this game was CRACK to me when i was 15
Dating Himuro was the most stressful thing I've ever done but it was worth it
Even though more lenient in the individual relationship management, the Girl’s Side of Tokimeki Memorial still carries the stressful view on high school romance centered life that the original one had. Some new ideas are introduced, such as being able to choose your clothes for every date and having to manage money to buy such clothes, and every single one of them still contributes to making this period of life a stressful strategic one.
And to sympathize with the motives is not that hard. Tokimeki always saw those teenage years as a period where every decision you took mattered towards how others perceived you, and to feel like you are about to make the wrong move all the time. For this reason, dates are not really interesting for what they are (if you go to a concert, the performance itself is skipped, if you go bowling, the game itself is skipped) because what matters is the actions you decide to take and the response of your romantic interest.
The consequence of this is immediate, romance is turned into a strategy game not that far from keeping your relationships healthy in Crusader Kings. Love is war, they say. And while it doesn’t necessarily mean to be a worthless approach, it doesn’t quite succeed.
The strategic elements end up being quite simple because of two reasons. First, it’s based on repeating a routine and keeping an eye out for obvious dangerous scenarios (bombs), it ends up lacking depth and because of the hard coded "victory" conditions you either know exactly how to succeed in a particular relationship or you don’t have a clue. Secondly, and most decisively, all the boys (...or men…) are boring at best and a hazard to avoid at worst. Perhaps the strategic options would carry more weight if you truly cared who you would end up falling in love with, but because of the game philosophy deciding to prioritize the cold strategy over the warm heartfelt moments the stakes are never there.
There is one notable exception regarding the disinterest towards any relationship. Turns out that in this game you can have up to four female friends that, precisely because you get to know them through random events that just occur and not through dates where you need to ponder what your optimal actions are, end up being genuine charismatic relationships. You see some friends hanging around having a good time and wish to be with them, you go on a school trip and the first one to get your back will be that girl from your club you read fashion magazines with during the week. The game seems to recognize the quality that it rejects by giving you a friendship ending option where you end up with the people that you truly cared about during all of these three years. Of course, with romance out of the question.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK8WOxVpsNc
And to sympathize with the motives is not that hard. Tokimeki always saw those teenage years as a period where every decision you took mattered towards how others perceived you, and to feel like you are about to make the wrong move all the time. For this reason, dates are not really interesting for what they are (if you go to a concert, the performance itself is skipped, if you go bowling, the game itself is skipped) because what matters is the actions you decide to take and the response of your romantic interest.
The consequence of this is immediate, romance is turned into a strategy game not that far from keeping your relationships healthy in Crusader Kings. Love is war, they say. And while it doesn’t necessarily mean to be a worthless approach, it doesn’t quite succeed.
The strategic elements end up being quite simple because of two reasons. First, it’s based on repeating a routine and keeping an eye out for obvious dangerous scenarios (bombs), it ends up lacking depth and because of the hard coded "victory" conditions you either know exactly how to succeed in a particular relationship or you don’t have a clue. Secondly, and most decisively, all the boys (...or men…) are boring at best and a hazard to avoid at worst. Perhaps the strategic options would carry more weight if you truly cared who you would end up falling in love with, but because of the game philosophy deciding to prioritize the cold strategy over the warm heartfelt moments the stakes are never there.
There is one notable exception regarding the disinterest towards any relationship. Turns out that in this game you can have up to four female friends that, precisely because you get to know them through random events that just occur and not through dates where you need to ponder what your optimal actions are, end up being genuine charismatic relationships. You see some friends hanging around having a good time and wish to be with them, you go on a school trip and the first one to get your back will be that girl from your club you read fashion magazines with during the week. The game seems to recognize the quality that it rejects by giving you a friendship ending option where you end up with the people that you truly cared about during all of these three years. Of course, with romance out of the question.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK8WOxVpsNc
I first became aware of the depth the Tokimeki Memorial games are known for through the Tim Rogers video essay on the first game in the franchise. However, since my Japanese knowledge is nothing to write home about, I’m only capable of playing the DS releases of the Girl’s Side spinoffs, since at the time of writing those are the only ones with English patches available (barring a translation of the SNES port of the original, ie the worst version). That’s just fine; I like men and have been known to admire many 2D ones in my time.
But you know what? Even going into the experience expecting something much closer to an RPG than a VN, I was ill-prepared for the socially anxious labyrinth of a videogame that is Tokimeki Memorial: Girl’s Side Plus. It has this solid foundation of your daily actions building up or ticking down various stats based on RNG as well as more long-term decisions like where you work part-time or what club you join at school. The real meat of the game lies in what’s laid on top of these, though.
In addition to actually romancing the anime boys themselves, you can also befriend them to varying degrees in addition to 4 girls that you can hang out with at any time without prior planning (and apparently if you get close enough you can get a quasi-lesbian ending). You can also get a random chance of taking any of these characters to a cafe after school to have a casual conversation with them (that I think also helps out their feelings for you?) or to walk home with you (which offers no information about them but definitely makes them like you more), before which you can call out to them by one of 10 nickname and honorific combinations. Also if you’re close but not close enough with a guy and have befriended a girl well enough she might start to go after him herself and you have to either start being mean to her and chase after the guy desperately or give up on that guy ever dating you again.
There’s also an entire metagame where you can go out to buy clothes on days where you could otherwise be calling someone or going on a date, and you can improve your dates themselves by wearing outfits that are in fashion or give off a certain vibe that each of the boys will react differently to, but it has to be suitable for the time of year or else they’ll give you a funny look.
You probably get the idea by now: the game is just chock full of interlocking systems like these, it’s mind-blowing. Even though you’re only presented with a small number of options at any given time, the depth in considering what your optimal move is remains enthralling for the entire run of the game.
Its design is brilliantly mathy and some SMT-level nonsense clearly went into its balance. In the final month of the game I got totally checkmated where my best friend suddenly became a rival with my for Sakuya Morimura, my favorite of the crowd. I was on track to get at the end if I could avoid offending any of the other boys too badly. The event where she was scripted to take him from me was set for a date too close to any of my saves for me to be able to take him on enough dates to prevent it by making him like me enough. My avatar narrated to herself: “Well, Arisawa-san finally told Morimura-kun about her feelings.” I rolled back my save to play the final 2 months of the game repeatedly, the protagonist always gratingly happy for her dear friend Shiho Arisawa.
Ultimately, she got into a first-rate university and graduated without being too close to anyone romantically OR platonically. Story of my fuckin’ life! Jorge Luis Borges could never.
But you know what? Even going into the experience expecting something much closer to an RPG than a VN, I was ill-prepared for the socially anxious labyrinth of a videogame that is Tokimeki Memorial: Girl’s Side Plus. It has this solid foundation of your daily actions building up or ticking down various stats based on RNG as well as more long-term decisions like where you work part-time or what club you join at school. The real meat of the game lies in what’s laid on top of these, though.
In addition to actually romancing the anime boys themselves, you can also befriend them to varying degrees in addition to 4 girls that you can hang out with at any time without prior planning (and apparently if you get close enough you can get a quasi-lesbian ending). You can also get a random chance of taking any of these characters to a cafe after school to have a casual conversation with them (that I think also helps out their feelings for you?) or to walk home with you (which offers no information about them but definitely makes them like you more), before which you can call out to them by one of 10 nickname and honorific combinations. Also if you’re close but not close enough with a guy and have befriended a girl well enough she might start to go after him herself and you have to either start being mean to her and chase after the guy desperately or give up on that guy ever dating you again.
There’s also an entire metagame where you can go out to buy clothes on days where you could otherwise be calling someone or going on a date, and you can improve your dates themselves by wearing outfits that are in fashion or give off a certain vibe that each of the boys will react differently to, but it has to be suitable for the time of year or else they’ll give you a funny look.
You probably get the idea by now: the game is just chock full of interlocking systems like these, it’s mind-blowing. Even though you’re only presented with a small number of options at any given time, the depth in considering what your optimal move is remains enthralling for the entire run of the game.
Its design is brilliantly mathy and some SMT-level nonsense clearly went into its balance. In the final month of the game I got totally checkmated where my best friend suddenly became a rival with my for Sakuya Morimura, my favorite of the crowd. I was on track to get at the end if I could avoid offending any of the other boys too badly. The event where she was scripted to take him from me was set for a date too close to any of my saves for me to be able to take him on enough dates to prevent it by making him like me enough. My avatar narrated to herself: “Well, Arisawa-san finally told Morimura-kun about her feelings.” I rolled back my save to play the final 2 months of the game repeatedly, the protagonist always gratingly happy for her dear friend Shiho Arisawa.
Ultimately, she got into a first-rate university and graduated without being too close to anyone romantically OR platonically. Story of my fuckin’ life! Jorge Luis Borges could never.
3 stars only bc amanohashi is real and not a funny little extra
I started playing this game so I could write an essay about it, it was very fun and worth looking at as a sort of archetypal dating simulator, but I don't have the time or desire to pick it back up and finish it. I played through the first semester and it was fun, if you're interested in otome games check it out as one of the elements of popularizing the genre!
This review contains spoilers
I’ve always loved the idea of dating sim games but I rarely actually enjoy them in practice. I inevitably get bored, frustrated, or burned out by repetitive scenarios that don’t go the way I think they will. Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side: 1st Love is the first game of its type that I actually rolled the credits on. It’s been years since a game has kept me up late on a work night the way this one did.
In Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side: 1st Love, you play as a teenage girl making everyday decisions about school, jobs, and relationships through all three of your high school years. Each week, you decide what to focus on (studying, club activities, exercise, etc.) and it either raises or lowers relevant stats on each day of that week. Your schedule is also something that needs to be managed and you can’t pay attention to everyone/everything you’re interested in at once. By prioritizing one activity, you are inevitably passing up on others, so your approach to raising certain stats or fostering certain relationships is important to your end result when you reach graduation.
As a game, I really enjoyed this system. The pacing had good momentum, the dialogue boxes were kept short, and I didn’t feel like any part of the game overstayed its welcome. I easily became invested in my life at the school (the voice acting and how it sounded in the DS’s tinny speakers made conversations feel more intimate somehow) and I looked forward to seeing how things would play out. At times, things even got pretty dramatic between me and my friends or potential boyfriends. I had a blast when it did, but it also made me hyper-aware of the parts of this simulation that were troubling.
As the year progresses and your relationships become more challenging, there is a demand put on you to succeed in all things. By about half way through second year, I was starting to feel like the story was an exercise in becoming the perfect people pleaser. By that point, I knew which boy I was hoping to end up with and the pressure was steadily rising to always say the right thing, touch them only at the right time, wear the right outfit for their tastes, and to consider the needs of everyone in my social life when deciding how to spend my time. Rarely was I ever given the same courtesy in return. Regardless of how well I thought things were going, the boys wouldn’t hesitate to say mean things if I messed up in minor ways. When you act the way you’re expected to, everyone likes you just fine. But if you take a risk on addressing someone with more familiarity too soon, inviting them to someplace new, or even if you have a different opinion on something than they would, it’s a setback in your relationship with them. They will express their displeasure directly to you for these things and you’re expected to adjust yourself for them if you want things to work out, but there are negative consequences if you are the one to reject them. The player character’s kid brother is your relationship “guru” and he shows up to let you know when you’re neglecting literally any boy and he tells you to get your act together before anything bad happens. Neglected boys will interfere with your successful relationships, so everyone must be placated.
To achieve the ultimate placation, you have to go on dates with everyone and act the way they want you to. The dates start to get grindy after a while because it entails repeating conversations and giving the same “correct” response every time. That was actually really funny because the boys show preference for consistent and agreeable girls but if you dare to wear the same outfit more than once, they will complain even if they approved of it before. All of these boys suck so bad, they’re the worst.
By succeeding in making everyone else happy, you get what the game communicates as a positive outcome. That part feels pretty yucky, but did I expect better from this 2007 DS game about high school dating? Absolutely not. Like I said before, I was loving the drama and the mess was genuinely a fun ride. “Failing” relationships and changing my approach was part of the experience and it made the narrative feel alive. The characters are reactive to your choices, so it was more entertaining to make different choices as I went along. I only played through a single time, but it’s apparent to me that there are many different approaches to this game and there is still a lot I didn’t see. I’m not sure I’ll take the time to play through again, but I am curious about what a new playthrough would look like now that I am familiar with the mechanics.
I'm happy with the ending I got, which was the friendship ending with Fujii. I met her after I rage-quit the basketball club because Suzuka was being a jerk to me (again) and my best friend at the time Konno told me ON MY BIRTHDAY that she had feelings for him even tho I had been going out with him for months by that point. So I joined cheerleading and Fujii was cool from the start. We were each others’ wingman on double dates, we sold crafts at flea markets together, and we had lots of “perfect weeks” hanging out and talking about fashion. By the end, we both failed in just about everything but we did it together. We failed to get into universities, we failed to get boyfriends, and we both got so-so jobs after graduation. All things considered, I think it’s cool we got to stay together and keep hanging out after high school. Too bad girls don't have a Love meter in this game because I definitely got the best relationship outcome. Fujii told me once at the flea market that she’d marry me if she could and that doesn’t sound like a bad deal at all.
In Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side: 1st Love, you play as a teenage girl making everyday decisions about school, jobs, and relationships through all three of your high school years. Each week, you decide what to focus on (studying, club activities, exercise, etc.) and it either raises or lowers relevant stats on each day of that week. Your schedule is also something that needs to be managed and you can’t pay attention to everyone/everything you’re interested in at once. By prioritizing one activity, you are inevitably passing up on others, so your approach to raising certain stats or fostering certain relationships is important to your end result when you reach graduation.
As a game, I really enjoyed this system. The pacing had good momentum, the dialogue boxes were kept short, and I didn’t feel like any part of the game overstayed its welcome. I easily became invested in my life at the school (the voice acting and how it sounded in the DS’s tinny speakers made conversations feel more intimate somehow) and I looked forward to seeing how things would play out. At times, things even got pretty dramatic between me and my friends or potential boyfriends. I had a blast when it did, but it also made me hyper-aware of the parts of this simulation that were troubling.
As the year progresses and your relationships become more challenging, there is a demand put on you to succeed in all things. By about half way through second year, I was starting to feel like the story was an exercise in becoming the perfect people pleaser. By that point, I knew which boy I was hoping to end up with and the pressure was steadily rising to always say the right thing, touch them only at the right time, wear the right outfit for their tastes, and to consider the needs of everyone in my social life when deciding how to spend my time. Rarely was I ever given the same courtesy in return. Regardless of how well I thought things were going, the boys wouldn’t hesitate to say mean things if I messed up in minor ways. When you act the way you’re expected to, everyone likes you just fine. But if you take a risk on addressing someone with more familiarity too soon, inviting them to someplace new, or even if you have a different opinion on something than they would, it’s a setback in your relationship with them. They will express their displeasure directly to you for these things and you’re expected to adjust yourself for them if you want things to work out, but there are negative consequences if you are the one to reject them. The player character’s kid brother is your relationship “guru” and he shows up to let you know when you’re neglecting literally any boy and he tells you to get your act together before anything bad happens. Neglected boys will interfere with your successful relationships, so everyone must be placated.
To achieve the ultimate placation, you have to go on dates with everyone and act the way they want you to. The dates start to get grindy after a while because it entails repeating conversations and giving the same “correct” response every time. That was actually really funny because the boys show preference for consistent and agreeable girls but if you dare to wear the same outfit more than once, they will complain even if they approved of it before. All of these boys suck so bad, they’re the worst.
By succeeding in making everyone else happy, you get what the game communicates as a positive outcome. That part feels pretty yucky, but did I expect better from this 2007 DS game about high school dating? Absolutely not. Like I said before, I was loving the drama and the mess was genuinely a fun ride. “Failing” relationships and changing my approach was part of the experience and it made the narrative feel alive. The characters are reactive to your choices, so it was more entertaining to make different choices as I went along. I only played through a single time, but it’s apparent to me that there are many different approaches to this game and there is still a lot I didn’t see. I’m not sure I’ll take the time to play through again, but I am curious about what a new playthrough would look like now that I am familiar with the mechanics.
I'm happy with the ending I got, which was the friendship ending with Fujii. I met her after I rage-quit the basketball club because Suzuka was being a jerk to me (again) and my best friend at the time Konno told me ON MY BIRTHDAY that she had feelings for him even tho I had been going out with him for months by that point. So I joined cheerleading and Fujii was cool from the start. We were each others’ wingman on double dates, we sold crafts at flea markets together, and we had lots of “perfect weeks” hanging out and talking about fashion. By the end, we both failed in just about everything but we did it together. We failed to get into universities, we failed to get boyfriends, and we both got so-so jobs after graduation. All things considered, I think it’s cool we got to stay together and keep hanging out after high school. Too bad girls don't have a Love meter in this game because I definitely got the best relationship outcome. Fujii told me once at the flea market that she’d marry me if she could and that doesn’t sound like a bad deal at all.
This game is so stressing and repetitive and for what.