Tom

@iiotenki

The Tony Hawk of Tokimeki Memorial

He/him
freelansations.com/

A most of the time Japanese>English game translator and writer and all the time dating sim wonk.

❓ Ask Archive

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Tom @iiotenki12/21/2022, 6:00 PM

starting to think that the best way to get press and players outside of japan to take dating sims seriously is to go back in time, have fromsoft do one as a one-off sometime during their ps1 years while the rest of their library remains intact, and then, in the future, when they make the surprise decision to revisit it 25 years later, people will be excited for it by default because they think it'll have to be a soulslike because they got it in their head that fromsoft is physically incapable of making literally any other kind of game whatsoever despite any and all evidence to the contrary

||jokes on me, tokimemo was a soulslike with builds all along||

jokes on me, tokimemo was a soulslike with builds all along

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in reply to @iiotenki's post:

Vincent Kinian @Video-Game-King12/21/2022, 6:18 PM

I was going to say you win that crowd by leaning into a sense of open world verisimilitude, but uh...*stares in Natsurio High School (and I guess Yandere Simulator?)*

Tom @iiotenki12/22/2022, 6:40 AM

I do think there is genuine merit in marrying dating sim mechanics to that sort of structure and that Natsuiro's issues are more down to mismatched priorities (well, on top of just poor execution in general), but that admittedly probably calls for a much bigger budget than anyone still actually working in that arena probably has the stomach for these days. Between you and me, I feel that if the genre is ever going to truly come back in a big way, it probably needs a (successful) big kick in the pants like that since, for as much as I like them, I just don't see the traditional kind garnering a sustained market, especially within Japan, but yeah. (Do I think a handful of legacy games could sell well abroad if they were localized well? Totally, but that's ultimately a smaller hurdle to clear than creating a new generation of sustainable games.)

Vincent Kinian @Video-Game-King12/22/2022, 4:18 PM

That depends on what you mean by "kick in the pants", since Persona 3 arguably represented just such a kick in the pants, but introducing open world design to dating sims? NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. Open worlds are the gentrification of game design: they emerge not because they're relevant to a given game or genre's design or because they help it more fully express themselves (the only thing expressing itself here is the player, and even then only hypothetically), but so as to make that game/genre conform to a universal standard that renders it more easily consumable. Was being able to speed in a particular, player-chosen direction so necessary to Sonic that it had to introduce the feature in Frontiers? Or were wide Caspar David Friedrich-esque expanses so relevant to the Souls series that it had to ignore them until Elden Ring? As far as dating sims are concerned, I imagine the open world-ification of them would look...well, like Persona 3: the statistical management and expression of character through those stats would be significantly flattened out (even moreso than Persona 3), and dating would become the punctuation loosely structuring a host of other, mostly irrelevant activities that exist more to fill out space than anything.

It took me until the "open world-ification" part to realize that Fuuraiki is already an open world dating sim, and one of the reasons it probably hasn't been localized yet is because - as far as non-Japanese, non-dating sim players are concerned - it doesn't emphasize "open world" enough in relation to "dating sim."