A New Life – Student Transfer Scenario Review

The return of massive donkers and animated lesbian rim jobs 

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Student Transfer Scenario Review:
A New Life by BuggsB
Build Released: 7/14/2021
Length: 8.5 Hours (English version)
Played using Student Transfer Version 6.1
TFGS Thread – Download – Flowchart

The following is a review of a fan-made Scenario for the visual novel Student Transfer. For more information about Student Transfer, please consult my dedicated Student Transfer page or the official Student Transfer website.

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I previously reviewed A New Life back in April 2020, but the creator of the Scenario, BuggsB, requested that I give his Scenario another go. And seeing as how I’ll cover basically whatever ST Scenario anybody wants me to (unless there is a lot of drama around it), I did just that, and… I can see why he wanted to show me what he had been cooking up this past year.

A New Life follows the underutilized Student Council vice president Claus Hawkins, an academic elitist that looks down on all of his peers by virtue of his high marks and their supposed lack of wit or care for their futures. This sense of superiority leads to entitlement, however, and leads Claus to do something regrettable to his fellow member of the 4.0 club, Michelle Bloom, after she does not return Claus’s propositions to be his girlfriend.

Dejected, suspended, and having lost a core component of his identity, Claus calls upon the paranormal to aid him in a quest for revenge, and winds up losing his body because of it, turning into a wandering spirit that must possess the bodies of others to seek his vengeance. All of which sounds like the start of a dedicated revenge store following a proud, pompous, and prickish young man with a chip on his shoulder. Though that is not necessarily the overarching theme of A New Life, as the Scenario is more concerned with Claus going on a series of extended joyrides that maybe, possibly, fold back on the whole revenge plot.

In its current form, the Scenario can roughly be divided into three routes. The Stevie route, the Sandra Collins route, and the Allison route which, in a rather roundabout move, can only be accessed through either the Stevie or Sandra route.

The Stevie route follows Claus as he begrudgingly takes refuge from the cool gust of ghost death by possessing Stevie Collins. An underclassman underachiever with an effeminate voice and body… except for his 40+ centimeter long dong. Following a brief… indulgence, Claus chooses to stay as Stevie for the moment and is offered a prolonged look into Stevie’s familial, social, and academic life.

What ensues is a story that sees Claus’s iron shield of superiority crack as he interacts with others and becomes a more human and empathetic person as he takes on another life as his own. This is best exemplified by his budding relationship with an alternate version of Mel, who struggles to unravel her feelings for this new ‘Stevie,’ wrap her head around the kindness he shows her and come to terms with her own insecurities after acting as his ‘slave’ for a day. Their relationship is sweet, compelling, and ends in an elaborate sex scene that feels like a natural progression of where their relationship was going.

Aside from a not-so-good stub route that reads like a dime-a-dozen 15-page hentai comic, the Stevie route is ultimately strong, offers a rarely seen male-to-male transformation of sorts, and offers a jerkish yet still somewhat likeable protagonist. That being said, the Stevie route stands out as remarkably different compared to the other two routes, which are full-on phantom pervert power fantasies, and… I kind of like them more because of that.

The Allison route follows Claus, after establishing that he is a profoundly perverted person, as he possesses Allison… pretty much just because she’s got big boobs. However, this would-be joyride quickly complicates itself after a visit from Irene, Allison’s friend of unspecified closeness. Conflict ensues, and in putting up a fight, Irene pushes Claus to learn more about his ghostly powers. Namely, that he can invade people’s consciousness, remove them from their bodies, and also alter them into being his slaves.

From that description alone, you can probably tell how the route fairs. With his immense ability, Claus decides to use and abuse those around him, scrambling the bodies and minds of Allison’s established popular clique as he sees fit. All while positioning himself, the New Allison Stein, as the leader of the group, and future leader of Tina Koya as an institution. Now, that might sound simple, but in actuality, this route has a lot going on. 

Every major character, including Allison, Irene, and Cornelia, is sent on their own arcs where their personalities steadily develop as they acclimate to their new lives, bodies, brains, and varying degrees of free will. Claus, while not always direct with his grander goals, is clearly trying to amass wealth, power, beauty, clout, sexual satisfaction, friendship, and possibly a greater sense of self-satisfaction. All of which makes him feel like a young noble with a heart of ambition and a head full of multitudinous smarts— an archetype I am quite fond of.

The route makes ample time for sexual indulgences, and it gets especially… creative with them. You have the three-way lesbian nipple nibble, the iconic lesbian rim job, and some pee-pee poo-poo references for good measure. But for the fellows of exceptional class, you have the discomfort, exhaustion, and undercurrent of eroticism experienced by a young man playing dodgeball in the body of a frail girl with full-sized-dobonhonkeros.

While this would all be more than enough, the route also does not forget that it is supposed to be about Claus getting his one-sided and baseless revenge on Michelle… and he goes about it in the most roundabout way possible. Seriously, I do not have any clue how BuggsB intends on wrapping this story up in anything less than another 5 hours. And I don’t know why he hasn’t just written a route where Claus gets his revenge directly by possessing Michelle and spending a weekend turning her into a crack hoe gyaru— y’know, the obvious place where this Scenario should go. However… I don’t really care. If a ride is fun enough, then I say let it last as long as the writer wants it to, and that sentiment certainly applies here.

The Sandra route, named after the Tina Koya language teacher Sandra Collins, not to be confused with the Tina Koya Japanese teacher Sandra Davis, follows Claus as he takes refuge in her body and proceeds to make the most of the experience. Which means taking advantage of both the power presented to him via his new roles as a teacher, mother, and adult, while never forgetting that he is in the body of the “hottest MILF in highschool.”

What follows is a route that gracefully slips flops between these two breeds of power trips, and I have to say… BuggsB did an excellent job of both bringing these scenes to life, and establishing just what kind of person Claus truly is.

It is chilling seeing Claus so quickly and eagerly takes to his new role of power, taking no flack from any of his former peers, and instilling a sense of dread in all who dare to disrespect his borrowed authority. He has power, he has clout, and he knows how to use it better than most adults. Except he also clearly does not deserve to have it, because he is such a fickle, emotional, and immature prick. He boasts such bravado and has such a high opinion of himself because he’s good at school. But he’s also this hopelessly horny bastard who clearly should not have power, because he only wants to use it to fluff himself up and dump on others.

This is nicely demonstrated through Claus’s numerous masturbatory and indulgent escapades throughout this route, as he boldly dives into the world of girl parts with eagerness and virility that he engages with whenever he has the ample opportunity. Whether it be fasturbating in the school W.C. before the lunch bell rings. Scoping out his new badonkers while walking down the hall. Grabbing a co-workers tits— because he can. Or causing a ruckus every night, masturbating until he can’t no more. 

Even though it is not particularly long, the Sandra route is a genuinely riveting ride, and easily makes the Sandra route the best way to sell someone on this Scenario. However, I simply cannot discuss the strengths of the Sandra route without going into the presentation of A New Life. 

The presentation does all the base-level things I like to see in an ST Scenario. It has well-positioned characters, fluctuating expressions, good use of the rotate function, and is clearly the end result of a lot of tinkering, abstract scripting, and fine-tuning. Yet what really puts A New Life apart from its peers are its custom animations. Most of them are sexual, such as the vertical or horizontal boob bounce given to every busty female character, the first-person breast fondling animation, or Sandra’s many masturbatory motions. But I found them all remarkable due to the sheer artistry behind them. 

All of these animations are done via image editing and manipulation, frame by frame, and then stitched together using the in-game animation tools. BuggsB is doing things the long and hard way, and while there are image artifacting issues due to how small the original sprites are, it is still incredible just how natural or ‘natural’ these animations look when everything is playing out. 

However, I am equally impressed by his attention to detail when it comes to the little things. He created custom expressions to sell certain scenes, from giving characters a downward-looking expression as they gawk at their chest, a perverted smirk, or applying a shadow to their face to make them look more intense and intimidating. It’s all great stuff, and I think the one scene that best demonstrates the sheer visual ambition of this Scenario is the lunchroom scene in Sandra’s route. 

Students flutter in the backdrop, coming and gawking as they reach their seats. Claus is surrounded by other teachers who flutter between expressions and flap their mouths open to simulate the illusion of speech. Claus in Sandra has a custom chewing animation that grows more intense as they decide they want to get in a good fapping before class. And the characters visually react as they see ‘Sandra’ plow through her food like a crazy person.

It is seriously a level beyond what I would expect from even the most premium of premium visual novels, and it makes me wish that more commercial VNs had someone as clearly dedicated to the visual end of things as BuggsB clearly is. That being said, for all the lofty visual heights A New Life reaches, it is also kind of all over the place in regards to polish. Some scenes were clearly made before BuggsB had the drive or know-how to heavily modify Student Transfer assets, and when placed against newer content, they look almost like they are from an earlier Scenario. 

I think the best example of this is the borrowed CG where a hang grabs a woman’s breast, which can be found early on in the Allison route, versus the first-person breast grabbing sequence in the Sandra route. Both of them work, and are above the presentation of most other Scenarios, but the latter is such a dramatic boost in quality it’s a bit hard to believe that they are part of the same package.

Before wrapping things up, I also want to talk about the writing. Like a lot of Scenario writers, BuggsB is ESL. His English is good for the most part, though he flubs the occasional line to mixed results. Ranging from endearing errors to a plate of words that I only kind of understood. Though what I find more remarkable about his script is his approach for two things. First, he used a second-person narration that asks the reader to identify themselves as being Claus, which I am not a fan of, as I don’t want to relate to this elitist sex pest. And second, BuggsB has this habit of showing the thoughts of other characters via italic text in appropriate dialogue boxes, or by putting in parenthetical italic text after a line of dialogue. 

I don’t think there is any style of English writing where this is acceptable, yet I found this to be an efficient way to inform the reader as to what other characters are thinking, ultimately adding to their characterization in the process. Although, come to think of it, if this is a second-person story, then is it even appropriate to list these characters’ thoughts? …Actually, screw it. It might not be all prim-lime and right-some, but if I can gobble these words and make a brain-based vegetable-style diorama outta them, then it’s all gravy in my boat.

In conclusion, A New Life is among the most technologically impressive Scenarios I have had the pleasure of playing. But even when one puts aside all the glitz, splendor, and titty jiggling, it still delivers on the story front. Telling a trio of stories that, despite being very much incomplete and incredibly horny, offer entertaining stories that make good use of its transformation subject matter and have a scattering of narrative ambition spread throughout. It gets a full recommendation for me, and I look forward to seeing how its creator continues to iterate and improve this Scenario going forward.

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In addition to reviewing this Scenario, I also prepared a flowchart. Please let me know if there are any errors.