Imagine that you're playing a console style RPG, you know the type that was spawned from Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. As your character approaches, let's say, a desk, there's the patented pixellated transition screen (or screen blur, take your battle transition screen of choice) and your shown your character at a desk, with options such as "Read Chapter" in place of attack, and instead of your skill "Uberheal" you have "Study Break" to combat your exhaustion. Would a game that used RPG mechanics to model the sort of drudgery that a college student goes through be interesting enough to merit someone's attention? Would it be possible to take a lot of the things that console RPG players enjoy in their games and completely shift it to a different setting? Does the setting matter that much with the standard console RPG, or is the game just as fun in a setting where instead of battling dragons, you're studying for your math midterm? Granted, in this theoretical game I suppose the story would be very important, how your character interacts with others and whatnot. Sort of like making a normal sort of drama into a game. I suppose this boils down to a question of how much setting matters, but does the above sound even remotely interesting?

Sounds fine. It takes about ten minutes to get past the heroic veneer and recognize the classic RPGs for the progress-bar-races that they are, and people keep playing long after that revelation. Changing the column titles on the spreadsheet shouldn't hurt much, and you get bonus points for creativity.

If you're asking, I suppose you haven't played this. To be fair, the drudgery of high school life in that game acted more like the character generation for the more traditional bits. Still, it was pretty much the best game on the PS2 last year.

Depends on how good the story was. Sounds like it would mostly end up like a Japanese dating sim, or harvest moon in the city. It all depends on design and execution.

Thanks for the feedback everyone, I'm glad the idea has some merit. I did get a bit of the idea from Persona 3 actually, but that still has combat and the whole saving the world bit. I'm glad that it looks like people would be able to get past the non-epic story.