Stuck by MissCelle

 

Published even before the Student Transfer Scenario feature was released, Stuck has been immortalized as the first scenario ever made and is now bundled with all Student Transfer versions aside from other scenarios that are chosen for each major version of the game. Is it really worth to withstand the test of time at a difference of other releases? Well, not really.

The scenario starts with a very fun concept: Serena, the naked bunny girl from the sprite files, telling us what can happen if you make wishes you might not be ready for, the characters act as if they were in a theatre function (which is a clever function taking into account in Student Transfer we always have static backgrounds and we only see the front of all characters), missing some of their lines and their cues.

Dominic's body is granted the ability to swap the consciousness it resides in, so Dominic can swap once but the person that swaps with him will retain his ability. After this, we are given 2 placeholders and two routes, the two placeholders are Rita and Jess.

Now, in the first route, which is really just a short end, Dominic swaps with a maid he sees on the street, tired of being a maid in a place she doesn't like, she decides to live Dominic's life, Dominic, who panics and doesn't want to go to the mansion she hates, but the maid refuses, offering him to be her maid instead, Dominic ends up as the maid of his previous modem, giving him fellatio.

The second route is the longest and the most curious of the two. Basically, Dominic tells Stevie, one of his friends at work, about his powers, which makes Stevie reveal to him something, that she is actually trans, and wants to be called Stephanie.

The fact that the first scenario ever made is a scenario with an explicitly trans main character is something I find really curious, trans characters are usually never mentioned in TF material, at least not until recent times, since writers usually depend on the character's refusal to accept their new sex to create conflict (which I find not strictly necessary, but that is topic for another day). Anyhow, is the portrayal good enough? Well, as you might expect, it isn't. 

Stephanie uses words like being a real girl and decides to trick a girl into a place she knows so she accepts swap with her body, allowing her to take it instead. Once Carla discovers Stephanie is AMAB, she complains and Dominic tells her to try out being a boy for a few days; since Stevie is younger than her, she can try and live again, go to college and grow up in the right way, which Carla surprisingly accepts.

Afterward, Dominic hooks up with Stephanie in her new body, and they live happily ever after. In the epilogue, Serena decides to cancel her class and is fired from her job as a teacher.

I was actually expecting this scenario to fuck up even further with the portrayal (something like mind break, maybe I have seen too much TF with that approach) but overall is still pretty bad. Transgender people wouldn't really try to steal the body of another cis person to make their desire come true, even more, when they could simply swap with another transgender person of the other sex. Stephanie could have simply found a trans guy and ask him to swap, but I suppose the idea of having two trans people swap doesn't make good enough conflict for such short time period. 

I was trying to get the appeal of the scenario to see how I can recommend it. Clearly, if you want a trans-wish-fulfillment story, the language is going to through you off, and even if you understand Stephanie's wish to be a cis woman, her attitude to things doesn't allow you to have empathy for her, so as a trans story, I don't really recommend it.

For people who look for TF to get a quickie done, I would say the maid TF route is kind of appealing (being the maid of your own body sounds really hot) but even then it ends up just as it starts.

If you like body swap stories and do not care about the trans narrative, you still have to take into account that the story has no lewd content, it's just a person swapping with another and then being happy, and even when some psychological conflict is shown when Stephanie steals Carla's body, things get solved quickly and we do not get to see if Carla at the end asks to accept become a boy forever days after. Still, you might like it if you want a simple and short body swap story with a good ending and some comedy sprinkled in between.

Overall I found Stuck lacking in appeal to people and even substance. The only reason the devs like it is because it was the first one and it was done before time. Although in my opinion, it is not worth keeping it bundled just for that.

As an addition, I found the story of this scenario really curious, I have said it before in the review, and is that writers think having transgender characters being part of a TF event is not worth it because a trans character would simply accept the fact and become happy without leaving any room of conflict. Of course, that is an outrageous lie, as I have been trying to show in my scenario In Praise of Being, there can be a lot of conflicts even with self-acceptance overall.

Overall, Stuck, aside from being recommendable to a probably very small and niche group of people, stays as a simple curiosity in Student Transfer history.

Maidenswap v5 by Choripankiller

 

Featured as the main route for v5, Maidenswap exploded in popularity everywhere and became one of the fans favorites in most cases, offering some missing background for Holly, John's sister, as well expanding the characters of Cassie and Elizabeth, Holly's friends.

While I think this scenario is a fantastic option for people who look for wish fulfillment and cheesy stories, it fails to add the depth it wants to achieve for people who are into TF interested in the psychological aspects of it, the relationships are artificial, and overall, it falls just as a beautiful lie.

Now, this review will contain spoilers past this segment since it will discuss things related to the plot, if you like to wish fulfillment and do not look for TF for the depth, I still recommend it, when I did read it I felt a lot of emotions because I enjoy the content of that kind as well in a certain measure.

The first thing that comes to mind is that there is no character development from the characters in almost all situations, while Holly accepts her identity and opens out to people, this happens too fast and the acceptance from her part works surprisingly easy. She even accepts the fact that John and Cassie might had been dating a year ago when she was rejected with a drink, there are no consequences for them, even when Holly was initially the focus o the route.

Elizabeth, one of the main characters, stays the same through the entire plot, probably because the devs wanted to give her more protagonism in Maidswap, but even then, she ends up things that might seem out of character for her, like erasing her friend's memories at the end, a decision she takes without consulting her. 

Aside from the ending Maid(en) from Scratch, where John and Cassie decide to start their relationship all over learning that they should get to know each other in a more normal way, the two main characters do not see any character growth through all the route, Cassie does not learn about her or about other people, and either end up breaking up with John for lack of trust or decides to forgive him. The worst one would be John, who ends up even doing some terrible things like mind controlling Elizabeth and hiding the remote from Cassie in one of the ends without consequences, again, not bad for wish fulfillment, but bad for a story of another kind, John does not feel remorse for his actions and lives with Cassie's stolen life.

One might argue that he grows in some of the bad endings like Where the Was Fire, Ashes Remain, but that's just because he is forced to learn when Cassie and Elizabeth destroy the remote and kick him out of the house.

Another big issue that this route suffers is how casual the characters are about the situations they go through, sure, Cassie cries, there is drama, frustration, and eventual acceptation, but a lot of stuff seems to be skipped over or relegated to happen offscreen. Once the long swap starts, John doesn't even try to contact his regular friends, telling Cassie to live his life for him, John does the same, and just after some years, they decide to live more "as themselves", even then, they don't seem to care about their old relationships anymore, everything in their previous lives got shifted aside. 

When John swaps back to his original body in one of the endings, he casually goes out with his friends and tells them the truth, who doubt at first and still talk to him normally, why? Because apparently replacing John with Cassie doesn't make really a difference. Even John says once "Well, there is no class at university today, what should I do?" Implying that he doesn't care about the career Cassie had chosen for him or that Cassie chose something John would study and had been studying as if she was him instead.

Another issue is that most characters have the same way of speech, or rather, their personalities are rather similar in most of the cases. With the main four friends, you can differentiate the personalities of each character: John, casually standard, Katrina is playful, she teases, Kiyoshi is forceful and annoying, and Kyoko is shy and reserved, she is the nerd girl of the group. With Maidenswap we have three Johns that are all casually standard to something, they do not have a recognizable voice between themselves, and that makes the characters not feel alive, all of them have very few defects, (aside from John in some endings, and controlled by the player), Cassie never does anything against John, and solves the misunderstanding with Holly in a single day and in the most assertive way, Cassie says she has done bitchy things, but the player never gets to see any of that, overall, it feels like the whole dynamic of their relationships was very artificial, a perfect story about perfect people.

One last thing I would mention is how I disagreed with the ending when John said that he and Cassie were not as compatible as they thought, I said, yes! You have hit the nail on the head! Their dynamic is flawed, and overall it really feels that they got close together only as a coping mechanism, I thought it was a perfect conclusion, it was difficult to accept, but it was something, they would teach them about how a swap can affect their thoughts, it would have made the trauma really mean something because they were living something they didn't really feel, they would have learned, they would have grown. Unfortunately, Chori decided to go for a more idealistic ending, saying that they both had lived great moments together, in the endings Cassie defends John, what does she say? He is gentle, loyal, a good man, just what any other girl would say of a generic anime protagonist, that he is basically "a good person". I found the couple to be quite dysfunctional and I didn't really get to dig completely their happy ending.

This is an issue that a lot of people will find themselves with, sometimes the conflict of a story will be ultimate, romance, but the issue is that John has other romance routes already in the game, he has Monitor, where he gets to know more Yui, a classmate, that makes a bit more sense, it is the usual school first love, he has Connie, that actually shows how a relationship-centered by the remote can end in tragedy, he has Katswap, and more, and it seems that a lot of the routes could end up in that, John should not hook up with all the girls in the game, and he clearly shouldn't have ended up with a person as Cassie, which has no real reason to be with John, she is a college student, a rich person that wants to be a fashion designer, John is a middle-class high school student passionate about videogames. If you wanted me to believe their relationship was genuine you should have used something stronger.

Overall, I do not think Maidenswap is bad and it has actually a lot to offer to ST and TF fans, but, failing its original purpose, it works mostly just as a wish-fulfillment story, relegated of logic at the very end.