dearcrowns

Magical Girl (Aspirational)

I'm still figuring this out uuuh read Lenin


Kimimi
@Kimimi

TokiMemo evolved!

This DS dating sim shifts the focus from winning the girl to the great What Happens After - and in some ways does too good a job of making your chosen date feel like a person in your pocket:


iiotenki
@iiotenki

Another sublime article on a dating sim from someone whose thoughts on the genre I'm always super interested in hearing. Even as someone who spent a LONG time playing Love Plus in the real-time mode and has pretty fond memories of it overall, it's hard to deny the pitfalls she aptly breaks down.

Go read it! Then go read the rest of her dating sim articles! They're all great! πŸ‘


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in reply to @Kimimi's post:

As ever, thanks for taking as much time as you did to explore the game and articulate your thoughts. I think at this point you've written more words in your essays about the genre than I've actually found the time to, and it's been a genuine pleasure to see you get to know the genre and come at it from a very different perspective to mine at times, and a very vital one at that. 😌

But yeah, I totally feel you on those issues, as they all tend to be things I wasn't so fond of in my own time, either. The probing character customization conversations in particular always left a bad taste in my mouth. Whenever the girls asked me what I thought, I always said that I liked it because, yeah, even if they're not real people of course, I didn't like intervening in their autonomy. If they like it and I like them as people, who am I to judge? And yeah, the touch screen kissing... I could do without. They went on to refine their approach for stuff like that in the 3DS games and it's interesting to consider the lineage of those touch screen features given the series' shared leadership with Tokimemo Girls Side, but it was never what I came to those games for by any means.

All told, you did great as always and I genuinely enjoyed reading this! Congrats on graduating your Konami dating sim history course! πŸŽ‰πŸŽ‰πŸŽ‰

Oh goodness, thank you!

I was the same as you re: those conversations. If she wanted long hair or started talking about glasses then yeah sure, I'd agree with whatever she was currently in the mood for - I wasn't going to tell her how to dress!

Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to read that through - it honestly means a lot to know I've got your seal of approval :D

I forget if this is something only the 3DS games do because they have the higher polygon budget, but a couple months into my run with Manaka (she opens up to be a much more delightful weirdo than the game lets on, and it really should let on a lot sooner), one day she surprised me with one of the few hair styles I've ever seen in that game that gave me a surprisingly visceral reaction in terms of how starkly different it was. My mom tells me than when I was really little, she picked me up from school one day after she got a haircut and I cried about it couldn't have been her and my reaction to Manaka's new hairstyle made me think that's how I must've felt before. But when she asked what I thought about it, I told her of course I liked it and by god, I lived with it for like the next two or three weeks before she finally changed it back of her own initiative. It eventually grew on me over time, but I couldn't help but find my own reaction genuinely funny and absurd considering she's just A Lady in the DS, who cares, ahaha.

But of course it has my seal of approval! Anything you could say about these games always would! You could've written about how you strapped it to a bottle rocket and shot it off into the sky for Bonfire Night and I'd still genuinely lap up every word! You've got genuine expertise in this genre and bring your own vital perspective to the table and I'm 100 percent here for it!!! 😌