Student Transfer Version 9.0 Review

Ten years strong, with no signs of stopping the swapping…

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Student Transfer Version 9.0 Review
Platforms: PC(Reviewed), Mac, Linux, Android
Developer/Publisher: The Student Transfer Development Team
Website – Download – TFGS Page – Discord – Official Flowchart – Natalie.TF Page
V9 Git History: The Bet, Scarlet Fever, Kyoko Mistake, Joyride, Kiyoshi Wish, Yui Swap

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Student Transfer is a community developed visual novel that centers around TSF/TG/gender bending, body swapping, mind control, transformation, possession, and more. Since it started development in 2015, the title has grown dramatically, with Version 9 featuring over 1.75 million words of writing.

The game follows John Davis, an unremarkable high school student whose ordinary life becomes extraordinary one fateful night when he either receives an incredibly powerful alien remote or comes into possession of a magical spellbook written by his ancestors. From this initial starting point, the game opens up into a sprawling web of different routes, arranged in a manner more comparable to a choose-your-own-adventure interactive story than a typical route-driven visual novel. It makes navigation fairly daunting, so I would strongly recommend that all players use a flowchart to make their way through the game. Whether it be the official interactive flowchart provided by the dev team, or the condensed alien and magic flowcharts I created myself.

Because the game is so expansive, it is not feasible for me to talk about everything in a single review, but the core strengths of Student Transfer can be seen throughout most routes. Being a collaborative title, Student Transfer invites writers to bring their own unique voices and spins on the world, characters, and subject matter of the game. Thereby giving the title more breadth, diversity, and content overall than it would have if there was only a single creative lead. From jovial lighthearted romps to dismal situations where one’s life and identity shatter before their very eyes, the variety of the content allows the game to remain interesting even after so many expansions. And with plenty of unexplored avenues and underutilized characters, it doesn’t seem like that will change anytime soon.

By being a team, the developers are able to check over and edit each other’s work to keep the universe and game overall consistent, while sharing their skills and technical knowledge. This is especially impressive given how consistent the game is despite having had dozens of writers over its life. Admittedly, you can spot a stylistic shift when a route brings in another writer, but the writing quality is generally high enough that this change is permissible.

Furthermore, by being a title with such a focused target audience of transformation enthusiasts, Student Transfer has access to writers who truly understand how to use its assorted subject matter to tell a good story. They understand the narrative potential of TSF and transformation and use it as a tool to craft quality character-driven narratives that only delve into the sexual end of things when it adds to the story… Well, at least for the most part.

The characters themselves are another highlight. They are simple enough to be easily understood and written by various members of the dev team, yet all house ample room for exploration. Yes, they can be a bit tropey, but I would consider this to be a strength as well. For it provides so many opportunities for growth and expansion that, even 10 years later, many of them still haven’t been explored. (Even those who really should’ve been by now.)

These open opportunities and approachable cast has also led Student Transfer to grow beyond a robust visual novel and into a platform for TSF storytelling through its fan-created scenarios. Stories disconnected from the base game that use the same engine, assets, and often universe.

I actually began reviewing these scenarios back in 2019, and after going through over 70 of them, I can safely say that they run the gamut with regard to quality. Some are ESL messes of half-baked ideas, abandoned as soon as they debut with an unfinished introduction. Others are easily on par with the routes featured in the base game and, depending on your preferences, they might even be a bit better.

They do a lot to extend the life of Student Transfer, keep the project relevant even during the long lulls between full version updates, and are a great way for fans to become developers thanks to the shared tool sets. You can find a comprehensive list of all scenarios on the official Student Transfer website. …Or at least you could. As of writing, the list has not been updated in over a year, meaning you need to dig through Discord or the TFGS forums to find the new stuff.

Now, I’ve praised the writing behind this project, but writing is merely one area where Student Transfer triumphs, as it also aims to impress with its visuals. The title is assembled using assets borrowed from other visual novels, primarily those from the developer Candysoft. While this leads to some stylistic discrepancies, the dev team has really made these assets their own over the past decades. Characters are given custom outfits, expressions, and poses. CGs are retrofitted to work with the stories developers are trying to tell. Some are even fully custom illustrations, which really speaks to their dedication. And the whole communal aspects around these characters and game make it easy to forget that none of them are original designs.

However, the reason why I praise the presentation of Student Transfer has less to do with the assets themselves, and more what the developers do with them. Characters giddily flicker between emotions and move across the screen like a stage. They tilt, tumble, and shake about when the scene calls for it. And there is even a camera system of sorts, allowing scenes to be cast into the background and make the world feel like a three-dimensional place.

It has led to some of the most impressive presentational feats I have seen in the genre, but unfortunately, this level of visual flair is not evenly applied. Different people do the animations and they have different standards. And the game is held back by its 720p resolution. This is because the source assets— character sprites, CGs, and backgrounds, were all from games made with that resolution in mind. It’s an unfortunate limitation that was obvious even back in 2015, but at this point, the game’s just stuck at this resolution, as I cannot imagine the level of work that would be required to bump this game up to 1080p or 1440p. Ah well. At least it looks decent in full screen.

That covers my general thoughts on the game, but what makes each new release special is, of course, the route updates they bring. Following an 18 month development cycle, Version 9 introduces over 270,000 words of new content. Concluding The Bet route, expanding two existing routes, and introducing another three. Meaning I had a lot to cover beyond the boilerplate.

I was hoping that this update would be a true celebration of the game, as you only get one tenth anniversary. Unfortunately, these updates were somewhat emblematic of an issue I’ve had with Student Transfer’s direction the past few years. Allow me to explain…

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The Bet Route

The Bet is a revision and expansion of the “Friends” route originally introduced in Version 3.0, all the way back in 2018, and follows John as he shares his alien remote with his friends Kiyoshi, Katrina, and Kyoko. Or as I affectionately call them, the K-buds. After a brief stint of swapping and experimentation, Katrina and Kiyoshi enter a bet testing their adaptability and endurance. They’ll swap bodies for ten days and unless Katrina can last ten days as Kiyoshi, she will need to do something demeaning. But if she wins and sticks it out, Kiyoshi finally needs to date Zoey, his affectionate little stalker.

This is a fairly standard premise to keep characters in different bodies for a significant stretch of time. At least long enough for them to see and understand the life of another person. The choice of swapping Katrina and Kiyoshi is a strong one, as while they are part of the same group, I can’t really picture them hanging out with each other under normal circumstances. Kiyoshi is a classically trained anime pervert— only missing the swirly glasses. While Katrina is a feisty nerdy tomboy, and one of three girls at Tina Koya that Kiyoshi doesn’t relentlessly hit on.

From this premise, I would expect a story of two characters testing their resolve, getting on one another’s nerves, and dictating what each other can or cannot do. All while putting John and Kyoko in the middle as they deal with two emotional body swappees, each concerned about their lives and reputations in vastly different ways. Kiyoshi might know Katrina, but a dork like him does not know how to life as her or how to always act like her. Which could invite a deluge of drama, conflict, and messy situations drawn from knowledge limitations and the complexities with being another person. …In practice, that’s not really what The Bet is going for.

Instead, The Bet gradually reveals itself to be another reprisal of the identity/memory/life exchange concept seen in Mem Swap and Leona Swap. Except The Bet has one key difference. Rather than depict John going through this transformation, he acts as more of a referee and monitor, distributing memories as requested by Katrina and Kiyoshi and observing their changes in behavior. This is a curious perspective, unlike the vast majority of other routes in the game, and one I don’t particularly care for.

In transformation fiction, you generally want to either follow the person undergoing a transformation or someone close to them. The first-person perspective, narration, and glimpses into a character’s mind are among the best way to illustrate how the transformation is affecting them. Their struggles with a new form, their shifting mind as they are unable to think the way they used to, their diction and vocabulary morphing as their mind shifts into something more proper or crass. I don’t believe there are many hard rules in how a transformation story should be written, and think that the inventiveness of the genre is what makes it so enticing. But when the transformation feels distant, the transformation can feel far less impactful.

The Bet is ultimately the story of Katrina and Kiyoshi as they undergo a body swap and incremental mental transformation. And, to me, the most interesting part of the story what’s happening in their heads. They might say what happened to them, that they feel different, but this distance and lack of clarity makes it hard to latch onto many specifics. We don’t get to see their intimate moments, how they act when they are alone. And when we would be treated to these scenes, we are instead treated to a series of B-plots where John and Kyoko mess around with the remote.

These are entertaining little diversions where they get into a flakes of trouble, mess with people around them, and are memorable in their own right. Watching John transform Kyoko and force her to act like his own impression of Sandra? That’s cool! Having John and Kyoko swap bodies so they can have parallel sleepovers with their bodily displaced friend? Also neat! But they also feel like distractions from the main story. Ways to have the protagonist explore the device without giving him much agency over Katrina and Kiyoshi’s story.

This lack of exploration and the gradual distribution of memories can make The Bet feel a bit dry, lacking in conflict, and like it is going through the motions… for its first half. With the release of Version 9, the back half of this route was added, and… it’s a different type of story. After the halfway mark, Kiyoshi and Katrina have exchanges practically all memories, and still have another five days to go before they can conclude the bet. The writer chooses to use this opportunity to do two things.

Write a dedicated “friends” route for John and the K-buds, following them as they go to school, go on the much hyped hot springs trip, and make occasional use of John’s extraterrestrial doohickey. Something that’s light on swapping or transformations, but has enough antics, banter, and characterization to keep things interesting. And explore who the new Kiyoshi and new Katrina are after having, I don’t know, 80% to 90% of their memories swapped.

The last bit is fascinating to me as, again, there is such a barrier between the reader’s understanding of Katrina and Kiyoshi due to a lack of narration. John gets to spend time with them and hang out with them, but they largely did not read like the people the story was telling me they were. Katrina stops feeling like Katrina in Kiyoshi’s body with Kiyoshi’s memories, and more like… a new version of Kiyoshi. A NuKiyoshi if you will. The same is true vice versa. Kiyoshi in Katrina is NuKatrina. And in both cases, the differences in their personality, preferences, or resolve… a bit too minor for my liking. Rather than feel like people who were forged through impossible or extreme circumstances, NuKiyoshi and NuKatrina just feel like older, more mature versions of Kiyoshi and Katrina.

NuKiyoshi is more assertive, confident, and socially aware of the world around him. I could easily see regular Kiyoshi growing into someone like NuKiyoshi over the span of an eventful year or after some formative college experiences. Some pervy incels like Kiyoshi learn that their ways are wrong, alienating, and lead them to further social ostracization. That the only way to achieve their goals is to improve themselves socially, physically, and mentally. And that doing so, they just might snag a cute, brilliant, or superficial girlfriend. They go from being red pill manosphere fodder to good men confident in their masculinity.

NuKatrina is more demure, clingy, and prone to go on flights of fancy. I could easily see regular Katrina growing into someone like NuKatrina over the span of an eventful year or after some formative college experiences. Plenty of tomboys like Katrina undergo a reassessment of values after getting away from cliquey high school bullshit, learn more about feminism, snag a dorky boyfriend, or simply reach a less defensive place in their life. And while her inherited Kiyoshi-isms might shine through with her references to the fae or other fantasy creatures, that type of fixation is not too uncommon. Tarot, horoscopes, and other fantastical coping mechanisms tend to be decently popular with women, and anybody can fall into the healing crystal pipeline.

The characters of NuKiyoshi and NuKatrina know what happened, might even say that they are still “themselves” but it simply does not feel that way. When John and NuKatrina get together, they act like John and a girly-girl version of Katrina. When Kyoko and NuKiyoshi get together, they act like Kyoko and a more regimented version of Kiyoshi. This isn’t a bad or wrong way for characters to use and explore the possibilities of a magical space whatsit like this. Minor mental alterations would be an amazing thing. I think the idea of people wanting to become a better version of someone else is dope. But I don’t think the goals or priorities of this route coalesce together.

The implied tension a bet is just is not present throughout 90% of the route. The choice in perspective means the reader is missing out on many salient details that would come with a first-person memory swap story. And I don’t think the story fully works as a slow memory/identity/life swap à la Mem Swap or Leona Swap. Instead, I view it, at its core level, as the “John and K-Buds route” that I have been wanting from Student Transfer since… well, since I played Version 1.4 over a decade ago. Except by focusing on a long-term identity rewriting swap between two characters, the story is inherently limited in what it can do, in the antics it can pursue. Making the whole premise of this route feel at odds with what it gradually became.

It’s as if the creator took elements they liked, jammed them together, and was not quite sure how it would work out. Having gone through all of it, I am left with a murky uneasy feeling. Because there are so many things that I think could have and should have been done differently. …And also thoroughly impressed with a lot of what this route accomplished. While I have issues with the direction of the first half of the route, and broader structural issues with the main transformation, this route absolutely kills it with some scenes in the back half.

Seeing John act all lovey-dovey with NuKatrina as they decide to break the tension and start dating feels like the fulfillment of a romance fans have expected for a decade. Watching NuKiyoshi stand up to Sayaka, the girl Kiyoshi used to worship and Katrina despised, was a brilliant character moment on several levels. The day John spends as Kyoko was a wonderful dash of horror thrown in to spice up the days, and remind the reader of how horrifying this remote can be. (It makes you wonder if NuKiyoshi and NuKatrina are actually being honest about many things.) And watching the four as they enjoy the hot springs together adds a sense of finality to their journey that has not been delivered… outside of the Leona Swap route, I guess. But this one had actual hot springs antics. Including public masturbation, the greatest of all antics!

All of this is only enhanced by the four fairly expansive endings added in this update. While the short end, The House(Kat) Always Wins was a satisfying conclusion to The Bet that nicely wrapped up the story while furthering the relationship between some characters, these new endings go hard. They’re not afraid to have characters undergo substantial shifts in their lives, jump ahead months into the future, and show the lasting ramifications of the choices John made in molding his friends. Seeing relationships crystallize, watching these friends continue to make use of the alien remote to spice up their lives, and just watching these characters chill out after their journey. This epilogue approach something I love to see in TF works in general, and after such a lengthy story, I found each one of them to be a fulfilling conclusion in their own right.

The Bet is a good route that I find well worth playing for anybody who enjoys the characters that Student Transfer has established over the years. However, despite nailing the landing in the end, its juggling of concepts and creative choices left me finding the route to be less than the sum of its part. Reading less like a story that had a clear vision from start to end… and more like a story that pivoted its direction halfway through.

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Scarlet Fever Route

I am glad that creators are actually using Circe to tell stories that go against the grain, break the formula, and deliver whatever concept the writer wants to pursue. However, I am a bit miffed that none of them have gotten particularly far along in development, and that’s the case for the Scarlet Fever route. Fresh off of receiving his magical spellbook, John decides to test his luck summoning a demon and, like a dork, makes an easily exploitable wish. This time turning him into Katrina’s older sister, the college-aged Scarlet Morgan, and turning Scarlet into him.

Predictably, John is pissed at how his wish was interpreted, and proceeds to threaten Circe… only to be promptly punished. John then wakes up in Scarlet’s bed the following day, fully convinced that he is Scarlet, and he proceeds to navigate through her life with relative grace and comfort. He thinks himself as her, as a woman, and goes about her life largely as she would. Interacting with the Morgans, getting ready for school, putting in shifts at the café Scarlet works at, and doing her humdrum college exercises. Broadly speaking, the route just features John as a new Scarlet, or NuScarlet, navigating through her life as she always has, with the occasional roadblock or oddity.

NuScarlet lacks the same caffeine dependency as the original. She initially forgets that she is a college student with a questionable fashions sense. She’s hornier. Despite supposedly having culinary experiences, she’s more prone to making mistakes while cooking. And she even has a couple of John-ism thrown in. But from the outset, she is just a regular college girl, maybe just having an off day.

This is an interesting way to write a transformation story. The protagonist starts in a point where they are, 95% to 99% another person, unable to remember who they are and only met with faint hints about their former identity. It gives the reader a thorough glimpse into the life of a new character, seeing how she operates around her friends, family, and around this cute boy she met at work. All of which is meant to contrast John’s established day-to-day as a high school boy.

As it currently is, Scarlet Fever can easily be read as a story about a normal girl 90% of the time, ignoring or brushing past the hints that she might not have always been like this, until the beginning of day 6. At this point, Scarlet’s life has been fully established, and NuScarlet is introduced to Scarlet in John’s body, with the help of Holly, John’s sister. Scarlet in John tries to convince NuScarlet that they were body swapped. NuScarlet views this whole thing as an elaborate joke posed by Katrina, drops the conversation and… that’s all for now.

I really wish the dev team would stop releasing stubs like this. It’s frustrating when one starts a story only to get a big fat pending screen right as things get interesting, with no assurance that it will ever be continued. At least capping things off with a short end offers a reasonable conclusion to tide over a player and gives them a reason to get emotionally invested in a narrative. A narrative that won’t be continued for another 12 to 18 months, if you’re lucky.

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Kyoko Mistake Route

After being introduced in Version 7, the Kyoko Mistake route was one again given a significant expansion. One that fleshes out the long-term body swap the route is founded on, but stops roughly 15% to 20% shy from reaching its true conclusion, with no new endings to speak of. Considering this route’s length, and its many variants, I would not recommend this route to people who previously played it in Version 8, and instead wait until the route is, hopefully, completed in Version 10. The additions are very good, but going through a hours of story does not make for a particularly good time. Well, at least not for me.

Functioning as (somehow) the only Kyoko-centered route in Student Transfer, the Kyoko Mistake route sees John introduce his alien remote to his alien fanatic friend, and the two promptly begin experimenting with it. Transforming themselves, messing around with mind control, analyzing its applications, and looping the other K-buds into the fun. It takes a while to get going, with the writer, Calaman, feeling the need to lay a lot of foundation. Showcasing Kyoko’s love of science as she analyzes with what this space doohickey can do. Establishing what Kyoko’s day-to-day life is like, both at home and at school. And emphasizing the dynamics of John’s friend group, as every route can be someone’s first.

Following a series of micro-conflicts, experimentation, and a slideshow of events over a month, the story reaches the titular mistake, where Kyoko tries opening up the alien remote. This triggers the body swap function of the device, swapping John and Kyoko, and leaving the device partially broken. While the memory transfer, mind control, and sex inversion TF (or gender transformation if you dunno what a gender is) still work, while the cloning and swapping functions no longer work. Meaning John and Kyoko are stuck living as each other, with no feasible way to fix the remote, and little hope in contacting the aliens.

On a pure conceptual level, I love this path. One of the more trite ways a body swap story can end is if the body swapping device just breaks, and the affected parties just go on to live their new lives. It is a vast oversimplification that ignores so much tension, internal growth, dread, and learning curve of being someone else full-time and all-time. But Kyoko Mistake explores the immediate aftermath of this, spread out over several months to show the reader just how these characters are adapting.

During this adjustment period, they still have the alien remote, still have some of its functionalities, and… they have their friends. John and Kyoko stick together, Kiyoshi and Katrina help them however they can, and they still hang out together, letting them feel, even in some faint way, as if things are still the way they’re supposed to be. All thanks to the jovial insistence of Katrina and the much-needed comic relief of Kiyoshi. …Who spends much of the latter parts of this route as Kiyo, his ditzy anime cheerleader alter ego.

As a route, Kyoko Mistake is trying to do a lot, and I would say it manages to tackle the subject well, highlighting the highs and lows of this experience, and dividing them across three or four different variants of the main story.

It shows John struggles to adapt to feminine problems as he is pressured to pursue makeup and fashion in a way Kyoko never had, and suffers through his first period. Something I’m still surprised to see the dev team tackle. He grows to view Kyoko’s body as not the body of his childhood friend, but the body of a beautiful woman, and eventually his body. Kyoko’s problems become his vice versa, and he is ultimately responsible when it finally comes time to fix them through two comparably compelling paths. And John subtly shifts into a different social role, both in his friend group and among Kyoko’s online friend group, where he replaces her, leaving them none the wiser.

All of these things previously appeared in the Version 8 extension, and Version 9 predominately adds sprites for Kyoko’s parents— a much appreciated addition— along with a month’s worth of new scenes, mostly accessible by playing through one of four main variations. This makes the additions wider than they are longer, but they all feed into each other and the broader story this route represents. Everything introduced is consistent, shows off characters in different lights, and these alternate scenes are substantial enough to be well worth seeking out. From John going on a clothes shopping trip with Kyoko’s mother where he can choose to go shopping with Sayaka to the two completely different aquarium dates.

It all represents a high level of commitment to this story, to the variable juggling nature of visual novels, and the art of a long-term body swap story. And every one of the chapter-length sections this route introduced left me impressed. Unfortunately, the update ends at pretty much the worst place possible. Either right before a major scene meant to usher in the route’s conclusion, or before a scene meant to commemorate a relationship that the route has been building up to this point. The only thing worse than getting blue balled by a pending screen is getting blue balled by three, back-to-back-to-back.

Still, based on some of the Git activity, I am semi-confident that this route will be completed next time around. And if it sticks the landing, it should cement itself as another landmark top tier Student Transfer route.

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Joyride Route

Well, this is a fun one. The Joyride route has been in development for three years, seemingly functioning as as a side project for Luckysquid (Mem Swap, Leona Swap, Gyara Ara~), aka Gunzil (Mice Tea, Crossed Signals). One that they initially described as “the hot new route that nobody asked for where John and Kiyoshi are the horniest mother fuckers alive,” which is a fairly apt description, though not as horny as some of their other works. Joyride follows John as he introduces Kiyoshi to his magic spellbook, and more specifically the possession spell. Pretty much the same introduction as the Popular Possession route from Versions 5 and 6, but with wildly different results.

With this new power in hand, John and Kiyoshi proceed to go on possess ’em up school tour, hopping from body to body as they decide which class they want to be in, commenting on their frames, ranging from anime average to extra busty, and making fun out of the situation. Zooming around the school on Zoey’s Heely’s, dominating dodgeball as Izuna The Forbidden One, abusing power under the guise of Yui. Or give any number of lesser used female characters a modicum of screen time. Normally such antics would eventually result in some flavor of plot, conflict, or thing to do, but that’s the great thing about Joyride as a route. There is none!

Joyride is… just a joyride. Just a loosely connected series of events that fluctuate between horny posting, genuinely inspired erotic scenes, and just funny duddy nonsense that Luckysquid thought was neat. Luckysquid just got an idea, decided to run with it for as long as they felt was right, find some way to connect scene B to C, before moving onto their next fascination. I have gone through enough incomplete stories to have an idea of when a writer had no definite plans for how to continue, and here? There was definitely no plan. Just a string of scenes from a seasoned TSF pro.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this easily could feel like a string of disconnected ideas. Yet there is just enough connectivity, variety, exploration, and sense of escalation to make these billowing antics feel like they are adding up to something. Not necessarily in the route itself, but as something that respects and, in a sense, celebrates the long journey the dev team has gone on.

Mina and Phila are given a spotlight after largely being sidelined after Corivas’s banger Mina Possession route in Version 3. Connie is finally given some action again, with the route paying particular attention to her pigsty living condition and sloppy lifestyle in a way that neatly meshes with CaptainCaption’s Connie route from Version 2. Rachel Clark gets some action after being left abandoned right as she and John began a criminal empire. Vanessa’s failure on the math test, a core plot point in the Magic Delinquents route, is pointedly represented here. Sayaka’s party is a major plot point, and touches upon not only the Katrina Sayaka rivalry, but makes sure to touch upon the Kyoko bullying subplot as well. Even Carrie, John’s yandere stalker, gets a spotlight and gets to walk John to school.

It is a route that respects everything that came before it, was written with a high regard for continuity, ultimately feels like a celebration, and functions as an answer to what a certain subset of players have probably wanted. I don’t think that randomly possessing random women makes for the most riveting of storytelling, but I still dredge enough of the gulags to know this is a popular erotic TSF power fantasy for some people. Just them and their perverted bro going around, possessing women they know, random girls on the street, and have fun with their bodies.

Joyride is never malicious. It focuses on foreplay over any type of sex or masturbation, in paining a scene. And Kiyoshi’s depiction is firmly on the goofy roleplaying dork end of the spectrum, when he could have been insufferable. And by changing around the characters and precise thing the pair are doing, it never feels like it is being bogged down or running out of steam. The only points of criticism I have are that, one, it’s not over yet, somehow. And two, it tempted me with the coolest possession scenario possible when it handed John a bag of weed, only for him, like a spuddy potato, to not smoke it all. What, you can have 18 years old drink IPAs, but they can’t get blazed while eating pizza and watching porn parodies in the bodies of hot twentysomethings? Lame!

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Kiyoshi Wish Route

So… The Kiyoshi Wish route was not actually expanded upon in this update. It ends in the exact way. Instead, this update merely tweaks a few scenes and fully replaces one small chapter. So, if you played this route in Version 8, you’ve pretty much seen all there is to see here.

The replaced scene happened on day 4 where, a month before release, Luckysquid removed a scene where John possesses Cassie or Elizabeth, and Sillypirate replaced it with a new scene where John possesses Yui and worked on a history project with his Mom, brainwashed to think she’s Kiyoshi. I do not know why this scene was replaced unless there was some continuity error I was not privy to. I think the replaced scene is fine, being more goofy and less aligned with the same hectic voyeuristic joyride the rest of the route is so clearly fixated around. But I need to utterly reject any Cassie erasure for… personal reasons. If you’re a regular reader, you’d know why.

That being said, since the route is basically the same, here’s a lightly updated version of what I said about this route last time.

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Functioning as a Circe route, Kiyoshi Wish sees John use Circe’s boundless might to spread his powers with his buddy Kiyoshi. Except rather than just make Kiyoshi into a perverted wizard, Circe decides to initiate a soul exchange between Kiyoshi and John’s mother, Sandra. Which is like a body swap, but more thorough.

After Circe’s meddling, Kiyoshi is left bonded to Sandra’s body and Sandra is left bonded to Kiyoshi’s, with possession, transformation, and so forth not working on them. Furthermore, Kiyoshi now has Sandra’s immense magical powers, while Sandra has been brainwashed into thinking she’s Kiyoshi. Except she does not fully understand how Kiyoshi acts and needs to be taught how ‘she’ should behave. Which makes for a funny, if slightly perplexing, side-plot if nothing else.

Even playing through this route a second time, Kiyoshi Wish still feels more like a scenario more than a part of the base game. John immediately takes action and shows initiative from moment one, expressing urgency without getting stuck in his head. Kiyoshi manages to acclimate to Sandra’s life surprisingly well, and it feels like his mind has been altered, even though I don’t think Circe explicitly did anything to him.

It definitively states that the shrine maiden, Setsuna, lacks familiarity with magic— which is less interesting than if she did. John just blazes through his new power set and just casually drops the fact that he can make possession puppets. There’s a talking squirrel named Jerry who drinks Kiyoshi’s breast milk from the toilet. Which… people had to approve as part of the in-game canon. And, as one would expect from a route kickstarted by Luckysquid, it is dedicated to TOTAL MILF-IFICATION without any reservations or shame.

Now, I don’t bring this up as a negative. I love the fact that this game is so seasoned and comfortable with itself that it can just zoom through to the coolest cuts of its story, without prefacing everything in the route intro. (Because you can only write about someone discovering magic so many times before it gets a trifle bit dull.) And the developers waste basically no time getting this ball rolling, slamming into shit, and just taking the story in whatever wild direction they can think of. Even the more somber scenes carry a sense of crazy billowing in the background, and everything moves at such a good pace that I rarely found there to be a dull moment.

I’m glossing over the actual details and events of this route, as just about everything it does is dope and well worth seeking out for oneself. The presentation left me cackling with delight upon seeing the effort put into even tiny scenes. Every time I thought it was going to devolve into raw self-indulgence, it presented me with a novel new idea. And while it is far from being complete, what’s there is simply dope.

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Yui Swap Route

The Yui Swap Route probably the most curious additions that I’ve seen to Student Transfer in the past few years. Not because the idea is so ‘out there,’ rather it’s the opposite. A lot of routes released over the past few years have been about expanding things, introducing new characters, expanding on established ones, or pursuing new out there ideas, like Sitcom or Alternate Yuunaverse. Yui Swap, however, is functionally another branch off of the Monitor, or Yui Monitor, route that was completed with the release of Version 4.

Monitor is one of my favorite routes in the game. A route that thoroughly established and explored Yui’s character as she worked intimately with John. And a route that sufficiently explored what John and Yui could get up to with the alien remote. As for the magic side, the Yui Spellbook route was another exploration of John and Yui, one that had John possess Yui repeatedly, though mostly going to school to school as her. The Yui Spellbook route was never completed, despite having had some unpublished writing and an excellent continuation scenario from Applemelon that I reviewed back in 2019.

Considering these factors, and the state of other parts of the game, I would not consider a Yui Swap route to be a priority for this project. But in a collaborative project like this, if someone wants to work on something, you let them. And this is what Raines, the lead writer of Magic Allie, wanted to do, I guess. As for what they had planned for this route… that’s a bit beyond me, I’m afraid.

The Yui Swap route only lasts the first day, so there is not much to chew on, and what’s there… feels like something I’ve seen again and again between the main game and the many scenarios I’ve played over the years. After having the remote confiscated, John swaps with Yui, impresses her with his spontaneous Yui-ness, leading the two to spend the rest of the school day swapped. John does so, enjoying the mild thrill of being the Student Council Boss and sights of the girl’s locker room, but when it comes time to swap back, Yui accidentally does something that overwrites her memory, making her think she had always been John.

John in turn needs to pretend to be Yui, while dealing existential dread of the situation. Did Yui erase her own memories? Is he actually Yui, but brainwashed to think she was John? How is he, a mild waster, going to live up to the standards of an overachiever? All of which is broken up by brief reprieves with Student Council member Flavia, Yui’s mother Yuuna, and Yui’s sister Natsumi. There is nothing this route does wrong. It establishes a solid introduction, good conflict, and hues of mystery as the brainwashed Yui claims to know nothing of the device. But it stops just when it gets started.

In its current form, the Yui Swap route is more of a taste test of a story, and while it is promising, I am tired of saying that after this game has been in development for a decade. I’ve seen John and Yui get into scrambles. I am open to more scrambles. But I want to see those scrambles in full, not imagine what could be.

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Ten Years of Success, and What More Can Be Done

Having gone through the major additions of Version 9, I am left feeling rather mixed about the current state of Student Transfer after its ten eventful years of development. I still love the game, am deeply grateful that it exists, but the fact that it’s been around for ten years and still hasn’t done or achieved certain things, even basic things, drives me kinda sorta nuts.

Starting with the positives, I continue to be impressed by the dedication of the dev team. Student Transfer is a collaborative project where the contributors devote hundreds of hours and write novel length scripts, and engage in a lot of finnicky animation in order to create something. Nobody owns the story they are working towards, they must adhere to continuity, a set of personalities and rules, and most people who experience their work won’t even know how to tell who made what.

The fact that anything was released back in November 2015 after just a couple months was an impressive feat. The fact that the project is still alive, still putting out semiregular releases, a decade later, is something I would have never even allowed myself to imagine. The depth, length, and complexity of the current game speaks volumes of the dedication of the current dev team and the rigor of former dev team members, who made a foundation worth building on. They established a platform for TF storytellers, giving them the tools, characters, and inspiration needed to create hundreds of unique scenarios, some of which are dope as hell. And the game even served as a training ground for other visual novel creators who branched out to start their own titles, such as reDreamer, Crossed Signals, and Possession Scroll Tales.

To every current and former dev team member, I want to earnestly thank you for your work. You have played a role in inspiring a new generation of TF creators, given them the tools to express their own ideas in a way that they might have never been able to. …In addition to creating the singular most impressive TF project I have ever seen. And it does without saying that, as a TSF creator, Student Transfer has remained a huge inspiration of mine for the past decade.

That being said, I have continued to be underwhelmed by what each new version of Student Transfer has to offer. Version 9 only added one finished route and continuations for four others. Many routes that looked like they would be expanded with each new release were left by the wayside. And two incomplete routes were actually removed from the base game— the Maria Mania and Natsumi routes— both converted into scenarios. Not for any troublesome reasons per the dev team’s scenario preface. Rather, they were removed because they were stubs that did not really mesh with the rest of the game and nobody wanted to continue them.

And this sense that “nobody wanted to do this so it didn’t get done” lies at the heart of my overarching grievance with Student Transfer as a project. The dev team has done a lot… but I also wish that they would do more.

In the game, I still think it’s ridiculous that some routes were left unfinished for so long, while new routes keep getting populated. The Katrina route concluded on a cliffhanger since Version 4. The Yui Possession route has abandoned since V3. Holly, the third character seen in the game, is still a distant figure whose background details lies scattered in other routes. Carrie, the fourth character seen in the game, exists mostly as a specter of an idea. The Mystery route feels like it should have been a necessary route to conclude to commemorate the tenth anniversary, a route meant to replace and redo the messy original route of the game. Yet it has not been touched beyond some light edits, as the writer wrote half a day and then… vanished?

I understand that there is a limit to what can be done, as people keep leaving the project or going inactive as they pursue their lives. But I also find the way Student Transfer is publicly handled to be… questionable. So much of their community is isolated on a Discord server or in the aging infrastructure of the TFGamesSite forums, and while they have an official website, it kinda sucks.

The “Samples” section still features the same screenshots from Version 1 or 2 of the game, released over 9 years ago, before characters’ school outfits were replaced with uniform… uniforms. The dev team is listed via a crappy word sphere that displays names devoid of any context, even the length of time they were on the team for. When just a basic summary of their duties and duration on the project would be infinitely more professional, and informative. Again, the scenarios page has not been updated since October 2024, and all links require people to make a TFGS account to access. Which was too many barriers even when the list was up-to-date. And while the dev team launched a YouTube channel to show off the game, they have not used it for anything other than a basic trailer and a V9 announcement trailer.

So much information needs to be learned through exploration and by talking to members of a community. The more time goes on, the more need there is for a project like this to openly host that information. To describe what routes are in the game. To highlight scenarios that caught the dev team’s attention, lest they fall into irrelevance and their download links rot away. To show off this huge-ass game to the public internet. And have proper posts on their website that tell people basic information.

I consider that to be simply responsible considering the project’s scale at this point, rather than keeping so much information locked to TFGS and Discord. Both of which could easily be erased, leaving behind zero archives. Something that is especially pertinent in my mind after the creator of Press-Switch had to erase everything last year.

I understand not wanting to advertise this game widely, especially given the puritanical stint we are seeing across the broader internet. I know that Student Transfer still attracts loads of downloads every month. But I think it’s foolish to underestimate how much widely available official resources can improve people’s experience with a game. I basically said all of this last time, and while some improvements have been made, I still think the dev team should be doing more. Because there are a lot of people who are going to be overwhelmed by the nonsense spaghetti navigation, random route development, wildly unpredictable content, and backlog of over 200 scenarios.

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Conclusion

I might complain, I can criticize, but at the end of the day, Student Transfer is Student Transfer. While I might always want more, want the game to be more, it is also such a large, robust, and storied creation that it is simply a dream game of mine. It is a platform for TSF writings that has grown and lasted well beyond my wildest expectations, and delivered a deeply impressive amount of quality stories, both in and out of the base game. I am continuously grateful to the dev team for supporting this title, and I hope that this project continues well into its second decade and beyond.

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