Tom

tokimeki memorial is a series that people describe as being about finding a girlfriend, but true gamers know that the real tokimemo is actually the girlfriends you take pains not to make along the way

I have finally gotten the Tokimemo 4 events I was after to proc and this game remains good, y'all. There is no emotional payoff in games quite like a relationship coming together in this series after busting your ass trying to figure out the best character build to pursue for a given route. Got legit butterflies in my stomach when I realized I'd finally cracked the barrier in Kai's that'd forced me to reset three times.

Good times. Old dating sims are good, I recommend 'em.

I'm having trouble getting an optional CG scene I want to proc in Tokimemo 4, so I've been diving back into the Japanese fan guides and wikis and even though I'm practically drowning in a sea of minutiae about hidden stats and gameplay systems (Tokimemo has always had a lot more going on under the hood than what it specifically surfaces to players), it's a nice reminder that, y'know, social systems in Japanese games used to be like this, right?

You could have bona fide systems that interpret different facets of human relationships in fascinating ways to facilitate the settings and themes and you ended up with these games that could genuinely be as enjoyable for their mechanics as their ensuing storytelling, both emergent and bespoke. We used to have games do that more often and we even used to have genre hybrids that sometimes went to a similar level of depth in their relationship systems!

There was a time when relationship arcs in games was as much about how players responded to the RNG dealt to them in runs to achieve their desired ending as they were the prescribed content, if not more so. You took ownership over what happened and how things developed in these games in the same way you take ownership of a party's build and stat progression in open-ended RPGs. That's what I find so frustrating about the modern incarnation of these systems in games today. When they're so linear and predetermined as to only allow players to choose which track to ride, you don't get to make a mark on that relationship and personalize that progression.

Is doing that easier than building out fuller subsystems, especially in games predominantly belonging to other genres? Clearly, but the older I get and more I play the sorts of dating sims that clearly inspired today's hits, the less forgiving I am of those compromises. It's been 17 years since Persona 3 came out and married a calendar system and Social Links to an 80 hour-long RPG, inviting decades of choice paralysis and nigh-enforced perfectionist, completionist mindsets, and the best answer that some of the biggest games from some of the most popular developers in this space often manage to come up with is those Family Feud-style "Vox Populi" systems that simply survey what choices other players make and explicitly surface those statistics. That's not perfecting a formula; that's conceding the formula has limits and the structure is unable to organically empower players to feel comfortable taking charge. And it's because there's simply too little that's actually there to take charge of in this incarnation of social systems. They threw out so much bath water with the baby in fusing these disparate paradigms together that they're left with an empty tub!

It frustrates me so much because it profoundly underrepresents what dating sims like Tokimeki Memorial actually stood for as gameplay experiences and accomplished in their heyday. We so often like to think of game design as always moving forward, always evolving, always learning lessons from the past and improving on what came before, but in this instance, we largely aren't. Games that the industry and in particular the western press point to as being groundbreaking in incorporating these themes execute them in ways that would've been considered threadbare in 1994 when Tokimeki Memorial released and it was one of the only games in town, let alone now! I don't fault players for not knowing any better and I'm not saying it's wrong to enjoy that content. There just used to be such tremendous imagination in this space and it flummoxes me that after 16-plus years of this other stuff, so little of it now benefits from the hindsight of their progenitors, genre classics that solved much trickier design quandaries and found touching and engaging ways to express human relationships systemically. After playing dozens of old dating sims, plenty of which still hold up now, I'm inclined to think that if these newer games aren't interested in exploring those spaces and genuinely grappling with the problems their fused approach introduces, perhaps a lot of them would frankly stand to benefit dropping them outright. This stuff might make money hand over fists, but progress it otherwise ain't.

I couldn't tell you why—maybe it's just a consequence of Konami hyping up the 30th anniversary of the original game on Twitter recently—but I decided to finally take another dive back into Tokimemo 4 for the first time since my essay-within-an-essay on it a couple years ago. I'd always meant to eventually; Tokimemo games are just the kind that I can only really play in brief, concentrated bursts for two, maybe three routes tops, before I set them back down for another indefinite period of time. And I'm someonly who obviously likes most of the mainline ones quite a bit! I just don't know how the hardcore otaku ever had it in them to grind 10-plus routes in each of these games in quick succession back in the day.

Anyway, 4's still as solid and refined an entry as ever! I go back and forth a lot on where it ultimately ranks within the series in my mind. It's in many ways the most polished installment, yet also very conservative with the scope of its changes and additions to the underlying formula. It's also easily the most tonally subdued game of the bunch by a pretty wide mild. You get what's probably hands down the best actual plotting and character dialogue in the entire series, but it's certainly not as vivacious as the series in its golden years. Like I wrote in the essay, a lot of that comes down to the period in which it was developed, when the last major traditional Japanese dating sims of note were being produced in the genre's twilight years, and it leads to a lot of thoughtful, even genuinely moving ruminating on the series and its legacy. But Tokimemo 2 in all of its wild, expansive ambition, it ain't, either, and it's hard not to miss that game's infectious gung-ho enthusiasm. "We made a kick ass game out of love and romance and we're gonna keep on making them!" it was practically screaming back then.

We'll see how I feel about it after it's all said and done and I've cleared the routes I intend to nab this time around (Elisa in all of her Sendai-ben-speaking glory and aloof punk Kai), but my overall opinion ultimately still stands: if you're new to the entire series and want a relatively gentle introduction to its structure and mechanics, 4 is a great introduction that smartly tutorializes things without interrupting the flow with scripted walkthroughs. It's really best played by those who are familiar with the original game, especially those who have romanced Shiori, but that experience is entirely optional. It's the rare canonical dating sim sequel and some of its best moments land best with that insight, but most routes that I've played don't expect it as a prerequisite. It lacks some of the bite and pizazz that I personally like most about the series in its prime, but it's very honest about what it's going for upfront and it's hard to fault it for that. If Konami continues to leave well enough alone and not make a 5 while they continue to focus on reviving the Girl's Side games, that's honestly just as well with me.