Tom

So, obviously excluding the recently released Bunny Garden, a game that I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to call a full-fledged dating sim (and which I did a writeup on here about three weeks ago, for those who haven't read it already), in terms of traditional Japanese dating sims by my personal definition, pretty much everything available remains exclusively in fan translation form and at this point, things are... in a weird spot, in my opinion.

For a long time, a lot of the only games you could find patched was more obscure fare that was just somebody's passion project. Which, there's nothing wrong with that by any means, of course, but it was only so instructive for those looking to dig deep into genre history and learn about the most relevant, influential stuff. Nowadays, in the wake of stuff like Tim Rogers' Tokimeki Memorial retrospective, things are a little better. Patches for that original game and personal favorite (and certainly big time cult classic) Amagami have since made their way out, but in general, pretty much all of these patches, both older and more recent have their caveats that frankly continue to make it hard for me to recommend any of them.

In general, and I'm not saying this to cut down people's hard work, but the English prose in a lot of these patches just isn't particularly great. I would go so far as to say they're often not sufficiently representative of the original Japanese quality, which in turn undersells a lot of what makes these games compelling and emotionally resonant in the first place. Some of this is probably down to technical limitations—I don't get the impression that a lot of these projects attract much in the way of hacking talent, if any—but a lot of it is almost certainly inexperience on the part of the translators and editors working on a lot of these patches. Again, this isn't to disparage anybody's work in particular or say that I wish their patches don't exist. In most of these cases, I do feel that any level of accessibility into these games is generally better than none at all.

But here's the thing: dating sim dialogue is deceptively difficult to translate well. This might sound a little self-serving coming from someone who used to LP these things on Twitter in his spare time, but the reality with these games is that they almost always have none of the typical crutches that games in other genres can rely on to make their writing compelling. They're almost always set in the real world, whether in an actual location or inspired by one, which means that unlike, say, in fantasy RPGs, you don't have the benefit of, say, worldbuilding to fall back on as a way to hook players if the dialogue itself is merely passable. (This isn't to say that worldbuilding never matters in dating sims; it just tends to be more subtle and operate in the background since a lot of it can just be taken for granted based on players' lived experiences.) On top of that, dating sim casts are typically cut from a similar cloth, which is to say, even if they might have diverse personalities and viewpoints, as they ideally should, there tends to be some universality when it comes to their background and personal status, so they also generally can only lean so heavily on gimmick characterizations before they feel out of place as a matter of narrative integrity relative to the setting. In the end, all you really have is the raw, unvarnished dialogue to work with and any chemistry that might exist between the characters to work off of.

That's it. So while dating sims might appear straightforward to localize in some ways compared to other genres because you're not having to, for example, come up with a bunch of bespoke terms from scratch, etc, they're absolutely test a translator's ability to write natural, engaging, and humanizing dialogue. And not just dialogue that ticks all of those boxes, but also dialogue that makes those characters relatable across cultural and social boundaries. It is a type of writing that, and I say this lovingly, plenty of professionals can handle competently, but few truly enjoy doing because they see it as either mundane or just less glamorous than other types of game writing. Even fewer, I would argue, are genuinely talented at composing such material. It really takes a particular type of game translator with the right passion, dedication, and outright genre fluency to make these sorts of games shine with so little else to work with and believe me when I say that there aren't that many of those to go around.

None of this is to say that it's impossible for fan translators to turn in quality work regardless, but I think what it does mean is that the odds tend to be more stacked against those teams than I think they often necessarily appreciate. I don't doubt that a lot of the people who have produced these patches understand emotionally what makes dating sims such a special genre. But these projects' knack for attracting less experienced fan translators—quite possibly only those with a singular interest in working on such material—almost invariably results in translations that are, at best, perfunctory and too deferential to the Japanese scripts in structure and cadence to fully capture these games' core charm, or at least not without asking English-speaking players to fill in a lot more blanks than they should really have to. Dating sim translations in particular require a defined, unified vision and self-confidence to execute and, without naming names, all of the ones I've seen have stumbled in this regard to some degree. It also doesn't help that the text sizes of these games tend to make the translator and editor teams for these games balloon, which makes fan translations especially prone to having too many cooks in the kitchen when this is a genre that particularly benefits from having as small of a translation team as possible in order to ensure stylistic coherence and all that jazz.

A lot of these translations are also technically compromised in one way or another. You can play Tokimeki Memorial 1 in English finally, but it's the deeply compromised, unvoiced SNES port, a decision that I get in terms of access to technical expertise, but means that people overseas have been playing what I would argue is the least representative version of that game by a wide margin, even over the Game Boy ports. (To that team's credit, they did some technical wizardry to add voices back into each ending, which is genuinely great, but still a far cry from the intended experience when that game was absolutely always meant to be enjoyed with fully voiced dialogue.) There is work being done on the CD versions, so hopefully that will eventually become a non-issue, but right now it still means that people are interacting with what I would consider to be the least widely remembered version of that game.

Likewise, there's now a way to play Amagami from start to finish in English. I think it's fair to say that, respectfully speaking as someone who spent five years LPing it, I'll always have pretty significant creative differences with how that translation handles a lot of stuff. But most critically, because of technical limitations with that patch's implementation, you need to maintain three separate patched copies of the game in order to access all of the story content. I also recognize that game is hardly the easiest game to tame from a technical perspective, but releasing the patch in that manner, I feel, fundamentally harms the game's intended free-flow structure and is a deal-breaker. Again, I tip my hat to that team for getting any translation of it out the door, I'm fully aware of what an arduous journey they've all been on to release it. But it's my sincere hope that if it never gets an official localization (and I'm not giving up on that dream myself!) that another team takes a stab at it and redoes it all from scratch. It's just unrealistic to expect anybody casually interested in the game to go to such trouble and nor should they.

So I guess my answer to your original question is... yes, there are more and more historically important dating sims you can play than you could even just a couple years ago, but there's still a lot of room for improvement. In addition to Tokimeki Memorial 1 and Amagami, there are also patches for Love Plus and all three Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side games. Again, I can't particularly give glowing recommendations to either of them, so my advice to anyone with no other means of exploring these games is to just do so knowing that these patches will perhaps teach you about how they're played, but not necessarily how they're intended to feel.

And other than Bunny Garden in terms of official releases, there is also the remake of Doukyuusei, which you can find on Steam here. I haven't played the localization, but it's my impression that out of literally everything I've listed here, this one probably has the most polished translation by far. Doukyuusei is a profoundly important game from a historical perspective, but its roots as a pre-Tokimemo eroge on the PC-98 also mean that in terms of structure and mechanics, it's pretty divorced from what dating sims ultimately became once they made that jump to consoles. The script is also a very, very acquired taste; the protagonist is libidinous in a way that's very typical of eroge of that era and it can also mean that even in tamer scenes, his dialogue has a harder edge to it than you'll find in a lot of stuff that came after it. So it's hard for me to give that game an unreserved recommendation either; it certainly has its fans abroad now, and I would certainly agree that it's a game worth studying it if you want to explore dating sim history in a more academic fashion like I have. But how much personal enjoyment you'll get out of it is definitely going to vary from one individual to the next.

I know you didn't exactly request a diatribe on dating sim translations, but since it's been a minute since I last really talked about my feelings on the matter and am also procrastinating on putting some paperwork together for my tax accountant here in Japan this afternoon, I figured, if not now, when, ahaha. Again, none of this is to say that it's a worthless exercise to explore what is out there now, including when it comes to fan translations and I tip my hat to all of those teams who I'm sure did their best within their means to put out what they were able to. None of my criticism should be taken to mean that I don't respect the effort and passion that goes into those projects. I'm just speaking as an increasingly longtime advocate for these games and feel it's important to stress just how, how much more work there remains to be done in this field, both officially and otherwise.