DEAD OR SCHOOL (English) · Test

Where there's a will there's a way: DEAD OR SCHOOL

The story behind the 2.5D Action RPG DEAD OR SCHOOL is an interesting one. Director “Mokuseizaiju” Ono was known for his erotic doujinshi works. Before 2016 he decided to drop out of school. He even decided to give up the erotic market which was his main income stream and pursued becoming a mainstream Mangaka.

This resulted in the Machine-Doll Nanami-chan series, while it got good critical reception but the sales just weren’t good enough…

Then came the fateful decision to create his own game: DEAD OR SCHOOL.It’s a fascinating story of renting commercial space and turning it into a development house at day and a bar at night consisting of 3 people. Thus the story of development Studio Nanafushi began.

The dwindling of development resources and turning to crowdfund was another major step of the story. Though the Indiegogo didn’t meet its goal, they somehow still managed to release the game as an ongoing Early Access.

Eventually, they reached the goal and finished the game, which is what we’re going to talk about in today’s review.

Though it’s already out in PC, the west never got the console version of DEAD OR SCHOOL which was released in Japan in August last year. Publisher Marvelous has taken the publishing duties for the western console audience and finally released it in 13.03.2020.

It’s an ambitious project and many things have changed across the development but there’s always the question: Is it good despite the concessions? This has always been a thing in Video Game development and we’re taking a look at their effort in making the best out of it. Join me, as I give you a detailed review of DEAD OR SCHOOL.

78 years after the mutant apocalypse…

78 years after the mutant apocalypse…

People have lost the 3-year long war and are now hiding underground. The strange thing is, that nobody has any memory about life on the surface.

DEAD OR SCHOOL is the story of the girl Hisako. Motivated by the incredible story of School from her Grandmother she’s become fired up to reclaim the surface. Her Grandmother supports her by giving her old School Uniform to Hisako. Wearing the goal of school life she sets out to make her dream a reality. It’s going to be a difficult fight but she isn’t alone. Along the way, she finds people sympathetic to her goals and together they fight for a future on the surface.

At first, everything is a mystery. What are the mutants? How did they lose? Why are the memories gone? Hisako’s journey isn’t a simple one. It’s also the search for the truth.

There isn’t that much story in DEAD OR SCHOOL but there’s certainly enough of it to fill up the lore and mystery of the world to keep you going. Everything has an explanation and I haven’t found any gaping plotholes so consistency is a thing. In comparison, DEAD OR SCHOOL has much more story than Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and has a much more compact one than say Aeterno Blade II which leads to much better pacing.

That doesn’t mean it’s perfect because there’s one aspect where it falls flat: Characters. Most of them are severely lacking in the backstory. Hisako, for example, is a just a girl growing up Underground, there’s no real story why she’s able to fight mutants to this incredible degree and largely depends on her emotions to make the player invest in her. The main supporting cast doesn’t look much better though there are nice little tidbits.

This doesn’t mean that the characters are bad. They only lack further depth and exposition which can make it hard for some people to invest in them.

Overall, the story does a good job of keeping you going by giving you a mystery to solve.

Controls and Gameplay

DEAD OR SCHOOL consists largely of fights with some light platforming. Your main goal is to go from checkpoint A to checkpoint B. There’s one important thing to keep in mind. Every time you use a checkpoint to recover your resources, the map gets reset and you have to go through everything again. In case of death, you’re transported to the first save point of the map and can fast travel to the one you need to go. The penalty is a loss of 10% of your Yen.

Along the way, you will keep finding yourself restricted in fight arenas that you have to survive. It’s a survival gauntlet that you have to go through if you want to progress.

Melee and shooting are part and parcel of your playtime which is why it’s important to have the controls down to the T. If it gets too difficult or easy, you can switch to one of the three difficulties at any time: Easy, Normal and Hard.

It’s not a Metroidvania even if it looks like one. The game is split into parts with the train functioning as your main hub of travel not much different than Mega Man or Demon’s Souls rather than single big cohesive map leading to a much more linear experience without too much exploration hassle.

The RPG mechanics consist of loot, levels and weapon management ( comparable to a toned-down version of Borderlands?).

We are going to split the Gameplay into 2 segments for a better overview.

Controls

DEAD OR SCHOOL is a simple game that requires you to know the controls in your sleep. From the very beginning, you have a full move set giving you ample time to master it throughout your journey. The controls are fully customizable but the standard controls are most likely one of the most optimal control schemes anyway. They put the attacks on the shoulder buttons to let your right thumb control the aiming. I can imagine you can optimize it a little by putting the jump and dodge button to the other two shoulder buttons. This makes it much easier to deal with the Twin-Stick-Shooter like gameplay.

Running, dashing, dodging, light attack, alternative attack, changing weapons are all part of your repertoire. There’s also a quick-select for each of your 3 weapon types.

Gameplay

Aside from fighting and main missions, there are side-quest, souvenirs, and refugees you can find disseminated to optional places on the map. The latter 3 are especially interesting because they offer permanent stat increases, sometimes even Skill points.

Action

This is where you will spend most of your time. The majority of it will be all about fighting. With a weapon choice of 3 weapon types, you’ll have to decide for each of them. All of them have limited resources that can only be restocked at savepoints.

The stamina gauge adds some complexity to your fights, as you can’t go gung-ho on your enemies because you have to take a break here and then but you can duck for a faster recovery.

Basic actions and dodging

Double Jumps are there from the very beginning. Dashing won’t be useful in fights and is mostly used for faster traveling.

The most important action is going to be dodging. You’re invincible to attacks during it and if you dodge right before an attack you slow downtime that opens up some great damage opportunities. Some enemies have easy just dodge actions which makes it a very important part of your gameplan.

The 3 Weapon types

Melee Weapons

Swords, Hammers, and Axes are just a small part of your potential options. Each weapon brings their stats and attack animations but there’s also a balance to keep in mind. Highly damaging weapons have low durability and deplete a lot of stamina. Less damaging ones are all about death by a thousand cuts at low stamina cost and fast attack speed to supplement this style.

Unlike guns, melee weapons just lose a lot of damage potential after depleting the durability which makes sense because otherwise, you would be completely helpless.

Small note: Specific swords have a 5-hit combo attack and the final attack is slower and can’t be dodge canceled until the attack happened. This is a very undesirable result because in these milliseconds you’re completely vulnerable to enemy attacks. Therefore, I advise you to skip the 5th attack with a dodge roll so you keep your mobility at all times. In DEAD OR SCHOOL dodging is paramount.

Alternate Attack: Hisako takes a little bit of time to start things up and then moves forward to spin like a windmill. It’s meant to be a big damage dealer over a short period. The time required for it to get into full gear makes it very difficult to use as the immobility makes you a prime target for attacks. At best, you’d want to use it when you did a just dodge.

Guns

Assault Rifles, Shotguns and Snipers are going to grace you at the beginning. The pool will expand into more options and some of them are even futuristic. This is going to be your most important weapon of choice because of the high utility, which also means you have to think well about the weapon you’re going to take with you.

Assault Rifles offer a high fire rate at a low damage. Shotguns give you big burst damage at a short distance. Sniper Rifles demand accuracy due to the low fire rates but come with big damage.

These three types are the gist of it but there’s another one that you’ll get within the main missions that will change how you approach enemies outside of arenas.

Alternate Attack: Hisako readies into a lower stance to brace the increased firepower. In this position, your shots will do double damage and penetrate the enemies. The first one gets full damage while the ones behind it are only getting a small fraction. You need to be careful when using it because it drains the stamina fast.

As you can already guess, this attack is very useful in arenas with flat surfaces where you can damage a lot of enemies at once. Additionally, you’re saving resources because of the double damage buff.

Explosives

The most powerful weapon in your pocket. Grenade and Rocket Launchers are only the tip of the iceberg. These are the final choice when things get difficult. They come with huge damage and an AOE effect that can clear out clusters of enemies in one shot. Another usage would be to make your life easier against enemies with large health. To balance things out, they have very little ammo and require you to use them strategically.

Alternate Attack: This is nothing else than Bullet Time aka slowing time down. By depleting your stamina you can force a time slowdown for easier aiming. Technically, I couldn’t find much use for it except platforming puzzles.

Enemies

As mentioned before, Hisako with her complete set of abilities without any further extensions. That’s where the enemies have to pick up the slack to give you variety.

The game starts with easy humanoid type enemies and escalates into more difficult ones with each new map. Adding the different fight arenas you get a wide variety of combat situations for you to solve. Aside from the humanoid monsters, you can more like flying ones or ceiling crawlers to name a few. Then there are extra strong versions of the monsters that have a blue aura that signifies an increase in health at least.

The next step is bigger enemies who appear much less but adds more difficulty due to their large health pool and big attacks. I recommend you to create some specific strategies for them to keep the resource usage low.

At first, you think the game is easy but as you continue it’ll become a much different picture that will make you invest blood, sweat, and tears.

I started the playthrough on Normal but at like the 3rd stage it was just too much for me with them feeling spongy and decided to switch to Easy instead. It did become easier but it certainly wasn’t a walk in the park and I kept seeing the Game Over screen a lot.

Boss Fights

Like usual, Boss Fights is all about recognizing their quirks and patterns. Find them out and create a strategy to counter them. None of them fight the same so be prepared to think outside of the box.

The Last Stand

A special mechanic that gives you an attack and defense buff once you only have about 20% health left. A special animation of Hisako’s Uniform getting damaged and a red aura will tell you it’s active.

A potential strategy would be to keep your Explosives until this point to maximize their damage.

RPG Elements

Levels

With each defeated enemy or completed quest you get experience points and just like a traditional RPG you get a level up once you collected enough. Each level up comes with a Skillpoint and an increase in the weight limit.

Skills

Just like the weapon types, the skills are put into 3 weapon categories. These skills are all about buffing you up but don’t add any skills to your pool of actions outside of the initial alternate attacks.

Weapons and Customization

In DEAD OR SCHOOL, you have 3 different currencies: Yen, Enhancement Gears and Modifier Gears. Each weapon also has 2 slots for extra options like more ammo, more stamina, etc. Everything can be found in chests or enemy drops.

Every weapon can be upgraded to a maximum level of 10. Each upgrade costs you Yen and Enhancement Gears. There’s a secondary modification that requires Modifier Gears and ads a random special option to them.

The most exceptional special options are probably those that heal you after killing an enemy or Drones accompanying you. The latter is important against a specific enemy that bears a shield as the Drones shoot explosives that blast away their equipment away and turning them to normal monsters.

All of it sounds interesting but there’s a huge caveat to all of this. Every time you get to a new area, better weapons are awaiting you. Ergo, your old weapons are guaranteed to become obsolete some time in the future.

Gameplay Impressions

The unique mix of Twin-Stick-Shooter, Castlevania like melee is an interesting idea, especially if you add the RPG elements to it.

Why is it Castlevania like melee? Because the enemies don’t react to your attacks like universal Hyper Armor which is standard in these type of games. Though you have specific attacks than can hit them away or launch them there’s no combo system in place which means you can just hit them and react to attacks in a simple manner. In a sense, melee isn’t that much different from your Gun action.

The loot system is a nice idea but RNG involved and the requirement to switch weapons sooner than later makes it difficult to invest in your weapons.

The next problem is with Hisako. Without any further advancements in her moveset, it falls upon the enemies to bring the variety but it just isn’t enough.

You can expect a playtime of at least over 10 hours. On a personal note, at about 3/4 of the game I started to get weary since it’s always the same. The only big standouts are the optional puzzles and challenges for some souvenirs and refugees.

Graphics & Sound

You can see it’s an indie game with troubled development. Details are relatively low on things like textures and effects. There’s a good chance it’ll remind you of the PS3 era but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Those who’re big fans of good graphics will have to think twice about this game. It also needs to be mentioned that at very specific spots the framerate went down even with the PS4 Pro.

Pre-rendered cutscenes are so heavily compressed that you can easily see compression artifacts popping up.

Another problem are the effects and this is something that affects the gameplay. There are some cases where there are just too many effects on the screen that makes it hard to discern the action. Then there are very rare cases of extra-large enemies with a blue aura that covers like a quarter or more of your screen.

On a more positive note, each area has its own visual identity when you’re not deep underground. The visual design of the characters and enemies are one of the bigger strength of DEAD OR SCHOOL.

The music is surprisingly fitting and emphasizes the atmosphere across the board like rock that supports the action. Hitting and shooting have enough auditory punch to them that supports the gameplay well enough.

There’s not much to say about the Japanese dub as there isn’t much voice, to begin with. Most of it is just Hisako’s combat cries. Also yes, there’s only Japanese.

The translation isn’t always perfect but it isn't close to eggregious or hinder you from understanding the plot.

Fazit

DEAD OR SCHOOL is an interesting mix of different ideas and genres with a solid degree of success. Be it Twin-Stick-Shooter, melee combat or platforming, all of them are implement sold but nothing exceptional which leads us to the main point.

The game offers the same gameplay across the entire story. Those who’re expecting more like upgrades, new moves like in Metroidvanias won’t be finding it in here. It’s a solid game offered at a budget price of £24.99 with plentiful hours of gameplay and an intriguing story.

I would even recommend playing this in short bursts so you don’t get tired of the repetition unless you love the gameplay loop.

Fans of 2D Shoot’em Ups and Action-Adventure games like Castlevania or Contra should keep an eye on it.

Wertung

7.5Gut

Kaufempfehlung

70% Kaufempfehlung

70%Empfehlenswert