Cherry Tree High: Comedy Club!

The Good
note: For two years, the version released for the Western audience was injudiciously disfigured by what developer name as «westernalization»: character and locale names were altered, Japanese in-game meals replaced with Western foods. Justice has been paid to the game with the release of what has been named as the «de-westernalized» version.

The Bad
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The Bottom Line*
We are in a Japanese city — «town» in game —, Cherry High Tree. The story is about a handful of youths living the hardships and aspirations, achievements and disappointments, of their blessed time. This is a rather choral story, with youth as the protagonist; there is one character however that we will be in control of, and whom the events principally orbit around: Mairu Hibisu. She, together with her school friends (and school enemies), is an ordinary extraordinary girl, sparkling with life like the sun with light; their class is, naturally, the Third C.

Mairu’s objective is, while enjoying her age to the fullest, to form and lead a school club: the Cherry Tree High Comedy Club. Which requires to persuade no less than three out of the six of her closest, old or freshly made, acquaintances to join it, given that the least amount of members for a club to be constituted is five, and that Hoemi — Mairu’s room mate, and not just that (she is also the provider of it, when Mairu feels desirous of savouring sugar) — is already in. Naturally, strokes of bad luck, hitches, and ill-intentioned fellow students who never get enough of putting spokes in our wheel, are all present and to be overcome in the road to success.

The story is narrated by the audio and visual means of a 32-bit typically Japanese game: lively merry hues, cartoon-like heartfelt artless music, few yet characterful locations, and manga style for the drawing of characters and their amusing animations. The gameplay relates with dating «simulations»: it plays in turns (corresponding to the three partitions of the day) and sees Mairu hang out, converse, and tighten her relations with to-be-recruited males and females, by sensibly choosing chat subjects they are likely to be more interested in, or just that she is more knowledgeable about. This, while doing occasional jobs to gain some small sum (needed to buy energy drinks, magazines, attend to special guest speeches at the museum, play the crane game, game at the arcades, and more), extending her knowledge of mundane topics by watching tv or reading, looking for bottles uncivilly left on the ground by people.

CTHCC is limited in size and gameplay structure, but neither is the heart, or the backbone, of it. It is, instead, a treasure chest, small, full of gems. Coherently, this is a game about a girl whose prime talent and purpose are to delight the others with jokes, whose prime quality and effort is to gift the player with laughter, as well as amuse them with light powerful humour, rarely devoid of wistful irony.

The gameplay is thin, nonetheless worthy and enjoyable: without some planning the bad ending is what awaits players, and it won’t be before the second or third playthrough that the best ending will be achieved. Video is limited to 640x480 (but, thankfully, ALT + ENTER allows for full screen), controls are entirely mappable (but well mapped already), the menus and the game interface are exemplar. You have to pay attention to things, to take pains in talking with everyone, every time, if possible. To avail yourself of some intuition, required in never a heavy, nor ever a shallow manner. Nothing feels forced. And there is some, rather than complexity, effective diversification. Although annoying and fatiguing at any time, doing homework in the morning or just after class is a more fruitful choice than studying at night; sleeping early helps fulfilling goals too.

The gameplay is, in facts, rich, not exteriorly, rather inwardly. As it will stated explicitly in the sequel, the world is a stage and everyone an actor: thus dialogues are the essence; and indeed loading again a game from the same save file is enough to encounter different dialogues, alternative rather than secondary. Japanese culture, or rather its deformation as in the collective imagination, is at a time object of respect and tactful parody.

In an age of castles that would collapse revealing they were made with sand, or pasteboard, if they who are now named as the «consumers» (former «gamers») would still have the ability to try to touch and press their walls, this is a house. A house capable of proving home. Plus, on air is that elusive quality, equally precious and rare, that we attempt at expressing by the name of «inspiration», a word that is tightly related with «spirit», in the acceptation of «soul». The outcome is at times important, not seldom delicious, never less than solidly entertaining.

Cherry Tree High Comedy Club is a really well accomplished embodiment of cuteness, and playfulness: a small — while not petty at all — adventure, involving to play, pleasant to the eye and ear, having its mainspring, and brilliance source, in that precious variant of humour that irony is.

Then, there is a cast of troubled and cheerful, mindless and mindful, little great girls and boys, and the quarrels and hopes, times of disappointment and times of mirth of theirs. All of which the player is going to meet again with anxious pleasure in the successive instalment, Cherry Tree High I! My! Girls!, and in no way ever going to forget.