In my last post breaking down what makes a dating sim a dating sim by Japanese definitions (among other genres), I briefly touched upon how, in the early days of the genre in the mid to late 90s, dating sims actually tended to have something of a reduced focus on predefined, linear narrative arcs compared to their contemporaries in traditional adventure games and the then-emerging novel games. This statement might have come as something of a surprise to some folks considering that dating-themed visual novels—which, again, typically don't fall under the dating sim umbrella specifically due to a lack of, well, simulation gameplay elements—have been so ubiquitous for over two decades. How could they struggle at such overt storytelling when that's exactly what the wider Japanese adventure game umbrella specializes in?
The answer lies in how dating sims were typically played and designed at the height of the Tokimeki Memorial boom and the legions of clones it inspired in its wake.
Gainax's Princess Maker 2, a highly influential Japanese PC raising sim.
In the earliest days of the dating sim genre, games like Tokimeki Memorial and its progeny were hugely inspired by another closely related Japanese game genre on PCs: character raising sims. These games typically place you in the shoes of an authority figure of some sort (eg: a parent, teacher, etc.) and you're given a character or group of characters and it's your task to mold them towards a specific end-game goal, either predefined by the game or determined on your own. This molding is done by growing your charge's stats, which is achieved by managing their schedules, with different tasks raising and lowering certain stats to varying degrees, usually with a dash of RNG thrown in for good measure to influence how big said changes are.
From my own experiences playing raising sims over the years, I've gotten the impression that a good raising sim is perhaps one of the most difficult genres to make within all of Japanese games, but what tends to make the most successful ones compelling is a combination of three things:
- Enough varied stats with tangible effects that invite creative problem-solving and encourage players to achieve their desired goals by their own conceived means. Some games like Princess Maker have a lot of stats, while others, such as the wildly successful mobile horse girl racing game Uma Musume, instead boast just a handful of stats that play off of each other in intricate ways, often undocumented within the game itself.
- Well-balanced RNG formulas that allow players to generally attempt their plans uninhibited in terms of growing the stats they wish to see, but still variable enough to at least occasionally cause some surprise twists to emerge organically, forcing players to react on the fly and accept the consequences that may come with such changed plans.
- Just enough story events, whether obligatory or optional (ie: only triggered at certain stat thresholds, etc.) to give some narrative context to developments that happen during the character growth process, much of it implied based on how players read into the systems and other elements of the game.
Basically, narrative trappings in raising sims exist in large part to give the more mechanical stat grinding some much-needed flavor and emotional stakes so that the games aren't merely exercises in watching numbers passively go up and down. The same is essentially true for dating sims such as Tokimeki Memorial that are directly derived from this framework; predetermined story events outside of the introductory and ending sequences stay largely out of the way in favor of smaller, one-off vignettes with individual characters. Done right, this is enough for players to prescribe their own meaning within the rhythms of their character's stats going up and down at different times.
Tokimeki Memorial's stat screen. Options for how to spend your week are displayed on the left.
For those who haven't had the chance to play a more traditional dating sim like Tokimeki Memorial, the appeal and potential of this style of systems-derived approach to narrative within a game with lots of number crunching might be difficult to imagine, so let me give a pretty plausible example many beginner players are likely to encounter. Say that mid-term exam season is coming up in Tokimeki Memorial and your character's academic stats have been slagging because you've mostly been focusing on other stats that you think your desired potential partner will prefer in a boyfriend. Maybe you want the sport club girls to be proud of you when you win matches against other schools, so you've been exercising endlessly. Or you've been a real social butterfly so that you can hold a conversation with a chatty girl who thinks and speaks a million miles and hour.
Whatever the case, you still want to do well on the exams because good grades obviously tend to impress them no matter who they are, improving your overall reputation. So you decide to buckle down and do the work, having your hapless boy hit the books to the detriment of just about everything else, at least temporarily. But, because you weren't careful and didn't pay enough attention to his precipitous health and stress stats, the final night before the exams, when you attempt to study one more time, he's hit with a burnout debuff. Now, when he goes into the week of exams, his performance will plunge despite otherwise having stats that should be good enough because instead of choosing to let him rest while you could, you tried to press your luck and make him keep studying so his stats could be even better. Now he's not only paying the price in terms of his health and academics, but also his standing with the apple of his eye, who thinks lesser of him after failing his exams. As a result of your hubris, your character is now markedly worse off than he probably would've been had he taken the night off and you're now going to have to work that much harder to repair your reputation and get things back on track. Worse still, this debuff will continue to remain in effect until you force him to sit down and rest, preventing you from building up any other stats in the meantime until he fully recovers some time later.
All of this has happened with almost no directed cutscenes on the part of the game. Other than an encounter with the girl in question after exams wrap up in which she perhaps shares some less-than-kind words with you, the entirety of this sequence of events was conducted purely by the player making routine decisions in the trajectory of their character's growth and the systems/RNG unfolding accordingly. That's what's possible in a good dating sim with raising game-style mechanics that keeps it own preset plot points largely out of the way and lets the gameplay do the talking in tandem with the player's own imagination. Even nearly three decades on from Tokimeki Memorial's original PC Engine release, it still feels genuinely magical.
But therein lies the problem. What if you have a dating sim with a compelling setting and charming characters and it turns out players want more stories about the cast? They want to learn more about these people they've come to fall in love with and just want to see more of them in their element. In the confines of many mid-90s dating sims that take their cues from games like Princess Maker 2, that's a tremendously difficult problem to solve within the existing gameplay structure, if not the very paradigms informing the genre as it's understood at that point. It's not that there are necessarily technical or logistical constraints preventing these games from having more defined narrative developments. But can that safely be achieved without robbing players of that sense of ownership they get from each run, successful or not? Put another way, how much authored content can a dating sim realistically introduce before it stops being, well, a simulation?
Though this problem became less thorny as the genre matured and incorporated influences from novel games in controlled doses, for many dating sims in the 90s, it was a problem that was too difficult to overcome within their existing toolset. In Tokimeki Memorial's case, it was a problem that was important to solve, however, and fairly quickly at that, in order to maintain the massive financial momentum it was building as Konami's biggest surprise hit of the decade. While the company also put out scores of drama CDs and other expanded universe material in other mediums, when it came to providing more story content in games, it turned to a more reliable vehicle for storytelling within the Japanese industry: adventure games.
Yes, in a sense, Tokimeki Memorial came home to roost with one of the genres that most directly informed its presentation and writing style. Not only that, but it entered the realm of adventure games under the tutelage of Konami's most experienced stewards of them, namely Hideo Kojima's team at Konami Computer Entertainment Japan. In a years-long endeavor spanning through the eve of Tokimeki Memorial 2's long awaited release in 1999, the team previously behind Snatcher and Policenauts, who I'll refer to from here on as Kojima Productions for simplicity, released three adventure game spinoffs in the Tokimeki Memorial Drama sub-series on an annual basis, each one depicting a relationship built with a specific girl from the original core cast. Volume 1 is headlined by the soccer manager Saki Nishino, while Volume 2 spotlights singer Ayako Katagiri, and Volume 3 stars none other than the iconic red-haired Shiori Fujisaki herself (although a secret route in that game also allows you to pursue local gremlin Miharu Tatebayashi, whose appearance in runs in the original Tokimeki Memorial is determined solely by luck).
Repurposing Kojima Production's existing adventure game engine that was previously deployed in Policenauts, the end results are nothing short of fascinating as their actual, yet near universally forgotten last works in the genre. The basic structure and mode of interactivity are carried over surprisingly intact. The Tokimeki Memorial Drama games are still point-and-click affairs that see you clicking on different parts of characters and the environment, opening up menus that dynamically render wherever you click with contextually appropriate actions and conversation topics at your disposal. After school each day, you also have relative freedom to roam around the school grounds wherever you like until you're ready to trigger the next required plot point, catching up with familiar faces and perhaps even getting into bemusing, quaintly animated optional minigames with them.
The effectiveness of the translation goes both ways, though. What's impressive isn't just how well Kojima Productions made an adventure game work within the world of Tokimeki Memorial, but also how comfortably Tokimeki Memorial transitions into an adventure game structure in turn. Many smaller elements of the original game manage to survive the shift in genre, not just in terms of lore and background details, but even mechanics. In particular, the phone in your room, which is used in the original game to arrange dates with girls and get intel on them from your pal Yoshio, still charmingly functions. While there are no dates to invite girls out to when each game already hones in on one in particular, you can nevertheless call them up once you've met them in each game to have a final extended conversation before you turn in each night, the contents of which change regularly as the game and their respective optional sub-plots advance. It might appear to be a small touch at a glance, but it lends your interactions with these characters a level of closeness, intimacy that's never truly afforded to the original game because of its structurally open-ended mandate.
Really, it's that new, unprecedented level of intimacy with the cast that Kojima Productions' Tokimeki Memorial games offer in shepherding them to the adventure game genre. Whereas in the original game, you generally spend at most two or three minutes with them at a time on weekend and holiday dates before returning back to the main stat grinding, the Drama games, by virtue of inhabiting a genre that's much more comfortable with extended exchanges, have you spending much more time with each of their starring heroines, sometimes tens of minutes at a time. And not everything that happens with them is terribly exciting, either. Sometimes you're just practicing your soccer kicks while Saki watches, sweetly encouraging you. Or you're writing a song for your guitar as Ayako, a gifted singer, offers you advice. Or you're sitting in a classroom with Shiori, quietly assembling a yearbook together on the eve of your graduation. Tokimeki Memorial the dating sim draws these characters in fairly caricatured, rushed strokes, constricted by open-ended systems and the need for spontaneous events that may arise in any order to be free of contradictions with one another. Tokimeki Memorial the adventure game, on the other hand, gives these characters room to breathe and be far more than their stereotypes as you pick their brains while spending time with them. Even in the most mundane moments, it feels revelatory simply because for the first time in the series, you're allowed to appreciate and interact with them on their terms, free from the dictates of a still immature genre, no matter how much the source material might have pioneered it.
It's a solution that feels very specific to both Tokimeki Memorial at that point in its history and Japanese dating sims as a whole in that moment. In the years that followed, dating sims successfully found ways to make their characters more personable and defined, offering up firmer individual plot arcs without sacrificing the player flexibility crucial to the genre's appeal and identity. Games such NEC Interchannel's Sentimental Graffiti that adopted wholly different mechanics and structures that better facilitated fuller narratives up front were among the first to achieve this feat. But by the time the series wound down with its fourth and final mainline installment on PSP, even Tokimeki Memorial found the confidence and means to tell richer stories within its systemic fluidity.
Yet as one of the very first steps towards those developments, Kojima Productions' unique contributions to the evolution of dating sims, however indirect, remain invaluable and still wholly worth playing to this day. As their final send-offs to a genre that legitimized them and their narrative chops in their earliest days, by the time their Tokimeki Memorial adventure games concluded with Shiori's chapter in 1999, they ultimately went far beyond their original mandate of simply fleshing out Konami's breakout hit, challenging and even deconstructing the very premise and foundations of the series to a genuinely touching degree. If the rumored objections and outcry to the plotting and cast's portrayal from the original game's development team are anything to go by despite Japanese fans' own loving attachment to the spinoffs, in some ways, Kojima Productions perhaps better understood dating sims and where they needed to head better than some of the genre's own founders.
Not bad for a side gig undertaken while developing Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2.
