I'm still playing Fire Woman Matoi-gumi (more on that here if you haven't seen my other posts) and I continue to be surprised both at just how many little details you can uncover if you take the time to walk around the school routinely and talk to people, as well as how sweet they often turn out to be.
Case in point with Reiko here, who's basically one of the local hall monitors. Even though nearly the entirety of the main gameplay loop and story take place exclusively within the bounds of the school, every Sunday, a fun little interstitial plays that shows you spending time somewhere with one of the characters, guy or girl. You can't actually choose who you spend time with per se, but of course, the more you hang out and do things for them during regular gameplay, the more likely you are to hang out with them during the weekend. These events are initially just framed as casual outings, but today, I triggered my first actual date with Reiko, complete with a unique CG showing her painting at the park we visited.
Fast forward a couple of days later and the school's annual festival is underway. As you might expect, this dramatically shakes up where you find characters and what they're doing, often participating in club activities or doing something with their homeroom. (You've seen Japanese media, you know the drill with these things.) Reiko also happens to be a member of the art club, so when I paid a visit to their humble little exhibition in their school's lobby, I found she had put up none other than... the piece I saw her paint on our date that had happened just days before in-game. This was the first time a character had directly acknowledged any of their weekend outings with me within the main game proper, so I couldn't help but smile seeing this quiet little bit of payoff take place.
And what fascinates me most about all of this is how, again, Fire Woman Matoi-gumi deemphasizes prescribed narrative arcs even more so than most of its immediate dating sim contemporaries at the time. You get to know these characters more or less solely through one-off vignettes that are portrayed with sparse amounts of dialogue and that you're never guaranteed to actually see, including the scene I just described. Here, relationships are less about big, dramatic moments so much as quiet intersections that take place when two separate lives already in progress happen to converge for a moment. You'd think these sorts of proceedings wouldn't offer very much to be invested in as a player, but the characters themselves are so concretely defined within those constraints and their writing and interpersonal chemistry so warm and inviting that I still find myself actively seeking out their company in the same way I would with a "meatier" dating sim, even if I know that the game's design dictates that any time spent with them will be incredibly fleeting, at most a few dialogue boxes long. It's given me a lot of food for thought in terms of how convincing relationships can be structurally conveyed and serves as a reminder that for as established as certain types of relationship-building mechanics have generally become, it's less of a solved problem than many like to think, and in an exciting way at that.