After procrastinating on it for months upon finally getting a physical copy of it with my beloved obi intact—that's the paper strip you find placed along the spin of Japanese CD cases for those not in the know—like the sicko that I am, I finally started a new run of Debut 21 for the PS1 earlier tonight. Debut 21 is a sequel to NEC's Tanjou: Debut for the PC-98, among various platforms. That game, itself something of a spiritual successor to Sotsugyou, is one of foundational entries in character raising sims as a genre alongside stuff like the Princess Maker and, as a game about bringing up a trio of budding idols to stardom, offers something of a blueprint that would go on to be elaborated upon to much more pronounced effect in Namco's Idolmaster about a decade a half later. Debut 21 has you focusing on just one idol, a newly activated android by the name of Ai Kanzaki, and replaces the original game's sprites with still charming polygonal models overlaid smartly laid out prerended CG backgrounds.
Anyway, Debut 21, so far as I can tell, didn't make anywhere near the same splash as the original game, let alone Sotsugyou, and I think I know why. I'm most of the way through the game this second time around and I get the impression it doesn't have much more gas in it beyond one or two runs once you figure out the optimal way to play it; there just isn't really much flexibility in terms of how you can play the game because you have one fixed goal and a pretty straight and narrow path to it. And while it's all laid out sensibly enough, it does make some minor flubs that are common to games of this vintage that I could totally see becoming tedious to less patient players. But, honestly? I kind of don't care that it might not be the best thing ever to come out of this genre because as a character raising sim, it's just got a real cool ambience. The main twist to this game over just about anything else I've ever played in this genre is that because Ai is an android, you're not limited to just grinding activities like usual to raise her stats. You can straight up buy her new parts to augment her existing capabilities. Want to upgrade her battery capacity so she can work longer before having to recharge? Just pull the old one out of the back of her skull and stick in a new one. It doesn't get any more moe than that.
Enough of the interface is in English that, barring some branching conversations with Ai, if you don't speak or read Japanese, you probably could figure out the gist of the game through trial and error, even if I wouldn't recommend it because the bulk of the spoken dialogue isn't subtitled, so you'd be missing out on the sparse bits of story strewn throughout it. Either way, between just the visual style, the futuristic setting, and the cool integration of Ai's characterization as an android into the gameplay structure, I get the feeling this is a game I'll end up forever having a soft spot for. Cool is a word I would rarely use to describe these games, at least when we're talking strictly about aesthetics and not the mechanics themselves (and I say that lovingly), but Debut 21 just hits differently enough in a way that I've never gotten anywhere else in my years playing these games that makes it worth playing for me. Individual runs don't seem to top out at more than four to five hours even at a relaxed pace, so if you're like me and looking to go on a little tangent in another largely dormant historical genre of Japanese games, you could do a lot worse than this.