Thursday, March 25, 2021
Into the Janeverse by Clavietika the Gynaecoid
Friday, March 12, 2021
In Praise of Being by Clavietika the Gynaecoid
Sunday, March 7, 2021
Help Me Be Happy by JeffCharFlame
Using ST characters and backgrounds (since this was done in the era where no custom assets could be added), the scenario presents us a set of all brand new original characters: Jeff and his friends James, Tessa, and Jadon, as well his family and classmates.
We get a lot of information and exposition with every character and then, the remote is introduced to us by Tessa, who found it on her home's door. The characters believe her right away and a swap between Tessa and Jeff is done for the day.
What follows next is a casual story of friends that want to have fun with the remote swapping and switching their sexes. In one of the routes, Jeff tells Tessa that he wants to stay as her, following a placeholder.
In the longest route, Jeff confesses wanting to stay as a girl, which his (her) friends accept right away, Jeff switches as a girl but at the mall, he decides to switch back for a moment as a man. At that moment, he meets a girl and takes her to his room to talk more with her.
Based on what I can see, and one of the sentences Jeff says as a guy "Would you rather be in love with a girl or stay as a girl?" Since he knows that switching back and forth will just damage the remote, unfortunately, the scenario ends there and has been abandoned. What we see now is just characters doing things, with no actual plot whatsoever.
What the scenario has to offer at the moment has very low stakes, the characters act way too casually and calmly, always supporting and agreeing with each other, even when Jeff and Tess were a couple before, they still hang out as friends, and even James who knows this does not seem to care, even when swapping bodies between each other.
Jeff, or Jess, mentioned that the characters were being too nice to her, which is when she realized she had given them a mental command without realizing when she was about to sleep, the characters get out of their apparent trance but still act relatively the same way towards Jeff, with no drama and a lot of comprehension.
Is it a recommendable trans story? Well, even when the character of Jeff/Jess is acceptable as a trans portrayal, very little of the social worries about being transgender are given to the audience to identify with, her parents are gone for the weekend, so they don't have anything to worry about, aside from some indecision from Jeff, we don't see too much about the mental issues he goes through, and the story doesn't do anything with the transgender element aside from the initial confession from Jeff. Even then, I think it makes for a cute and wholesome time.
If you want some slice of life story without too much conflict, I would say you can give this a shot, but even then you have to take into account that has no more than around 1 hour of content and it doesn't seem is going to get an update ever again.
Saturday, March 6, 2021
Stuck by MissCelle
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.
Friday, February 5, 2021
The Heaven We Were Promised by PhaseJumps (Lotus)
Those who normally enjoy MTF TG due to wish-fulfillment reasons will find in this scenario a nice experience that talks about the most delicate and ladylike aspects of a female transformation.
The premise of this scenario follows John becoming one of his classmates and getting stuck for physical reasons that will not allow him to say use the transformation spell back. John will end up looking for help for one of his friends, Setsuna, and spend a girly moment in the night while they both try to discuss an option to turn this back to normal.
The scenario counts also with a protagonist that goes deep in introspection of all his actions, and even when for some this will be considered off-character it adds a lot of personality to the story since these introspective thoughts deal with the meaning of TF and TG in general for people who like it for its psychological reasons.
As a bonus, the spellbook is described as a science fiction artifact rather than a magical plot device, explaining its mechanisms and functioning as if it was a device with very advanced technology rather than just a fantasy item, people who like science fiction more might enjoy more this take on the book and it shows how fantasy and science fiction are differentiated in the amount of explaining the author wants to give the audience about their own world.
Even when the scenario has a lot of good points, it ends very soon leaving the audience merely in the prologue of the story and leaving a lot of questions to answer. One of the most critical faults of the scenario is how according to the author John is written as an egg in the scenario, his feelings towards femininity in itself are not explored until the spell has been used; this along with the tags Slow Mental TF of the scenario, might make the audience believe that John is going towards mental changes and identity death caused by the spell he has used.
The scenario has been abandoned, but or has enough little moments to be recommend alone if you like MTF stories, wholesome TF stories, and wish fulfilment.