Tom

First off, I applaud you for actually putting in the work and getting people to actually play those games! I saw what you did with Getter Love and was genuinely super impressed. It's way more than I've actually managed to accomplish even though my translator friends I discuss playing these games together over Parsec like once every six months, ahaha.

Anyway, off the top of my head, the two games you've probably thinking of and that I would recommend are:

• Next King. Either the Saturn or PlayStation version is fine. They're functionally identically beyond I believe some very minor control improvements to the Saturn version.

• (Deep breath) Taisen Renai Simulation: Trifels Mahou Gakuen. I know I've posted about at least this specific game once or twice, I believe under the "trifels" tag or something similar on here. I'm sure once you type that, you'll find some version of the tag one way or the other because nobody else other than me has surely posted to it.

Neither of them has been fan translated as far as I know, but all other things being equal, I would say that Next King is the easier game to recommend. There's a lot of tremendously funny writing for those who can read Japanese, but it also has proper design chops as a board game... game riffing on dating sims. Just maybe the session to last one to three months tops if you're going to playing blindly as a group. Speaking as someone who did the full 12 months for the single-player mode, I'd say it holds up pretty well to longer sessions, but it's a fairly hefty time investment, like at least eight to ten hours long, and that's with three CPUs taking their turns. I can't imagine doing a whole run with four total newcomers. You might miss out on some story events that would trigger from being able to do whole routes (at least, I assume that's the case with shorter sessions), but you don't have do that to win the game or have a happy ending, so I would just keep it fairly short and sweet to get a taste for the mechanics and see if everyone's into it.

As for why I don't recommend Trifels, it mostly comes down to the fact that it's a spinoff of the Eberouge series, which are pretty much all but forgotten even domestically. Trifels is super charming and gorgeously drawn and animated, especially for a PS1 game, so it's not that there wouldn't be anything enjoyable for someone new to it. But it really is intended to be played by people familiar with the first game, which is definitely not gonna be most people today until it gets a patch, if such a thing ever comes to pass, alas.

Hope that helps!