A couple of weeks ago, I decided to go through and count how many dating sims and other games within that general orbit (ie: galge overall) I had in my collection and came to a total of about 80 games. It wouldn't be exhaustive if I was going after novel games, too, but I'm not because I am but one man of only so much time and money on this earth, so for everything else, it's getting to be a pretty comprehensive collection. This year has seen me working on getting the handful of standouts that are really left, including the lone dating sim in the entire N64 library: Hudson's Getter Love.
Getter Love is actually something of a strange duology, its characters and setting also being used in Typing of the Date for the Dreamcast, a game that's mostly your typical typing game, except focused on typing stuff that makes girls happy. I've covered it before, actually; it's nothing spectacular, but at least it's one of the academically neater uses of the Dreamcast keyboard this side of Sega's seminal Typing of the Dead. Anyway, Getter Love is the older of the two games and commands a significantly higher price on the open market; I dropped about 30,000 yen on my complete copy in largely excellent condition, but brick and mortar shops in this part of Japan have gotten in the habit of selling it for upwards of 50,000 to 55,000 yen, even in worse shape. They know it's rare and I guess they're hoping to sucker ignorant foreign collectors into paying up for the sake of completing their collection because hell if there's otherwise any real interest in collecting for the system domestically.
Regardless, as for the actual game itself, Getter Love resides in the more-populated-than-you'd-think board game subgenre of dating sims. It doesn't necessarily come as that much of a surprise when you consider this is Hudson on the N64 we're talking about, but still. On that end, it at least has some interesting ideas. Gameplay takes place over the course of two in-game weeks, with the goal being to get one of the girls to accept your confession and officially become a couple. The days themselves are split into three times of day, daytime, evening, and night. At the start of each time of day, players choose where on the map they want to visit. Then, once everybody has chosen their destination, everyone moves at once across the board, including the girls, who roam to different places at different times. The player to reach their destination soonest then becomes the first one who gets to conduct their business, with the rest of the players getting to subsequently take their turns when they arrive, as well. Different locations offer different things to do, but the basic idea is that you're supposed to pay attention to who goes where so you can try to intercept them, whether it's one of the girls to approach them and hopefully set up a date later, or one of the other players to try to harass them.
In practice, it's... a mess, perhaps true to form for pretty much all of Hudson's non-Mario Party board game ventures (though I'm hardly the biggest fan of those, either, to be absolutely clear). As you can see in the second shot above, the transit period where everyone goes to their destinations takes place in 3D and when we're talking about like ten-plus low-polygon, indistinct models running around the board at once, it just becomes an incredibly jumbled mess to even attempt to parse as it's happening. Worse still, since most player turns will involve going through some amount of dialogue, especially when they're on dates, you're spending a lot of time idling and unable to really do anything whatsoever. You're supposed to use this time to essentially perform recon on the other players and girls so you have a better idea of where they're all heading in future turns, but when you're playing single-player especially, the AI tends to scroll through dialogue too quickly to reliably make out that information, and I speak as someone who obviously reads a lot of Japanese for his job and has become decently speedy at it over the years. (It also doesn't help that, as far as I'm aware, none of the dialogue in this game is voiced, which, while to be expected for an N64 game, can really harm a dating sim specifically as a genre initially conceived with that in mind for numerous reasons.)
I'm still going to try and make an effort to get through at least one full run of this just so I can be better acquainted with this game, but if you're not me? Don't go dumping 30,000 yen on this game, let alone more, even if you know what you're getting yourself into like I was. If you want some actually good dating sims that are played in a board game format, I highly recommend checking out either (deep breath) Taisen Renai Simulation: Trifels Mahou Gakuen, which I've also covered before on here (but with the caveat of having played the original Eberouge first) or especially Next King for the PS1 and Saturn, a genuinely funny piss-take on dating sims written and designed by Shouji Masuda of Linda Cube and Oreshika fame that is legitimately quite fun to play even solo. I talked about it previously elsewhere, but it's probably due for some more coverage on here since it remains probably among my top five dating sims to actually play.
Either way, please do not pity me and the amount of money I spent on this game. I don't truly regret it and, if nothing else, the box art will forever be fun to look at a shelf, even if it's attached to a pretty dicey character who also doesn't do it or Typing of the Date any favors. If nothing else, it's a relief to finally tick this game off the old shopping list, even if it means I'm now mostly getting into the really expensive stuff that'll take who knows how long to find.
I live a life. 😩
I tried this game sometime last year, entirely because a certain Japanese N64-era magazine went to bat for it super hard, and all I remember about it (aside from the identity of the character on the box art, which I'd rather not go into) is that one and only one of the character themes sounds like warmed-over Soichi Terada:
The number of times that chant gets used in the span of 30 seconds, if you told me this actually uses the same underlying midi file as the N64 Tony Hawk 3 version of Ace of Spades, just with different instruments, I would believe you without question, irrespective of the timing and geographic obstacles.