I promise this will hopefully be one of the only times I directly reference the place on this site, but after a week of waiting and a lot of doubting whether the functionality was even still working now anyway, I finally managed to get an archive of my posts from the bird site downloaded, largely to have a raw, if very, very imperfectly organized carbon copy of my dating sim LPs. (Imagine my immense joy when I found out their included HTML-based viewer doesn't seem to preserve any threading for posts whatsoever!!!) But just as importantly, since it also includes every single image and video I couldn't be bothered to hold onto locally after posting them before, it means a beautiful era is upon us of subjecting a whole new site to some of the most prime, vital Dating Sim Content I've ever created.
Such as this coverage of Love Plus' most clutch feature: the ability to play Konami arcade bangers like Yie Ar Kung-Fu with your DS girlfriend.
It's Good. Love Plus is Good.
Okay, kidding aside, here's the real reason I often go back to this specific feature when I talk about Love Plus (even if it's exclusive to the 3DS games, mind): one of the things that I admire about Konami's best dating sims is the extent to which they embrace their medium as games. A lot of people have this unfortunate habit of treating dating sim design (really, design for most all Japanese games that fall under that adventure game umbrella I've discussed before) as being divorced from design for more traditional game genres. This despite the fact that as a genre, dating sims aren't interested in completely forsaking the history of other types of games and the grammar they've built up over time. A lot of that grammar and even the mechanics you'll find elsewhere are very alive and well, just recontextualized to a very different, more personable and emotional end. In fact, I've written at length about how the original Tokimeki Memorial is a game that builds upon Konami's canon up to that point in a number of ways and how that experience creating "gamers' games" was actually pivotal to making it mechanically compelling and, for lack of a better word, legitimate.
In a lot of ways, Love Plus allowing you to actually sit down and play games with each of the girls, both competitively and cooperatively, is the ultimate blossoming of those seeds that were planted by Konami nearly two decades before at that point (and almost three at the time of this writing). Now not only is Love Plus repurposing mechanics from elsewhere in Konami's library to foster that bond between players and the girls, they're making that canon a direct part of the relationship building process. It's much more than simply a cheeky nod to the games of Konami Past, too. While it goes without saying that obviously many couples these days bond over video games, very few dating sims actually incorporate the act of playing them directly as a mechanical motif. There are lots of perfectly understandable logistical and technical reasons why that's the case—really, Konami is one of the very few dating sim developers with a back catalogue sufficiently compelling enough to attempt such a thing from a retro angle specifically—but it goes that much farther to solidifying the sense that, even for all of their narrative, emotional, and experiential aspirations, these are dating sims that are still proud to be games. And if dating sims have always found ways from the very outset to incorporate lessons and mechanics first formed elsewhere to compelling effect, then certainly other genres could stand to take a closer look at dating sims and embrace more from them than they're typically loath to do.
