Miley Verisse who is in her last year of high school wants to start a comedy club. Her dream is to become a comedian and she wants to start heading towards the goal with some of her friends. Unfortunately, the head of the student council, Octavia Richmond isn’t about to make things easy.
The school has rules about what it takes to form a new club. Miley needs 5 students to set up a new club, and she soon finds out that her and her best roommate Harriet are not enough to start one. Spring break has just started and Miley must track down potential recruits to start the club before the trial period for new club end.
Cherry Tree High Comedy Club (CTHCC) is the localization version of “Manzai Kenyuubu” (Comedy Research Club) or “Manken”, a simulation visual novel developed and published by 773 (pronounced: “nanami”) in June 2010. Set in modern Japanese day, it was originally designed by one programmer knows as Hizume using RPG Maker XP.
The localization English version was published in 2012 by Nyu Media with the help of Capcom and Tezuka Production. All character names, food names, locations and some humor are replaced to make the game feel more like a American experience, but the bases are well covered.
CTHCC plays like standard visual novel in which player make certain conversation choices with each character to progress the story to a particular ending. But at the core the game plays like a side-scrolling simulation RPG of sorts. Miley will run around different parts which are separated into one single scrolling area. Each will have different people to talk and different things to do. Each day is broken into morning, noon and evening with the last one being night of which you can only do things in your room. The game itself starts on March 22nd and ends on May 30th.
The RPG elements come from the different things player can do to interact with the world. Activities like reading magazines, playing video games and seeing guest lecturers can raise Miley’s stats. There are 12 stats which can be raised up to a level of 5. These stats reflect how well Miley talk to each character, and higher stats means easier to get closer to potential club mates. Miley has homework which needs to be finished. She also has a fatigue bar that raises from doing part time jobs or homework.
Throughout the game there are 6 people who Miley can build up relationships and convince to join the club. At rank 2 she'll obtain their phone number and at rank 5 they join the CTHCC. There are three endings depending on the number of targets recruited; bad ending(0-2), normal ending(3-5) and good ending(6).