The Flopside — Class of 09 the Flip Side review

 

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The Class of 09 series consists of the original game and its remake, Class of 09: The Reup. The Reup added more content to the original, including additional scenes and new artwork. The game features South Park-level humour with a visual novel platform, satirising the prevalence and tropes within the visual novel genre through this format.

The game is set in 2008/2009, with the characters adapting to different absurd situations in their final years of school. The player can choose dialogue options that lead to various endings. In line with the dark humour, each ending is as absurd as the next, highlighting the true wackiness of the school and its characters.

The Flip Side diverges significantly from the first two games by making Jecka the protagonist. What made this change so jarring for fans and me when playing the game was that Nicole, the previous protagonist, was a sociopath who didn’t care about what happened to her or the other characters. This created humour in the way she responded to the events around her.

Jecka, on the other hand, was portrayed as a mini voice of reason and a slightly more sensible version of Nicole. Although she did bad things, Jecka always seemed more level-headed. Therefore, it felt odd when Jecka became the game’s main focus because the addition of shock humour and uncomfortable situations made the game feel more disturbing than funny.

The way the game addresses abuse is not how it should have been portrayed. It is depicted as a comedic element, when abuse is not something to joke about. Even in the first two games, this topic is only mentioned by Jecka and is not fully explored, which was a good approach, as it acknowledged her situation without dwelling on it excessively.

The fact that her father drives most of the plot points makes the situation even more severe, as his influence pushes the story forward. When Jecka hesitates on a decision, it is her abuse that forces her into the worst-case scenario, and there is no option for a storyline where she escapes the abuse or opens up about it. It feels like something that just happens to her, without any sense of agency.

The humour became much darker, as did the storylines. In contrast, The Reup and the original game provided enough choices to make each route’s outcomes feel worthwhile. However, The Flip Side only offered five endings, which felt too few for a game that had previously been popular for its many routes and player decisions.

Having a lack of choice can result in players feeling emotionally disconnected from the game, as it can seem like control is being taken away from them. To avoid this, you either need to give players enough choices so they feel in control, as in the original Class of 09, or remove all control entirely and present the game as a visual novel.

I am not opposed to edgy humour at all, as it can offer different perspectives on the world and make the darker aspects of these topics easier for people to understand by adding humour. However, five endings are not enough to explore Jecka and the many interesting facets of her character.

This is particularly evident in the ending where Jecka dates her history teacher. The biggest issue here is that the player has no initial choice about pursuing the teacher — it’s forced upon them. Even when given the choice to attend a party or go on the date, it still feels like there should have been a decision earlier.

One route that made me particularly uncomfortable involved Jecka looking for a job to make money for her abusive father. She ends up making money by engaging in foot fetish sex work.

This route not only feels abrupt and strange, but it also felt exploitative of Jecka’s character and unnecessary. I preferred the ending where she goes into Hot Topic, dyes her hair black, and crashes a car. This felt much more in line with the previous releases, and I wish there had been more endings like this — dabbling in the pop culture of the time but still maintaining the dark, cheeky humour of the original game. This element is sorely lacking in The Flip Side.

The game’s humour feels more like a jab at the fandom than an effort to tie up the trilogy. This is evident in one of the better endings, where the character Ari gets run over at the end of her route. This is significant because Ari is a fan favourite within the community.

She was beloved not only because she was a more mild-mannered character in the game but also because she was a bisexual character, which many in the LGBT+ community could relate to. Having her be the one killed off in a route suggests how the game’s creator may feel about the fandom that helped make the game so popular.

In conclusion, had the game followed characters such as Emily and maintained a similar tone to Class of 09, it might have made the story more palatable. However, by focusing on Jecka, many of her actions feel out of character and forced.

If her father weren’t forcing her, would she have done what she did in most of the routes? The difference with Nicole was that she didn’t care, so her actions felt like her own choices, influenced by the player’s decisions. In The Flip Side, however, the player has minimal control over what happens to Jecka. It feels more like a game designed to make players dislike or harm the character, rather than an exploration of the previous games from Jecka’s perspective.