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.

Tales of John the Wizard by IoloNight (PaintedNecroz)

 

The issues that a lot of scenarios experience are the lack of editing and rushed pacing, scenario authors end up writing things rapidly without giving themselves space for proofreading or animation testing and this can end up in static animations without transitions that can make a scenario feel unnatural and even create recurrent reading issues like lack of periods (even beyond the grammar limits that can still happen to writers with English as a secondary language like us).

Unfortunately, Tales of John the Wizard is one of those scenarios, and its amount of ideas doesn't actually compensate for the lack of editing either way.

After a fun self-conscious introduction from John and Sandra, the story starts with John discovering his powers and trying to decide who is the best person he can talk about it, the player is given to chose between 3 options, visiting either Brad, Katrina, or Kiyoshi.

The Katrina route ends up in John morphing himself into his girl version to prove to her about the existence of magic, after some teasing from Katrina, the route ends in a placeholder.

With Brad, John decides not to morph himself because he doesn't feel comfortable as a girl (even when he did change himself in the Katrina route without issues), and Brad volunteers to be the subject of the spell instead. Apparently Zoey comes in and reveals she was listening them all along, after seeing Brad as her little sister, she takes him to try her clothes upstairs.

This is a fun idea I haven't seen explored in other scenarios yet, Zoey seeing Brad becoming a small girl like her, and even taking the initiative instead of obeying him in anything he says since he is "the big bro", PaintedNecroz also has a fun take on Zoey, who thinks John used magic on Kiyoshi to make him go away every time she approaches him.

All of these things would have made for a fun route, but this route also ends right there on a placeholder.

The last route is the most interesting of the three, after meeting up with Kiyoshi in his house to reveal him he has magic, Kiyoshi tells him he has something to reveal as well; while some people might think Kiyoshi has gotten the remote, what actually Kiyoshi got was the company of an alien bunny girl that was exiled from the moon and has to stay with Kiyoshi from now on, making both of them require the help of John's magic abilities.

The scenario ends up there in all three routes without any actual development from them. PaintedNecroz mentioned making the 21-minute scenario in no less than 1 hour and a half counting reading the guide and so forth, and it hasn't been updated ever since.

While even short scenarios are still recommended due to the small ideas they propose, there are no ideas that actually stand out aside from the Kiyoshi route, making the scenario in general completely skippable for any readers in most of the cases.