Among the big, traditional Japanese developers with roots in arcade games, a lot of people tend to think that dating sims were historically the domain of Konami. Maybe Sega gets thrown into the mix, too, if you want to count Sakura Taisen as a dating sim, although I don't personally lean that way myself as a matter of genre semantics. But, as longtime followers probably know by now, plenty of other heavy hitters also threw their hat into the ring at the peak of the post-Tokimeki Memorial boom, even in arcades. You had the shmup and action game masters at Taito putting out not just one, but two, versions of Magical Date, a rare early genre entry rendered in polygons. Namco showed up in the early 2000s with Seishun Quiz, a gorgeously animated sprite-based game running on PS1-derived hardware and a personal favorite of mine that also serves as something of a distant relative to the Idolmaster series. And then you perhaps have the most readily overlooked case of them all in Capcom. Yes, that Capcom, the one setting the world on fire with classic fighting games and brawlers took time out of its busy schedule to put out Quiz Nanairo Dreams, another beautifully crafted 2D quiz and dating sim hybrid built for its iconic CPS-2 arcade platform.
Despite being Perhaps Your One Weird (Casual) Arcade Collector you might know, because I am a complete lunatic and don't have any personal affection for much anything else on the platform (most of the big CPS-2 games were just a bit before my time growing up, so I'm ever so slightly more a child of the Neo Geo), this is the only game I've ever gone out of my way to seek on that platform and once I have an accompanying motherboard to actually play it, it's going to probably stay that way. My deepest apologies to the FGC heads out there looking for real hardware to play the true classics on. It's nothing personal; I'm simply committed to my art.
Anyway, Quiz Nanairo Dreams has some genuine talent behind it, perhaps most notably character artist Kenichi Ueda, who's done a lot of work on Capcom games both past and present, plenty of which you're bound to have heard of. Go look up some screenshots if you've never heard of it before and you'll see a game not quite like much else in the rest of its 90s catalogue, featuring a lot of uncharacteristically soft pastels. It's not quite my favorite looking dating sim of its vintage, but, like pretty much all of Capcom's games of that era, it holds up a hell of a lot better than many of its contemporaries, especially as one-and-done tiptoeing into uncharted genre territory. (Or at least, if we're not including the games copiously recycling sprites past their expiration date.)
I don't have the means to test this board yet, but the Yahoo Japan listing made it seem like its infamous suicide battery is still alive, which is great because sourcing permanent replacements for that mechanism is apparently really difficult at the moment. I'm not super keen on replacing the battery with another one unless I absolutely have to, given that once that battery is removed, you're running on borrowed time until the data runs out of charge and scrambles itself, but if I have to down the line, I will. More than anything, I'm glad I was able to source the paperwork for this game as well, which, while not original, are surprisingly nice-looking copies. You'd be hard pressed to know the inserts in particular aren't the real deal if you didn't feel them and realize it's regular paper. And while copying is obviously looked down in other game collecting circles, it's less of an issue in the world of arcade PCBs, where what really matters most is just having that reliable technical information for when you need to fiddle around with dip switches and stuff.
All told, while I already owned the console port of it, I'm still super happy to bring this original version into the fold and am super excited to bring it to life eventually. This brings the list of retro arcade dating sims left to buy to just one and if you've followed me long enough, you probably know which. Please pray for my soul. 😩
