Tom

So, in about the last four years, we've seen three reasonably big releases in the Japanese dating sim space. One of these, Angelique Luminarize on the Switch, while being somewhat more of an otome strategy game first than a conventional dating sim like I traditionally cover, is actually really well regarded! I've only played a sparse amount myself and need to get back to this, but had a great time with it. Slickly produced, charming visual design, fun dialogue. Koei Tecmo is nuts to not use this game as its chance to finally take the Angelique series global, but it's a very easy recommendation to make of an example of a game in this genre actually doing great work, even if, like me, you're not the target audience.

Not the actual question, I know! I only bring it up to clarify my opinion on the state of things isn't all doom and gloom. It mostly is, but Ruby Party's work is a genuine bright spot and they're long overdue for a proper international outing.

That leaves us with the other two games that play much more traditionally, even if they're still for very different target audiences: Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side 4 from Konami and LoveR/LoveR Kiss from Kadokawa. (Kiss is a lightly expanded edition that was essentially an excuse to port the game to the Switch.) I was originally going to write a much longer breakdown of each of these games because they're, if nothing else, interesting case studies for their respective audiences. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that their problems are actually pretty similar and emblematic of most Japanese dating sims post-2009, so I'll just lump them together and discuss things more broadly.

While they leave a lot to be desired in terms of their presentation and especially their character writing (GS4's lead romance especially is such a single-minded wife guy for your character, it's genuinely suffocating), their biggest problem deep down is that they just don't have faith in their mechanics and in players' ability and willingness to overcome any semblance of obstacles presented to them over the course of their run. They do this in different ways. GS4's stats have such a slow rate of decay that it robs the growth progression of any sense of consequence or individualized narrative; everything just kind of goes up and on the rare occasion anything actually goes down, it's by such a small amount as to be fixable with one action before you're back to schmoozing whoever you like without any real concern about whether you're playing right to win their affection long term.

LoveR, meanwhile, as the fourth post-Amagami game from Kadokawa, makes it incredibly trivial to override the random encounter system through a rechargable power-up system that can be regularly invoked with relative ease. The post-Amagami games as a whole have all trended in this direction anyway and even at its best, the random encounter system is one I always had deep, deep misgivings about. (And so did many of the developers behind Amagami specifically, who dumped it entirely since its main proponent was nowhere to be seen for its development.) But that combined with a conversation system that offered essentially no failure state whatsoever despite featuring what's ostensibly a strategy layer to it, makes for a game that bends over backwards to allow players to essentially not play the sort of dating sim that by that point had been iterated on for nearly 25 years relatively continuously, a feat even Tokimeki Memorial can't claim.

As I wrote at the time while covering my playtime with LoveR on Twitter, the end result with both of these cases is that you end up with games that aren't actually all that interested in being dating sims and that I personally struggle to call such. That's not me being an elitist snob turning my nose at them because they're mediocre; that's the level of disdain that these games show for the mechanics and structure that had built and justified to brilliant effect decades before. Is it tempting to soften certain edges to make the genre more approachable to possible newcomers after so much stagnation? Sure, it must be. But I would argue that in forsaking those roots so flagrantly, they're making a worse case for the genre and the numbers somewhat bear that out. GS4 wasn't a flop, but as far as I know remains the worst-selling entry in the GS sub-series by a pretty wide margin, and LoveR apparently did so poorly at launch that I'm skeptical it ever made its money back even after numerous sales on the digital version.

None of this is to suggest that I think the death of the genre was ever truly inevitable and that it can't climb out of this hole. But I do think that even if games like these had been much better executed, it's going to take someone coming in with a paradigm shift on the level of the original Tokimemo (in terms of design execution, not necessarily sales) to breathe real life into it again, if only because these developers will have new tent poles to build and innovate upon instead of ideas that are now getting on to be 30 years old in some cases. I think someone will take an earnest crack at it one of these days, but I don't envy the business case they're going to have to make for it, either, that's for sure.

I'm glad you asked this because it's totally a valid question! As you surmised, yeah, unfortunately, it's a pretty dry well when it comes to games with romanceable gay and bi character for the most part when it comes to stuff within that period. There are some games focused on yuri to varying degrees of sincerity and some that have reveals of so-and-so really being a girl or a guy, but not a lot beyond that, which, yeah, given that period of time for Japan, is pretty par for the course within mainstream games. I will say that in general, I've found that a lot of dating sims at least don't go out of their way to be, like, constantly phobic and a fair few do have supporting non-straight supporting characters that are overall treated well, even if they do sometimes fumble things. (Amagami, for instance, for as good as it generally as it is about being humane to its characters and the players themselves, does drop the ball in a handful of optional scenes in ways that bum me out, I'll fully admit.)

That being said! Two games I'll always recommend people looking for that sort of representation in Japanese console games with romance mechanics are actually PachiPara 13 and 14 for the PS2. Very longtime followers are aware of this, but on top of sporting impressive, mini-open world story modes for what are ostensibly pachinko simulators at their core, they have a pretty wide cast of romanceable characters and they include gay and bi options for both female and male player characters. You can even invite them to move in with you and they'll greet you when you come home and stuff. It's great stuff, I genuinely love it and will always sincerely recommend people who are okay with the occasional pachinko (those segments are great for podcasts!) to give them a shot. When I livestreamed 14 forever ago, it was a pretty big hit among that chunk of my viewership.

Anyway, I feel like I'm still missing something else, so I might go back and amend this later, but yeah. The lack of wider representation is definitely one of the main caveats to old dating sims and I'll never begrudge people being turned off from playing them.

This was a question that I used to get asked on Twitter with some frequency. Seeing as it's been some time since I last really broached the subject, as well as the fact that I'm somewhere I don't have to worry about threading my thoughts 280 characters at a time, I thought now was as good of a time as any to put out a more definitive piece that will hopefully help ease those interested in exploring one of the historically least understood genres in Japanese game history. This will be partly an instructional post, but it'll also offer advice about the philosophy of the genre and the best ways to approach it in my experience to ensure you have a fulfilling time and are engaging it on its intended terms.

Before we proceed, it's also worth emphasizing that when I say the term dating sim, I don't mean the mish-mash of romance games in genres like adventure games and visual novels that the term has come to mean in mainstream English circles. I have a lot of problems with that particular usage and how it misrepresents disparate development trends and creative outlooks, but for the purposes of this post, I want to make clear that dating sims here and in all of my other posts refers to the definition as it's understood in Japan, which is games where the primary gameplay meta revolves around relationship building of some sort. It can encompass a wide variety of games and those who want a more specific explanation can read my previous post breaking down different Japanese genre definitions here. Basically, if it's a game like Tokimeki Memorial or Amagami, you've come to the right place. Stuff like, say, Clannad or Sakura Taisen, not so much (although I have a deep love of the latter and what it brings to the table in its own right!).

With that out of the way, before we talk about anything else, let's just go ahead and address the elephant in the room:

Speaking of which, it's been a long ass time since I properly Amagamichosted, so, in case you're new here or need a reminder, here's Amagami having the best eye and facial animation scripting in the dating sim business, now, then, and forever.

Yet to beaten, even three games later from the same publisher. There's a reason why I went to the trouble of stitching together a million of these gifs back in the day.