Ryo Marufuji's Training Program

Developer: Ryo Marufuji's Training Program

Year: 2007

Platforms: PC, physical release

Medium: stat raiser & visual novel

Engine: Comic Maker

Ryo Marufuji's Training Program is a stat raiser where you play as the professor Misato (name changeable) at Duel Academia and have been tasked with planning Ryo's schedule every day to make the most of his senior year. with lots of repeating events and a daily schedule for an entire school year, the game takes 5+ hours to finish one playthrough of with different light boys love scenes for each of his main male classmates (Judai, Manjoume, Fubuki, Ed, and Johan).

you’re tasked with making Ryo’s schedule for each day, trying to increase his stats (a variety of things including intelligence, duel strength, physical strength, etc) while making sure his stress doesn’t get too high. there’s not much interacting with the other characters- Judai, Manjoume, Ed, Johan, and Fubuki are all characters that pop up but there’s no way you know who is where and even when you end up at the same location as one of them, you get a boilerplate dialogue each time (seen below).

there are special events in the game based on the date, but there's no in game calender to know when that will happen. these get a bit confusing, as sometimes they’re from Ryo’s perspective and sometimes they’re from Misato’s perspective.

the game is longer than I thought it’d be but also less than I thought? I was assuming there would be more actual story and dialogue with the other characters, but it’s rather brief- most of them time you’re just assigning Ryo a place to go the next day without any real clear idea if that’s going to help him aside from numbers going up and down and rewatching the same "it's raining" scene 3984092 times. I’ve yet to see anything actually be affected by how I’ve “trained” him, aside from 1 duel scene with Johan that he won (maybe he would’ve lost if I hadn’t made his duel strength high?)

quite a few artists seemed to have worked on the game, as there's a multitude of art styles for the cut scenes.