Tom

I hadn't until I saw this ask! Thanks for the heads up!

I was lightly interested in the first game, but decided against picking it up when it came out earlier this year since the launch price was a bit pricey for my tastes, although it's always remained on my radar as a thing to check out eventually. I see what you mean about those dating sim-adjacent elements for 2, too. It definitely looks to be taking at least a bit of a page out of Love Plus' book, even if I'm sure the scope of the actual game won't be anywhere near as big or open ended.

I normally don't pay a whole lot of mind to Entergram's output, but I'll probably keep an eye out for a used copy while I'm here and Tokyo and finally snag that first game if I can find it for a bit more reasonable of a price, so thanks for reminding me to finally look into it. I genuinely appreciate it!

It is the year of our lord 2024 and like the true, mainstream retro gamesman that I am, I just paid $60 for--deep breath, now--a Dreamcast port of a sound novel spinoff of Sentimental Graffiti that I already owned on the PS1 purely because I wanted to appreciate the CGs in VGA mode instead of being limited to the interlaced presentation of that original version, even if it is otherwise still outputting in one of the higher resolution modes.

Sentimental Graffiti: Yakusoku, as it's called, is a near little thing no matter which version you play because it's actually a gussied up repackaging of the serialized novella that ran in Japanese newspapers prior to the original game's release, which was one of the ways that NEC managed to drum up so much hype for that game back in the day before it launched. There is a proper paperback version you can also pick up, of course, which I keep meaning to buy one of these days, but given where Japanese games storytelling was at the time, it honestly feels most fitting to play in sound novel form with voice acting, background music, and, indeed, CGs, even if I would personally only really recommend picking it up after you've cleared a route or two of the main game for context.

The constant disc drive accesses this game seems to do (seemingly to stream in the background music, as far as I can tell, as it doesn't ever otherwise seem to stop in the way you'd expect if it was just pre-caching assets) have quickly led me to conclude that I'm better off just playing this version in an emulator anyway. Some of the more thrifty among you might question if this purchase was therefore worth making at all, to which my answer is: have you played Sentimental Graffiti 2, the only other real content in this series on the Dreamcast? You probably haven't, which is good because it's a fascinating kind of misery compared to the first game, but it also means that you can only imagine my desire as someone who really, really likes that original game to have something, anything for it on the Dreamcast that doesn't make me wince. So even if I never end up popping the actual disc into my system again, at least I can finally have a little peace of mind on that end after all these years.

It's also always just fun to pick up a Japanese Dreamcast game published well after Sega called it quits, you know? Only so many of those that are actually noteworthy without being some kind of shmup port! Just glad to finally have this one in the collection after spending years tracking it down, or at least a copy that still had the obi intact, which let me tell you, that's a challenge!

Anyway, that's all for today's episode of Tom's Expensive Galge Purchases. I'll see you again probably sooner than I can imagine not would really like from a fiscal perspective.

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!

Sentimental Graffiti is a dating sim I find myself thinking about a lot, even if it's not one I talk about publicly all that much. People treat the mainline Tokimeki Memorial games as the holy grail within the genre to get fan translated, and in some ways they are (mostly, 3 be damned), but they're still such a small sampling of what was going on in their heyday as to not be truly representative of what dating sims were about and how they could play. If there's one other game people should really be making a beeline to translate, it should probably be this. It's a fascinating case study well worth examining 25 years on. It's probably the biggest direct competition Tokimeki Memorial ever faced in its early years, backed by more publisher support from the outset and spawning reams of character merchandise in its own right. (I'd probably make the argument that in terms of actual mindshare and numbers, Sakura Taisen was probably the bigger overall threat to Konami despite the games inhabiting largely different genres, but I digress.) It's a group of veteran PC developers who had worked on formative pre-Tokimemo galge essentially having their say on a genre that their work helped give rise to, bringing to bear a level of direct experience and insight that frankly few others working in the space had, including the original Tokimemo team itself. And most crucially, it was a game that played vastly differently despite sharing some core concepts like a calendar system, demonstrating that the most successful alternatives to Tokimemo tended to be the ones that played the least like it, not least because it's really god damn hard to make a successful character raising game, so if you couldn't beat 'em, it was best not to join 'em in the first place.

Sentimental Graffiti is just a cool one of these games to play, man. The interplay between your budget, stamina, and schedule as you try to traverse Japan to manage all these dates leads you to make some fascinating decisions throughout a run. Got no money, but have a date in 36 hours a couple of prefectures over and some extra stamina to bear? Try sticking out your thumb and hoping a trucker will let you hitch a ride in the back most of the way there without paying the price too much with your body. Need to go from one end of the archipelago to another in as little time as possible to keep your promises to a pair of girls in the same weekend? Better be ready to pony up for that plane or bullet train ticket, pal. Ran out of money and can't move on to your next destination? Guess you're hanging out where you're staying and doing part time work for a weekend or two. There's also a lot more prescribed story content to top it off compared to a lot of its contemporaries, but there are still enough events that can spontaneously happen outside of major beats such as running into girls outside their main turf or them paying a surprise visit at your home in Tokyo that it still makes the narrative trajectory feel relatively organic. (It also doesn't hurt that the writing itself is a cut above pretty much all of its peers at that time.)

It's probably the sort of game that's not really Japanese game YouTuber essayist fodder, which is a shame. For as much as its sequel would go on to completely torch things (and I mean torch it; there's a reason the series didn't maintain this initial momentum for long), the first game is so well-executed of a first outing and a compelling demonstration of just how much more dating sims were capable of if they didn't leave themselves beholden to Tokimemo, it's definitely a game that I feel merits playing for those who really want to explore the ins and outs of the genre history.

Maybe it's time to churn out another proper dating sim essay. 🤔

Never did get around to writing that essay about it (I'm sorry; it really is a game worth covering in greater detail, though), but got this game on my mind again after singing its praises to a friend who I think I've convinced to give it a crack. I know a lot of retro game afficionados past a certain age just regard it as old import column filler that now lines game store junk bins by the dozen, and yes, it's true that the Saturn version is probably one of the most common games of its kind you can find over here, but I'm telling y'all, for once, this is one of those games with some proper genre bona fides that's still well worth experiencing and studying if you have the Japanese chops for it.

It's maybe not the most replayable game in the world, which tends to a red flag for dating sims given their inherently repetitive gameplay and structure. But like I said before, the writing is so much more polished than just about anything else at the time and the overall flow is still fresh and unique nearly 30 years later. If you like dating sims like I do, I genuinely think you owe it to yourself to at least give it a try to see just how close this first entry arguably came to being, in the parlance of old magazine console war talk, a genuine Tokimemo killer.