The creep factor persists: Meet your weekly in-game targets and you'll be rewarded with new costumes for your student. I have never felt that with typical video games. When she gets a bit too close, you feel uncomfortable. If there's one redeeming feature here, it's that you feel like Hikari is in the room and that you should obey social conventions (get too close and she will complain). Oh, and she still really, really loves softball. She always eats breakfast, loves manga comics. She'll tell you again and again that it's weird to have a home tutor in her room and that she loves softball. even though the timeline is reset each time. This depends on how smart your lesson plans were though it's hard to see the reasoning behind what makes a lesson successful or not.Īfter the eventual test result, you can repeat the whole thing again, this time armed with leveled-up lesson plans. Then, after six lessons, you meet her one last time to hear the results of her midterm. But even these hidden scenes aren't exactly thrilling when written: You share headphones while listening to music, she drops her pencil, she searches for her favorite comic book or brushes some virtual fluff from your virtual shoulder. Marginally more interesting scenes are randomly drip-fed in throughout this daily grind. However, irrespective of what you choose to do during her lesson (vocally cheering her on, introducing a rapid-fire quiz, lowering the air-con, or even turning the lights off), it has no bearing on what you see in the next scene. In the middle of study, the game lets you improve (or lower) the odds of a successful lesson by changing the learning environment. (It's fortunate, perhaps, that you don't have to actually sit through the multi-hour lessons.) The gameplay consists of choosing a lesson (logic, memory, etc.) and conversation starter (family, school, sports) with Hikari, listening through greetings and some small talk, rubber-stamping a lesson report card (one of the rare in-game interactions) and waiting for scenes to fade in and out.
In reality, it's not much of a game - more like one of the dullest PSVR experiences I've seen yet. You play as a tutor hired to help Japanese high school student Hikari improve her grades. Summer Lesson is the most polished - and the weirdest - PlayStation VR game you can't buy outside Japan. (Factoring in some time for Rez Infinite, of course.) Summer Lesson Here's how they fared over a weeklong playthrough. From awkward teacher role-play with a Japanese schoolgirl, to anime J-Pop idol concerts, digitized musicians, Godzilla and virtual karaoke rooms (!), these regional exclusives very much cater to the locals.
Fortunately for you, I've got one, and have played through some of this Japan-only content.
While standalone (much less stand-out) games are few, there are still handful of experiences that are only playable with a Japanese PlayStation account. The virtual reality headset launched in Sony's homeland with several titles on the PlayStation Store that are not available elsewhere. It's something you may have noticed with PlayStation's VR debut in both Europe and the US - and that's even more true for Japan. Sony's lineup of games and demos is often slightly different depending on the region.