School Rumble : Neru Musume wa Sodatsu

School Rumble: Neru Musume wa Sodatsu for PlayStation 2 is a Japanese school-romance adventure based on Jin Kobayashi's School Rumble manga. Marvelous Entertainment released the game in Japan on July 21, 2005, with the edition represented here arriving as a budget reissue on August 10, 2006. It is a Japanese-language, single-player adaptation that places the series' comic high-school world in an original interactive story rather than simply retelling the television animation.

The player follows Tenma Tsukamoto, a second-year student whose feelings for the aloof Oji Karasuma provide the game with its central goal. With the school year moving forward and Karasuma expected to leave, Tenma tries to make the most of the remaining time. Her efforts are complicated by the same tangled relationships that define School Rumble: Kenji Harima has a crush on Tenma, while her sister Yakumo and classmates such as Eri Sawachika and Mikoto Suo are drawn into the day's misunderstandings.

Most of the PlayStation 2 game unfolds through illustrated dialogue scenes and choices. Tenma visits places around school, speaks with classmates, and collects keywords from the conversations she has. Time advances as destinations are selected, so a day cannot be spent checking every available location. The keywords gathered during these daytime scenes affect later events, giving repeat play an incentive and making the player's choices part of how individual episodes develop.

Its most unusual mechanic takes place after school. Tenma's sleep and dreams connect to the information she has learned during the day, and the keywords can influence whether those dreams become helpful scenes or troublesome nightmares. A bad night leaves her worn out for the following day and can work against her attempts to get closer to Karasuma. This day-and-night structure turns the title's sleep motif into a practical part of the adventure's progression instead of a background detail.

School Rumble: Neru Musume wa Sodatsu also breaks up its story scenes with short interactive challenges. One featured diversion is a mahjong-like contest built around tiles carrying images of the school's students, where sets are matched against an opponent's combinations. Standard PS2 controls handle navigating choices and menus, while the game also supports reviewing prior dialogue and an automatic text mode, features well suited to a dialogue-led adventure.

The game belongs to the early wave of School Rumble adaptations, arriving while the manga and its first animated season were active. It uses the franchise's familiar school-comedy cast and voice performers while presenting a game-specific scenario. Marvelous offered the original release in regular and DX Pack editions, the latter with extras including a soundtrack CD, while the 2006 The Best rerelease made the PS2 adventure available again. A second, separate School Rumble PS2 game followed in 2006, making Neru Musume wa Sodatsu the starting point for the series on the system.