That’s where the dungeon crawl comes in and where you spend the majority of your time. During the visual novel portions, you spend your school day cultivating relationships with students and faculty, whom you try to charm enough to go with you into the spooky cemetery at night after class. The unlikely combo of visual novel and dungeon crawl makes for a surprisingly harmonious partnership, and you should wish them a long and happy life together. Looking past that issue, Kowloon High-School Chronicle presents some interesting twists on typical RPG conventions. It would have been easy to avoid the game’s questionable setup by clarifying that the main character is also a teenage student, but that is never communicated. The game is not really a dating sim, but it is uncomfortable when characters express their romantic interest and you’re expected to respond.
But when he is inevitably discovered by several of his classmates, it’s a “how do you do fellow kids?” moment. Presumably, he’s young enough that he thinks he can believably pass as a student. But there’s nothing to indicate this guy’s age.
It’s possible he’s an Akechian (I’m inventing Persona 5-based words) teenage prodigy who just so happens to be so accomplished that he’s a professional in his field while still in high school. It doesn’t sit right that your character, who’s apparently a grown man, is going “undercover” at a high school. Does something sound a bit wrong about that? Why a high school would need its own cemetery raises questions, and you’re looking for answers, going undercover as a student in a graveyard grift. Fresh from archaeological success in Egypt, your next assignment from the Rosetta Society espionage agency sends you to Kamiyoshi Academy boarding school in Shinjuku, Japan (not Kowloon, which is in China), where you race the evil Relic Dawn organization to locate an ancient relic deep beneath the school’s cemetery. In this odd mix of visual novel and old-school dungeon crawl, you’re a treasure hunter like that guy named after one of the United States who’s always jonesing for more adventures.
Kowloon High-School Chronicle debuted on the PlayStation 2 in Japan in 2004 and has finally made its way to the rest of the world. “An unpolished gem will never be a treasure.” –The Book of Rites