Another day, another chance to make a Sega system think it's a computer to play some Japanese dating sims, this time Hudson's Typing of the Date for the Dreamcast. This game is something of a duology with their other dating sim(-ish) of note, Getter Love for the N64, if mainly in terms of shared aesthetics and cast members. Whereas that game is a board game with dating sim mechanical flourishes sprinkled on top (itself a not uncommon sub-genre during the heyday of dating sims in the 90s), Typing of the Date is a much more straightforward typing game, and it's far from the only dating-themed typing game at that. You play through scenarios with one of the three romanceable girls and, surprise surprise, instead of choosing your dialogue responses as usual, you type them out, with some seemingly basic-looking minigames thrown in for variety's sake. Sega's own Typing of the Dead this is not in terms of charming writing and creative gameplay design, but it looks short enough that I'll probably blitz through a route or two soon enough just to get my money's worth out of that keyboard, which I genuinely bought more or less for this game. That said, the options menu does allow you to toggle romanization system preferences for most of the Japanese phonemes that are contentious in that regard, meaning that if you come to this game as a non-native speaker in particular, you're mercifully not forced to type in the wretched Nihon-shiki standard, barring a few strange, but comparatively bearable exceptions.
If nothing else, it's significantly cheaper to buy than its N64 sibling by a factor of about four to six times depending on how much a seller feels like bleeding a prospective buyer dry (something I'll likely be experiencing soon enough because this far in, I can't not own the N64's only dating sim, can I...?). So, hey, that's something.