My Academy’s Special Place (Gakkou no Seiiki) is the third and final, title in feng’s ‘Special Place’ series. Brought to us by Sekai Project/Denpasoft, this standalone visual novel is more about the lewd than lore but does offer a few sweet moments along the way.
Twice the Heroines. Twice the Fun.
Unlike the previous titles in this series, My Academy’s Special Place focuses on two heroines instead of one.
These two heroines are near opposites. Maika is petite to the point of near flatness and a rather extreme otaku, while Yaeka is busty and has no personal interest in otaku topics. Despite many more differences, they have one thing in common; they love Youhei in their own way.
Under One Roof
My Academy’s Special Place is no literary masterpiece, but the common route nicely introduces both Maika and Yaeka and sets up a situation for events to progress quickly. Maika has run away from home after an argument with her mother, so Youhei and Yaeka take her in. This leads to a few nice domestic moments with Maika and some amusing moments dealing with a drunk Yaeka.
It throws in silly situations along the way, but it occasionally gets serious, dealing with family issues with both characters. I felt that Maika’s story was the most interesting here and took center stage in the common route too. Yaeka’s felt more abstract, being more about her feelings than a problem to solve.
Fans of the previous titles in feng’s Special Place series will see familiar characters pop up too. My Academy’s Special Place works more as an alternate universe than a sequel though, with the events of the other games not having happened.
Maika
Maika is a half-Japanese girl with a sleepy voice and a habit of mixing in the occasional Russian phrase. Youhei became friends with her when she came over on an exchange program and her strong interest in Akiba reignited Youhei’s own childhood interest in spending time there.
She’s very into anime goods, calling herself a second-generation otaku, inheriting the interest from her father. She buys every doujinshi she sees and owns over 100 dakimakura.
Maika clearly loves Youhei from the start. She even says so in the very first scene, albeit in Russian so he can’t understand. Sadly, while he’s learned some Russian due to his friendship with her, that’s not one he knows. Still, we can see that she cares deeply about him. She’s very much the devoted loving type.
She’s certainly an oddball though, which can be amusing at times. She doesn’t think anything of walking around half-naked and seems to lack common sense on occasion. Still, some of the moments in her route are rather touching. One minor change from her character in My Girlfriend’s Special Place is that she’s notably more interested in lewd media and topics here.
Yaeka
Yaeka is their homeroom teacher and is known as a somewhat strict cool beauty, despite her hidden personality as a lazy drunkard. More importantly to Youhei though, she’s his blood-related older sister.
She wants to make sure to separate their teacher-student relationship at school and sibling relationship at home, though this does lead to a few little discrete jabs at each other along the way.
Yaeka’s feelings are less clear at first, though she’s always very affectionate while drinking. These moments could be funny, but I appreciated seeing her play the reliable older sister at times too.
I expected Yaeka’s story to revolve around the issues of dating a blood-related sibling, but this was actually fairly limited. If anything, the fact that their younger sibling who also loves Youhei might find out was more of a concern. It sets up another storyline too, but doesn’t do much with it.
Adult Situations
The characters in My Academy’s Special Place are nice to spend time with and I found Maika particularly sweet, but the story isn’t too special. So what makes this visual novel worth playing? As you might have guessed from a series with titles like My Girlfriend’s Special Place and My Little Sister’s Special Place, the adult content is a highlight here.
There are two routes and three endings included. If you want to explore these further, we’ve written a brief guide covering choices and the adult patch.
After getting onto a route, it soon gets the other character out of the way to move onto the adult scenes quickly and keeps throwing them at you frequently until the end. Maika even references it in the game, saying that a confession can lead to sex these days.
Each heroine acts differently which I appreciated. Maika is rather forward and interested in trying all the things she’s read about in her doujinshi but lets Youhei take the lead, whilst Yaeka wants to be the one taking charge as the older sibling. In Yaeka’s case, it even has her take an instructional tone with some dirty talk thrown in at first, while Maika is more about sweet lines. Beyond that, it does do the standard of having the heroines narrate events as they’re happening.
As the story progresses, it’s shown that the content here is quite varied. It never gets too wild, but there are a lot of different positions, outfits, a few mild fetishes, and even scenes with toys. The artwork shows these off brilliantly.
On that topic, the CG art for these scenes is completely uncensored and drawn wonderfully, with great detail. There are no oddly misshaped body parts revealed by the lack of mosaic on display here.
The adult scenes are the highlight of My Academy’s Special Place and take up a large portion of the runtime of only a few hours. I’d certainly recommend playing with the adult patch or getting the full version from Denpasoft directly.
Art, Sound and Languages
About half of the CGs in My Academy’s Special Place are of the adult variety, with most of the others are in the super-deformed style. These can be rather cute.
There isn’t a huge amount of sprites, and animation is limited to fairly minor effects such as sprites shaking. Each one is certainly high-quality art though. There are a few characters without sprites sadly, including the lovely shop clerk.
My Academy’s Special Place runs at 1920×1080, so there’s no upscaling needed here. It’s a fairly modern title as visual novels go, having initially been released in 2016 in Japanese.
The music all fits nicely but didn’t particularly stand out to me. The voicing worked well for the character’s voices, with Maika’s standing out the most for its sleepy, slow, sometimes less expressive tone. All of the small cast are voiced aside from the main character, as is typical. The normal options around sound are all included too, such as individual character volume controls.
As a nice additional feature, multilanguage support is included. English, Japanese, and Chinese are all available and two languages can be displayed at once.
Verdict
My Academy’s Special Place provides two very different heroines, some particularly good adult content, and a reasonable enough story to get you there with some cute and comedic moments along the way. There are parts I would’ve liked to see expanded on further in the story, but that was never the key feature of this visual novel in the first place.
MY ACADEMY’S SPECIAL PLACE IS RECOMMENDED
Want to check out more visual novels? Why not check out our review of Destiny Star Girlfriend or the rest of the Special Place Trilogy? We have also covered a wide variety of visual novels both original to English and localized from Japanese, which you can check out here.
Many thanks go to Sekai Project for a PC review code for My Academy’s Special Place.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
