A horror adventure game that was released as part of Koei's "English Dream" series, a collection of games used to help teach the English language.
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This is a game I’d actually never heard of until my partner suggested we go through it together sometime as an idea for a date night. Always curious to both learn more about a new (old) game as well as spend time with her, I eagerly agreed, and we played through it together last weekend. It took us about 4 hours or so to go through the PS1 version on emulated hardware with her at the controls.
Both halves of Dark Hunter are part of an English educational series published by Koei during the late-90’s, and this is the first half of it. The titular academy is surrounded by mysterious happenings, and it’s up to our unassuming high school girl and two strange transfer students to get to the bottom of it. This is only the first half of the story, so it doesn’t exactly feel fair to judge it on its larger narrative elements quite yet, but the premise is at least delightfully odd with just how quickly things get utterly ridiculous (which is exactly why my partner suggested we play it together x3).
A large reason for it being so entertaining is because of how this is (ostensibly) an English educational tool. The game is a visual novel that plays out like a very simply animated anime. Not only do you have subtitles for everything, but you also have full voice acting, and both of them are in Japanese and English. You can switch between either whenever you like, and the English bits even have remarkably detailed explanations for harder words as to how they’re used (such as for the word “they”, pointing out both what the article is pointing to in the particular sentence as well as a more dictionary-definition of the word).
As an English-teaching tool, I think it’s a really remarkable effort, and the English is just about perfectly fine save for a typo here and there. That said, I think this is kinda a product for no one in many regards. By my experience both teaching English and learning Japanese, I think a hypothetical Japanese learner of English would very likely find little value with this game, as it’d almost certainly be either far too difficult for them or far too easy. It’s a pretty wild story, and they’re using that to try and engage you, but at the same time, it’s also so complicated that you’d need a pretty advanced level of English to engage with that aspect of it meaningfully. It’d certainly be a nice practicing tool for someone with more advanced English skills (not unlike how I use Japanese-language games to practice my Japanese), and it’d be quite unique in ’97 when importing an American game to practice with would’ve been a lot harder, but it’s still such a niche product that I have trouble praising its educational value too highly.
The game is mostly a visual novel that you just watch happen with a very occasional choice here and there, but there are actually some more video game-y aspects to things as well. However, they’re often so poorly implemented that you’d wish they weren’t there in the first place. On the more unremarkable side of things, you have mini-games that are just glorified little English tests, which are inoffensive enough even if they’re not too interesting. Then on the more egregious end, you have the adventure and shooting sections. The adventure sections are basically point and click adventure games with you navigating areas in first-person, and they’re dreadful. It’s often extremely unclear on where to go, and the loading times on the unskippable voice clips are such that it takes absolutely forever to just aimlessly hunt around some of these areas trying to find the one very unclear thing you’ve missed (or just hoping the game eventually decides to let you progress).
The shooting sections are light gun games without the light gun, and they’re also pretty bad. My partner confirmed this to be true after the fact, but even just watching her play I could very easily tell that the response time on the cursor was awful and even the button to shoot their weak points was weirdly unresponsive too. You can retry one right from the start of that fight should you die, thankfully, but that doesn’t make them suck any less, unfortunately XP.
The presentation is, like the story, definitely a reason to check the game out, but not really for good reasons XD. The animation is very stiff and characters are almost never on model. This combined with the less than stellar English voice acting makes for a great comedy experience, even if it takes a lot out of whatever tension the story could theoretically have XD. The Japanese voice acting is good, as you’d expect, but I imagine most people reading this review would be playing the game for its hammy English VA anyhow, and it is indeed just as hammy as one would hope (it even shares a voice actor with the original Symphony of the Night voice cast! X3).
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you can bear with the cruddy adventure and action sections, then this is a good, silly time to go through with friends like we did. The story is hardly high art, and I doubt going through the second half this coming weekend will convince me otherwise, but it’s at the very least entertaining regardless, which is the least you can ask of something like this, I feel X3.
Both halves of Dark Hunter are part of an English educational series published by Koei during the late-90’s, and this is the first half of it. The titular academy is surrounded by mysterious happenings, and it’s up to our unassuming high school girl and two strange transfer students to get to the bottom of it. This is only the first half of the story, so it doesn’t exactly feel fair to judge it on its larger narrative elements quite yet, but the premise is at least delightfully odd with just how quickly things get utterly ridiculous (which is exactly why my partner suggested we play it together x3).
A large reason for it being so entertaining is because of how this is (ostensibly) an English educational tool. The game is a visual novel that plays out like a very simply animated anime. Not only do you have subtitles for everything, but you also have full voice acting, and both of them are in Japanese and English. You can switch between either whenever you like, and the English bits even have remarkably detailed explanations for harder words as to how they’re used (such as for the word “they”, pointing out both what the article is pointing to in the particular sentence as well as a more dictionary-definition of the word).
As an English-teaching tool, I think it’s a really remarkable effort, and the English is just about perfectly fine save for a typo here and there. That said, I think this is kinda a product for no one in many regards. By my experience both teaching English and learning Japanese, I think a hypothetical Japanese learner of English would very likely find little value with this game, as it’d almost certainly be either far too difficult for them or far too easy. It’s a pretty wild story, and they’re using that to try and engage you, but at the same time, it’s also so complicated that you’d need a pretty advanced level of English to engage with that aspect of it meaningfully. It’d certainly be a nice practicing tool for someone with more advanced English skills (not unlike how I use Japanese-language games to practice my Japanese), and it’d be quite unique in ’97 when importing an American game to practice with would’ve been a lot harder, but it’s still such a niche product that I have trouble praising its educational value too highly.
The game is mostly a visual novel that you just watch happen with a very occasional choice here and there, but there are actually some more video game-y aspects to things as well. However, they’re often so poorly implemented that you’d wish they weren’t there in the first place. On the more unremarkable side of things, you have mini-games that are just glorified little English tests, which are inoffensive enough even if they’re not too interesting. Then on the more egregious end, you have the adventure and shooting sections. The adventure sections are basically point and click adventure games with you navigating areas in first-person, and they’re dreadful. It’s often extremely unclear on where to go, and the loading times on the unskippable voice clips are such that it takes absolutely forever to just aimlessly hunt around some of these areas trying to find the one very unclear thing you’ve missed (or just hoping the game eventually decides to let you progress).
The shooting sections are light gun games without the light gun, and they’re also pretty bad. My partner confirmed this to be true after the fact, but even just watching her play I could very easily tell that the response time on the cursor was awful and even the button to shoot their weak points was weirdly unresponsive too. You can retry one right from the start of that fight should you die, thankfully, but that doesn’t make them suck any less, unfortunately XP.
The presentation is, like the story, definitely a reason to check the game out, but not really for good reasons XD. The animation is very stiff and characters are almost never on model. This combined with the less than stellar English voice acting makes for a great comedy experience, even if it takes a lot out of whatever tension the story could theoretically have XD. The Japanese voice acting is good, as you’d expect, but I imagine most people reading this review would be playing the game for its hammy English VA anyhow, and it is indeed just as hammy as one would hope (it even shares a voice actor with the original Symphony of the Night voice cast! X3).
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you can bear with the cruddy adventure and action sections, then this is a good, silly time to go through with friends like we did. The story is hardly high art, and I doubt going through the second half this coming weekend will convince me otherwise, but it’s at the very least entertaining regardless, which is the least you can ask of something like this, I feel X3.