Very fun game. One of the greatest games I've ever played, which is a sentence I find myself typing up a lot whenever I am reviewing a Rockstar game. I hope and pray I'll be saying the same in a year with VI.

This game is just, it never gets boring; even after you complete it, there's always so much to do, mess around, do tasks, earn money, walk around the school, walk outside, inside, bully others obviously, cause fights to happen indirectly or directly... the city itself is just so fun and it is such a simple and mostly narrative-driven game that it feels like the game doesn't feel complete unless you've finished the story because it is always missing a part otherwise; both literally and figuratively.

As you play through the game, you unlock different parts of Bullworth to explore; starting with getting out of the school itself, then venturing out into different places far away from the school. And the design of the map is so smooth and meticulous that it geniunely feels satisfying to go from one place to another; the short distances, the easy shortcuts you can take like say from Bullworth straight to the Asylum then venturing out into the Towneys' area, the map is so small yet feels so big because of the individual differences of each area in it.

It is such an amazing experience, somehow I got so lost in describing it that I did not even mention the fact that I completed it I believe 8 times now. The story is so simple and straight-forward that it never gets boring; unlike "the super complicated for no reason" stories you see nowadays where it ventures into so many different pathways and narratives and side-quests and just overall messes up the experience and overfloods it with how many things there are to do at oncec without being paced properly; which is a problem a lot of non-Rockstar open world games or even just narrative-driven somewhat un-linear problems that these games suffer from.

Bully paces the storyline just right; for one chapter you're fighting one clique, or maybe two at most; during which you start to get challenges and tasks related to these cliques, then if you wanna progress through the classes which you can do at any time of course, you don't get absolutely annihiliated with a million classes and mini-classes to do, instead you playthrough up until a certain point of say, like, art, then you start unlocking perks very gradually that you explore individually; you don't get hammed with new unlocks, new perks, new side quests, new challenges, and all that garbage all at once, you take each skill as it comes.

Each class unlocks one skill and you won't have that class until a few days after, giving you time to actually get to use this new perk that you unlocked without overflooding you with other skills that you also need to learn or master.

There's also the photography and shop classes respectively which you don't unlock up until a certain point in the game, that way you don't get absolutely destroyed and just tortured with all the different activites to do at once, because it is that at point in games like this where I end up shelving it and never looking back; they just ham-fist the whole game with so many different things all at once that you don't even know what to focus on; so what I love about Bully is the absolute mastercraft of simplicity, fun, and just special pacing it has.

Even the challenges that you unlock which are the side quests of the game, you don't start getting them all at once; instead you unlock ONE challenge for each chapter you're in, for each clique you're fighting respectively, and you can do it whenever but it feels like the game hints or encourages doing it at the time you get it which makes the experience more coherent and fun.

This game is just endless fun. What I find so special about it is how complex yet simple it is, honestly. There is a lot of hidden underlying mechanics within it yet all it displays for you is a simple narrative that you go through without worrying about what story cues you remembered, you forgot, you knew, you didn't know; it's a really simple and fun game at its core. It is definitely one of my favorite games ever.