the difficulty-level of this game is not very high (quite lower, if the hint-system is used), I would any experienced b-gamer expect to get all the right ways directly after trying one or two times.

Someone at the PeaPri-board called this game "TCI-light", probably because of these two reasons:
a) less variety of characters
b) if the path to one of the characters is opened by the first three decisions, there is no way to lose the path to that characters ending. Only some h-scenes can be missed by making decisions, that lets the main character go away, before the h-scene happens.

This view is reasonable, but I have another opinion:
Because there are a lot chapters, especially written for the different paths, the characters here gain a lot more depth and make them for me sometimes even more enjoyable, as the TCI-characters (my favourite story is the "Nanana"-path). A bishoujo-game has to tell me a story, not to baffle me with difficulty (oops, no pun on "Snow Drop" intended, but the frustration of some players, that never got to the second part of "Snow Drop" on their own is a hint, there are some people out there, that might share this opinion).

However, these stories are want to entertain, not to give some deep philosophical thoughts. At least, I used this game to get my spirits up again, after I played "Kana" and went almost crazy with the sadness at the first ending, I got there. I can assure: There is no better place to find consolation for a sadness, that at the busom of one of these nurses. (Oops, do I sound like a baby here? :D)

Anyone, who always wanted a funny and heartwarming nurse-soap on his PC would be good advised, to at least take a look at this title.