"Whew," the enamored g@me play0r sighs out in reverence as the boss clearly designed by someone who thought they were on a job for a mediocre Platinum title did three SICKASS ANIMEY slow-mo front flips, each dealing 70% max health damage to the player with around 8 quintillion HP (which was only reasonable to invest a few points into after getting some from the eleventh Piss-And-Shit-Smeared Tree Spirit overworld boss fight that also netted a BAD. ASS. spirit ash to help you circumvent said bosses in the future except it's objectively worse than half the ones you already have) which they got to by trekking across seven hills, seven lands, seven seas and seven hells, each populated by more barren stretches of land than the last with s p o o k y copy-pasted caves and catacombs breaking up the monotony of running into small platoons of disinterested enemies you can't even be assed to to swing a sword on horseback at on your way to the next 𝓛𝓮𝓰𝓪𝓬𝔂 𝓓𝓾𝓷𝓰𝓮𝓸𝓷 (VERY important areas they put all their ACTUAL level design into! which is why half of them are directionless slogs where everything looks the same and with enemy placement done by the one only Mr Miyazaki'ˢ ⁸⁻ʸᵉᵃʳ⁻ᵒˡᵈ ˢᵒⁿ who really liked the funny jump battan) so that they can find an NPC which mysteriously vanished one Saturday night a few weeks into the playthrough but is crucial for the conditions of one of the many different-colored endings outlined by the Purposely Vague and not frequently Irritatingly Nebulous lore (which is totally okay because that's how they always did quests dude :P it's NOT comically archaic in contrast to the world design xP) but at least there's some World Essence and Snail Drippings to pick up on the way in case you ever bump into an instruction manual that teaches you how to MacGuyver the two into a portable ICBM and then not land the shot because the Lands Between Olympic Champion you're chucking it at read your input had superior reflexes, "From the Software has done it again!"


I gotta be honest man I think this formula has the studio stuck spinning their wheels and given ER's astronomical success they're probably not gonna try reinventing it anytime soon. The game isn't bad. I'll still play the DLC. But seeing it heralded as the zenith of the genre let alone Fromsoft's masterwork gives me a fucking migraine.

About halfway into this game, I made an interesting discovery - you can take any girl to the planetarium at any time and tell them that our stars are millions of years old; they no longer exist, and one day the same will be true of us, too. It will always make them really happy. It doesn’t matter if it’s the preppy girl, the nerdy girl, the clumsy girl or the punk girl - reminding someone of the pale blue dot will improve your relationship with them.

What does that mean, exactly? That people, regardless of personal status and beliefs and perceptions, find comfort in being reminded of their insignificant end? Or that you aren’t talking to people at all - you’re just stirring electrons across silicon to simulate a conversation with a girl, sending your light millions of miles away to a virtual Tokyo in 1997 that doesn’t exist? Or did the programmers just forget to account for variance in this one scenario out of thousands, and had all these digital girls react in the exact same way to your Carl Sagan impression? Who knows.

This “infinite diversity, infinite combinations” style of game-reading defines a shadow that will perpetually be cast over this game’s existence in the West by ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS Tokimeki Memorial, the video-essay that more or less lays the blueprint of many classic Backloggd reviews we’ve all grown to love. In my opinion, Tim Rogers (or at least the character of Tim Rogers that Tim Rogers presents in ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS: Season 1) is a patron saint of sorts for this site - a mortal archetype of game-liker who acts as a guiding light for the infamous reviewers here who like to compare 1994’s Game Boy port of Taz-Mania to a fond midsummer’s day, or speculate on the Gulf War-adjacent cultural implications of Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal for the PlayStation 3.

To me, these ‘deranged’ assessments of video games are the most enjoyable way to respond to what is essentially a consumable product - honestly documenting your personal reactions and mental explorations as prompted by a game and its world, eschewing even the slightest hint of constructing a GRAPHICS: 7 | REPLAYABILITY: 4 | STORY: 6 table, rejecting the need to perform a fumbled technical analysis of the ray-adjacent teralighting and polytetrahedro-counts. Years of reading games magazines and games websites has taken a dreadful toll on us, and I think we can unlearn what we have learned by dreaming of the stars while fragging pigcops in Duke Nukem 3D: Duke’s Penthouse Paradise.

This push-and-pull between souls and spreadsheets came to define my playthrough of Tokimeki Memorial: Densetsu no Ki no Shita de¹. To get it out of the way early: I don’t really approve of dating games. I think there’s something insidious and oily and ungodly about them - this idea that you can simulate a power fantasy where an entire class of schoolgirls dance in the palm of your hand, a hand that grips a cold plastic controller in place of the warm human hand of another soul. It is, in a word, pathetic. I don’t approve of dating games in much the same way I don’t enjoy the idea of the dating games we play with each other in reality. It’s not a healthy way to face our interpersonal realities. Dating sims write poems for the emasculated.

To give credit where credit is due - I think the functional bits and bytes of the gameplay here could easily transplant to a game where you are a 27 year old single person with a smartphone and an office job. Switch out Yoshio’s notepad for a Tinder contact lists and the local park for a local bar and I think you’d have a remarkable facsimile of the modern adult dating landscape. But that game doesn’t exist, and you instead find yourself trying to find meaning in a Japanese game developer’s longing for a high school experience he definitely never had. Applying this idea in reverse, does skinning the disposable round-robin experience of modern online dating with a coat of PG13+ 90s chou kawaii high school paint make it somehow more desirable to us, in much the same way we covet Japan’s urban sprawl and sakura scenery over the views of own environment?

For me, Tokimeki Memorial isn’t “the Rosetta Stone of gaming” by any meaningful stretch; I feel like Tim Rogers did a six-hour gold-panning in a dirty digital river, trying to find nuggets of meaning in an exploitative little product for lonely boys that isn’t really all that far off from the insidious pachislots that Konami are now infamously known for. Make a number go up until a girl acknowledges your existence, and then manipulate her into liking “you” by reading a strategy guide inside or outside the computer game. Roll the dice on whether your girlfriend likes blue dresses or green dresses. Got it wrong? Too bad. Perhaps you can live without regret by reloading another of your save files. Put another coin in the slot and hope the right number comes up this time. Want to form a meaningful, long-lasting bond with your oldest friend? Manage and manipulate the lives and hearts of everyone around you like a ruthless restaurant manager filling out a work schedule. And so on, until you stand under the Tree of Legends and pretend to yourself and your trophy sprite that this was all destined to be. You "love Mio"? What the fuck is Mio in relation to you? The sociopathy here is amusing to acknowledge, but can be worryingly internalised, like all bad jokes. How long before gamification inverts your digital and physical lives, and you demand that genuine girls give gratifying gamerscore?

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¹ Known as Heartthrob Memorial: Under the Tree of Legends when the English translation patch is applied.

I fell in love with Dragon Quest at a young age with DQIX. They announced this game not too long after, and I was crazy excited for it - but I didn't really understand that it was a remake of a Super Famicom game, so when the day finally came, I was a little let down by the lack of a character creator and the "downgrade" to first person battles with sprite graphics. I dropped the game for a few months, came back to it on a random night and got absolutely sucked in. Something just clicked - the dream world plot was so mysterious, I realized how huge and grand the world was, and the class system proved to be addicting.

I still have so many moments from this game permanently ingrained in my mind and I plan to replay it again soon. The evil world you visit in that final stretch of the game was so immersive and the whole summoning scene where a demon demolishes a castle blew my mind. Gradually coming to love this game's older style was probably the beginning of my descent into dungeon crawlers