Straight Outta The Recycling Bin!

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Student Transfer Scenario Review:
Legacy Route – Murder Mystery by The 2015 Student Transfer Dev Team
Build Released: 6/21/2024
Length: 1 Hour and 55 Minutes

This scenario is pre-installed in Student Transfer Version 8.X and was played using Student Transfer Version 8.1.

The following is a review of a 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.

Note: My friend of several years, gammaflux, was part of the original Student Transfer Dev Team. He wrote the pancake scene in this route and is responsible for naming Katrina, Kiyoshi, and Kyoko among other minor things.

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Backstory and Background

As a project, Student Transfer was rapidly developed from an idea to a released visual novel within just a few months. Kmalloc (Eliza Velasquez) first mentioned creating a visual novel in a similar vein to Press-Switch on the TFGS forums on July 30, 2015. The following day, she launched a thread for what would become Student Transfer. And on November 8, 2015, the game saw its first 1.0 release. A release that appears to have been largely scrubbed from the internet. I could not find any links in the TFGS threads and I deleted my copy a few years back, so I can’t share it myself. However, I did write a review back then, specifically of the patched Version 1.4. It was positive, and weirdly prophetic with the last paragraph, but in this review I did not really discuss the sole complete route, the Murder route.

To offer a brief synopsis: The route sees John share the alien remote with Kiyoshi and has the two, like a pair of classically trained perverts, raid the girl’s locker room. As they investigate things, they realize the locker room is, as the rumors said, haunted. Specifically by Faith, the twin sister of the school’s nurse, Grace. From memory scanning Grace, John learns that Faith was murdered by the Tina Koya history teacher, Jack Mallory, and that Mallory also raped John’s sister, Holly. As a pair of upstanding teens, they decide to bring forth the hammer of justice… only for things to get very complicated very quickly. Do you remember how the note from the aliens mentioned how they tried giving a remote to someone else? Yeah, that person was Jack “Child Fucker” Mallory. And when in possession of his remote, he’s immune to John’s remote.

This throws a wrench in their plans and leaves John stuck as his female form, Jane, for the next few days. With tensions and dangers high, the two task Maria with stealing the remote from Jack, only for Jack to use her body as a disguise. Depending on the player’s actions there are several possible outcomes. John can be duped and turned into Mallory’s latest concubine. John’s remote can stop working, leaving him stuck as Jane forever or it can keep working, allowing him to bring Jane ‘out to play’ when he so feels like it. And Mallory can either be brainwashed into confessing for his crimes, or transformed into a clone of Grace, who Faith can then possess.

It is tonally inconsistent, deals with a lot of disparate concepts all kind of jammed together. And rather than designing characters and then using them for the plot, the characters were restricted by the plot the developers cobbled together here. It was clearly a route that a lot of people put ideas and effort into, though I do understand why this might have been a source of frustration for the dev team. A then-prominent member of the dev team, jcjade45 publicly detailed the rationale behind closing this route off for rewrites back on December 6, 2018, just a few months before the release of V4.0 on February 28, 2019. As part of V4.0, the Murder route was closed off for rewrites. It technically remained in the game, but locked behind a single line of code, for five bloody years, before finally being relegated to its own scenario. 

Now, why didn’t they just relegate the route as a scenario with the release of V4.0? That would have saved the dev team and community the trouble of fielding what had to be hundreds of people asking about how to find this route. Well, for one, that would make sense. For two, that would be a major decision, and I don’t think the dev team wanted to make that kind of commitment despite… clearly not liking this route. But I think the real reason is that they wanted to replace the route before removing it. A sensible reason… but not a good reason.

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The Actual Review

So the question I have is… is the Murder route any good? Not as a component of Student Transfer, but a standalone story, isolated from the base game that grew around it, only considering the materially unchanged introduction that leads up to it. That’s pretty much how it was conceptualized and, as a scenario, that’s how I’m choosing to interpret it. My answer is a non-committal almost.

The story has merit, yet it is definitely confused, distracted, and attempting to reconcile a lot of disparate ideas. It wants to be a crime-solving duo mystery story. It wants to be a story about the protagonist getting revenge against a murderer who raped his sister. And it wants to be a ‘my best friend turned into a girl and now I’m in love with him’ type TSF story. While the first and third can go together, the second is a sensitive topic and just does not work when paired with something lighthearted.

Let’s start with what I think works. I think John and Kiyoshi do have a good rapport with one another. John’s the straight man, Kiyoshi’s the funny guy. John is pretty sensible throughout the route, rightfully recognizes danger, and quickly picks up on the situation. While Kiyoshi is a brazen cartoon character whose lack of awareness and impulsiveness more often results in something funny happening, rather than conflict born from incompetence. There are plenty of funny lines and silly moments with these two, and I think their dynamic has aged well.

As part of his transformation into Jane, meant as a way to get close to Jack without his awareness (which was kind of pointless in practice), Kiyoshi mind controls John into acting more like his ideal girl. So girly and feminine he cannot run or say naughty words. Attracted to guys, namely Kiyoshi. And generally more passive, willing to accept Kiyoshi’s hare-brained schemes. 

It is a straightforward mental alteration story. The key scenes make effective use of the relevant CGs, are generally well-written, and work to form an functional story about someone whose mind was altered, yet ultimately chooses to accept this burgeoning new side to themself. It does not feel forced or like John is a repressed trans girl, and while neither deep nor nuanced, it doesn’t need to be.

When it wants to be, the story can be a fun John and Kiyoshi story. And while the writing can be a bit brief, I think it generally does what it needs to and moves at a pleasantly brisk place, not lingering too long before getting to the next remarkable scene. There are some good, novel ideas to be had in this route, and you can tell that the dev team thought so. While all the writing is new, some of the structure of day 3 was adapted into the replacement Mystery route introduced in Version 8.0.

There are good parts to this route. …But when Faith and Jack are brought into the fold, problems just start stacking up like crazy. Where to begin… how about I just list all the things this route establishes:

• Ghosts, i.e. vengeful spirits are something that exists in the universe of Student Transfer, and this is learned the alien route rather than the magic route.
• Jack Mallory— of all people— was contacted by aliens as some representative of humanity. Which makes even less sense than picking Potato Boy John.
• Jack Mallory keeps his alien remote on his person at all times while attending school, yet never uses it to get what he wants. The man could have a harem, could be a millionaire, could have the pope suck his dick, but chooses to be a high school teacher.
• Holly was a rape victim by her teacher and her standoffish behavior is due to a distrust and discomfort she developed around others. A questionable plot point made worse by the fact that she is not a main character and this is not her story.
• The barely utilized nurse, Grace, has a twin sister, Faith… because Grace had a good ghost sprite, so just make the two twins, I guess? It’s not like there were other female twins in this game— OH WAIT!

This is simply too much for a story like this, and it does not work. Everything with Holly should have been cut, as this is not her story and her being raped amounts to little more than a bonus motivation for John to want to get revenge on Mallory. As if Mallory being an abusive bully and murderer was not enough. This is not really a ghost story, and a concept like this should only be introduced in a route that actually makes use of it. Same with the fact that Setsuna has the ability to trap ghosts in her body.

Mallory having access to his own alien remote is… just unnecessary. jcjace45 said the dev team originally intended Jack to be an antagonist, and he is. An antagonist from John’s regular life. So giving him equal alien powers was just… dumb. There is enough conflict in every route in Student Transfer that a traditional villain is not necessary. And in this route… it purely exists to prolong the story and justify a bad end.

Also, and I’m just pulling this theory outta my ass here, I think the Dev Team just wanted their own version of Candice from Press-Switch. A mastermind with powers comparable, if not greater than, those the protagonist discovers. Interesting idea, but Candice is a hidden bonus that players must uncover. Jack is a day 1 introduction character and a major part of the plot. Candice is the inventor of the DSM. The spellbook and alien remotes have clear origins. The context is totally different, this didn’t work, and to make it work, you’d need to change so much it would not be worth it.

This level of narrative recklessness also, predictably, opened the ground for a number of plot holes. Ranging from why did Jack not pursue John on day 4, when he was at school? Three instances where the alien remote is used to change the minds of ‘everybody’, when there is no way to issue a mind command to a group of dozens, let alone hundreds, of people. Kiyoshi, inexplicably, is able to drag Jack Mallory’s unconscious body across the school without attracting any attention. And the script is littered with so many little things that should be clarified within dialogue, but the team was all over the place, so nobody caught them at the time.

On that note, the writing is a bit jumbled, and you can tell that this was a bunch of different writers each composing scenes, stitching them together to make a full story. This is not a bad idea— it’s not too different from what folks do in writer’s rooms. But when combined with the tonal shifts and growing vision, you can tell when writers are popping in, particularly when the tone jutters between comical and serious. Which is how you get bomb-ass scenes where Jack Mallory is a vicious villain and scenes where he’s… distinctly not that.

There’s also the presentation which, naturally, is rather muted compared to what Student Transfer has offered. This route was made back before the dev team made a lot of heavy customizations to Ren’py, before they implemented a lot of effects and tricks beyond the ghost, device, and transformation effects. As such, I am not bothered by the animations being a bit limited or plain. 

Although, I did notice a few mistakes, possibly caused by engine alterations. A few movements looked off. Fades to black see the scene teleport elsewhere before the fade is completed. And a few of the visual effects— like the CRT flicker in the Jane the Slut ending— do not work as they should. Maybe this was intentional… Or maybe they did not want to clean this scenario up and left the errors in it. I’d buy either justification.

However, I will criticize the regular use of black screens of exposition, where the story describes things that happened rather than showing the reader, including scenes that were likely deemed ‘too hard to animate.’ I understand why they did this, as they just wanted to ship the first release, but they are so common I could not help but notice them, and it really does not fit the medium of a visual novel. At least have a background image…

And I will criticize the way the dev team handled the Jane, or John GB, sprites here, as this scenario uses the legacy sprites. With the release of V4 of Student Transfer, the dev team redid Jane’s sprites, shrinking the breast sizes, altering the hand positions, and changing the skin tone to better match John’s. They did this for some outfits and not others, including the original school uniform. That was replaced with the standard uniform design lifted from Tsuyokiss NEXT. 

The Murder route uses several CGs that feature the original uniform design for Jane, and because the new sprites do not have that uniform design, they chose to stick with the legacy sprites. They could have just made an edit of the new Jane sprites, putting her in the original uniform. It would take time, possibly hours, to do, but the dev team didn’t do it leading up to V4, and chose not to do so for five years. (At least, as far as I can tell.)

This means that every other sprite was updated to the modern standard, but Jane’s stuck with her old sprites. I would make some edits as my way of saying ‘see, this isn’t that hard’ but the devs also never edited the legacy sprites to be in-line with other sprites. So the scale would be all scuffed up! …Actually, a scenario developer probably made sprites that match what I have in mind, but I’d rather not dig through my scenario collection searching for an example.

Overall, I think the Murder Mystery route has some solid highs, but its lows are very low. A lot of the problems with the route are more conceptual, but that still does not change the solid chunk of bad ideas that do not mesh with the rest of the story. Still, I do not think it is a bad or embarrassing route. It was a case of too many cooks, a lack of oversight, and a lack of a leader or editor to say ‘no, you cannot do that in this route.’ 

From a historical perspective, I find it to be an incredibly interesting relic, a piece of Student Transfer that should be preserved, just not part of the base game. However, I also do not see it as particularly great or worth a recommendation beyond satiating one’s curiosity as to where it all began. It’s a rough early pilot of ideas that would be refined, redeveloped, and thrown out as the game evolved. And I think it’s simply amazing that something with as many problems as this could blossom into a game and story-telling platform with the quantity, quality, and longevity as Student Transfer.