Probably like most people playing this now, I got interested in this game from the Action Button review of the game which I watched recently, and while my experience with Tokimeki Memorial was not as as varied or interesting as that video might make it seem, (at least in a quite normal playthrough like mine) I still very much enjoyed the game and would recomend it to a lot of people, especially due to how short and well paced it is. If you are looking for an actual review to decide weather you should play the game or not, either watch that video or just play the game as it will take less time anyway, this review will just discuss my expereineces with the game and what I thought about it
Something I didn’t expect is how repetitive the dialogue is. Most of Tokimeki Memorial consists of either managing your stats or going on dates, and all of the dates with the same girl have the same ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ dialogue every time. Most of the random and yearly events also have the same dialogue, which, while understandable from a game development perspective, still dissapointed me somewhat. On the other hand, when something does change, it makes that stand out all the more. About three quarters through the game, the girl I was focussing on, Yuina, started changing all of that repeated dialogue to versions that suggested that she was much more excited about the character talking to her, which was a very powerful effect. Yuina’s new valentine’s day dialogue was particularly effecting since she started to accidentally reveal her feelings for the player character. The couple special events I encountered were very cool and took me by extremely pleasant surprise every time, although I probably would have wanted to experience a couple more in my playthrough. These changes and events reminded me a lot of my time playing LSD: Dream Emulator, where I was similarly dissapointed at first by the seemingly limited content, but as I continued to play, the various changes to the game worlds and the movie dreams made me continue to play and made me like the game more and more.
It’s worth noting that throughout Tokimeki Memorial, I pretty much exclusively focussed my days off on trying to go on dates with Yuina, aside from when I needed to defuse other girls’ bombs, or when I was approached with a date from another girl. I imagine that’s how most people will play this game due to it actually being pretty hard. I’m not sure how far away I really was from getting an ending where I was alone, but there were a bunch of quite tense moments throughout my playthrough. One of the most tense was having to manage two bombs from Shiori and Ayako while being unable to actually go on dates with either of them since my looks stat was too low. While I was low key panicking a little at this, Yoshio saved the day by setting up one of the double dates with both Shiori and Ayako. I’m not sure if the game really thought all this through or if it was all just up to chance, but either way, it reminded me of a kind of systemic story you’d probably expect from a game like Prey or Breath of the Wild.
I really have had no prior experience with any dating sims before Tokimeki Memorial, the only other games I’ve played that could be considered dating sims are the Persona games. I’d say the main difference to me that makes me still prefer Persona over Tokimeki Memorial is that Persona’s characters, school life, and jobs have much more unique writing that you will encounter throughout a playthrough, while Tokimeki Memorial is much more repetitive, although it is probably much more replayable and varied. While I still really like the Persona games, after playing Tokimeki Memorial, I can’t help but feel like the Persona life simulation elements could’ve been so much better if you actually had to put thought into them and have it become a real part of the gameplay and have the player actually have to make meaningful consequences.
My favorite kinds of games are ones that try to emulate the mostly mundane elements of real life, and Tokimeki Memorial has gamified life so effortlessly and convincingly that it makes me wonder why more games haven’t tried to copy it.

Link's Awakening was one of the first games I played as a kid and it's been one of my favorite games for a long time. I was super excited for the switch remake when that came out and it was very good, but something about it never felt as refined or good to play as the original. I thought the new graphics were great, the music was very well done, and the gameplay changes were good, but something about it made it seem less than the sum of its parts. This version isn't a perfect way to play the game, but it was a joy to experience one of my favorite games in a new light.

Obviously, the biggest change is the updated camera system where it scrolls around the world along with the character and can display a much larger space, which wasn’t something I ever really thought was necessary for the game. But, when I stepped outside of Marin’s house for the first time after booting the HD version up, I started getting a little emotional. Seeing the town I was so familiar with all at once was just so powerful to me for some reason. The switch remake does have a slightly similar camera system where it will follow along with the player but it doesn’t really display much more of the world at once than the original did. That along with the updated visuals somehow didn’t make as much of an impression on me as this HD version did.

Unfortunately though, a great change to an otherwise identical game creates some issues. The main issue I have with the camera is in dungeons, seeing all of the rooms feels a little cheap when you’re supposed to be going through them like an explorer. The different floors and rooms also don’t connect together in a way that looks correct because they’re all just laid out right next to each other. Obviously the player was never supposed to see the game like this but it's questionable why the developer of this HD version chose to hide some parts of the dungeons and not others. In eagle’s tower, the different floors aren’t able to be seen off screen, but they are in most other dungeons. Also, showing the boss room and the instrument kind of takes away from their significance.

A quite great change is the addition of two more inventory slots. I've gotten used to switching items all the time in the original game but it's a lot more painless to get around the world knowing you won’t have to pause every few screens to equip the feather or power bracelet. The animation for opening the inventory screen also seems to take less time than the original, which is a great addition. That being said, I feel like the developer still didn’t take this far enough. I ended up having the sword, feather, and power bracelet equipped for the vast majority of my playthrough, leaving me with just one slot for another item, which isn’t ideal. It would’ve been great to implement a change similar to the switch remake where the power bracelet becomes a completely passive item, but I understand if the developer wanted to make it more close to how the original worked.

I assume this HD version was created from the ground up for computers, while incorporating some aspects of the decompiled code for the original games. For the most part, I’d say the developer or developers did a remarkable job emulating almost everything about the original in a very convincing way. There are still some issues with the recreation, most of which aren’t really worth mentioning, but there are a few that detract from its quality. It seems like the player gets sucked into holes a lot more often than in the original, which was still an issue and source of frustration even then, but it's only more emphasized in this version. There are also some enemies that don’t take damage properly, namely the armos statue in the southern shrine and the ganon stage of the final boss fight. Both of them only take damage from the pegasus boots, which took me quite a while to figure out. Another big issue I had was in the turtle’s rock dungeon, where two small keys seemed to disappeared from my inventory when I went outside. This would have softlocked my save file, but I was able to edit the file with a text editor to fix it. Anyone who also has this problem, open the file and go to the sections that start with d8 (aka dungeon 8) and start changing the lines that say ‘d8_smallkey_x 1’ to ‘d8_smallkey_x 0’.

Just as with the switch remake, it was amazing to play one of my favorite games again under a new light, but unfortunately, just as with the remake, it seems we haven’t yet gotten the perfect version of Link’s Awakening.

Finally got around to playing this, and I feel very conflicted about it. I first played Ico last year and it quickly became one of my favorite games, despite some shortcomings in its gameplay. Unfortunately, it seems like team ico didn't really learn anything from Ico's issues, and this game has just as awkward controls and movement. In fact, since Shadow of the Colossus has so much more of a focus on gameplay than Ico does, its awkwardness is much more prominent. My playthrough took seven hours, and I'd say that probably an hour or two was wasted on either the game's controls messing up, or on some questionable game design.
I’d say that for probably around half of the colossi, it took me multiple minutes to understand what I was supposed to do, or to figure out how to execute it. I’m kind of stupid, so I’ll take the blame for some of the issues I had in this game, but I doubt that at least a few of my problems weren’t shared by a lot of other players. In some cases, I just resorted to looking up the answer, which really sucked. I feel like this game does so much right to create a really good flow state when you’re battling a colossus, but it got halted in its tracks so often and pulled me out of the experience. It was really unfortunate that this also happened in the final battle.
Regardless, a lot of the battles went really well. When I was able to understand what I was supposed to do in a reasonable amount of time and the controls didn’t mess me up, I completely loved the game. At times, the flow state that I was put in was essentially perfect: when the gameplay, art design, and of course, the incredible music combine properly, I can’t really find the words to describe how great it is. It makes me understand why this game is so beloved by so many people. Especially if you originally played this back in 2005, (the year I was born) I imagine it was even more impressive and powerful.
To touch on the story a little, I don’t have too much to say besides it is just as quality as the story in Ico, a prime example of “less is more.” One huge flaw of current day games is that so many of them commit the awful storytelling flaw of explaining everything about their world and making everything boring. Games like Shadow of the Colossus and Ico have scripts the size of one of the dozens of lore entries in other games like Death Stranding, but do so much more with it. There is clearly so much history in the forgotten lands, but the player is expected to fill in the gaps by themself, making them just as important in crafting the story as the developers. I feel like that creativity on behalf of the consumer is something that an interactive experience especially makes sense to strive for.
Shadow of the Colossus isn’t perfect, but it does enough things perfectly to deserve its reputation.