June 2023 essentially ended with dueling romance games published in North America by Aksys and Idea Factory; both focused on budding romance and acting. While Charade Maniacs put the focus on romance and made the acting a threat, Jack Jeanne is a calmer title that focuses on musical theater to the point that progression in the game is based largely on performance in rhythm games. The other major difference between the two is length: most of the visual novels I’ve played on Switch would be a couple hundred pages as a real book. Jack Jeanne is basically War and Peace by comparison.

Jack Jeanne takes place at a fictional drama (high) school in Japan called Univeil Theatre Academy, where the main character (changeable default first name: Kisa) once witnessed their brother shine as one of the school’s greatest performers. Naturally, they want to attend Univeil themselves, especially as it may help them find their brother who vanished off the face of the earth following his graduation. There are two complications: The brother’s disappearance has caused the family to not be able to afford it normally… and Univeil is an all-boys school. The principal does take pity on Kisa and invites them to attend on three conditions: They have to live up to their brother’s acting skill, they can’t reveal who their brother is - and of course, they can’t reveal their gender identity. With the weight of these expectations on their shoulders, Kisa has to survive a full school year and show that they can sing, dance, and act with the best of them - maybe finding love along the way with one of her six classmates.

Credit to this guy for holding onto the secret, considering he's your childhood friend and all.

When I say Kisa has to survive a school year, I mean it; the game starts in April and goes until the following March, to the point where I had to resist the urge to make Persona comparisons. During the week, you can assign Kisa to one of six classes based on a particular stat - and you can set the plan for the whole week automatically on Monday and have it “run” through the week. Unfortunately, Kisa only has 10 points of stamina to spend on lessons, and attempting to push her into classes with no stamina runs the risk of failing the lesson so it’ll be necessary to take a rest day every week and a half or so. The year is focused on five different plays: the “newbie” performance, then a summer, fall, and winter play before the “graduation” play in the early part of the following year. Each week, there will be cutscenes building up to the play, and weekends let you build up relationships with the other students, along with opportunities to “rehearse” the rhythm segments before having to do them in the play proper.

There are two different types of rhythm games depending on the task you’re doing: a “singing” performance is similar to Rock Band DS in the need to slide between tracks on the beat:

While the dancing performance is a timed button press game similar to the early Switch game Superbeat Xonic:

The main story features three different difficulty levels for the rhythm sections - Normal is perfect for those of you who are just in it for the story, while the Expert difficulty in those above videos works well for those who have the reflexes to SS-rank songs. (There’s an unlockable fourth difficulty level called “Jack Jeanne” which unlocks per performance after the play is completed in story mode.) In the live performance, you can get assists from a suitor that are often needed to get the highest possible rank, which is vital as you’re graded on performance and one of the requirements to get a romantic end with one of the suitors is to get top rank in the winter performance.

Yeah, the winter performance. The “common route” in this game is about 80% of the school year, and it’s not easily skipped like in most games because of the format. Although the lessons are color-coded for each of the suitors so focusing on say, “spirit” can get you on the road with the childhood friend character, there comes a point where you max out the relationship with them. In the case of the aforementioned childhood friend, that was sometime in late summer and there was no movement on the romance end for months at a time. At least the nature of the setting (a school play) means that there’s no random villain of the week to deal with out of nowhere which is nice. Jack Jeanne is a very positive game, even if I did slip up and refer to a lead male character (a “Jack Ace” in the game’s terms, a lead female role is an “Al Jeanne”) by something with a completely different meaning when saying it out loud.

Given that the game is focused around music and performance, it’d be vital to have strong voice actors who can also sing - and thankfully Jack Jeanne delivers on that front. It helps when it’s the first game from the music/VN hybrid specialists at Broccoli to ever be localized. Although the setting might lead to a lot of background reuse, it turns out that Univeil has a full town nearby and their scenery designers are some of the best I’ve seen anywhere given the variety of plays the school puts on in the run of a year. There also weren't any text issues that I could find, which given the sheer length of the story might be classified as a minor miracle.

I did have experience with high school acting, though not in the musical sense; mine was more focused on the Fire Emblem-style commedia dell'arte. (It was also the worst experience I had with a Fiona until 2022, but that’s a story for another time.) I don’t think the backlog will ever let me see every suitor’s ending in Jack Jeanne, but the ones I did reach were worth the extreme amounts of effort I had to put in. And it's nice that we have a proof of concept for "replicating physical performance in a rhythm game" like I asked for last month. Still, hopefully there’s a nice long break before the next rhythm novel because I definitely need one.