Tom

Just putting up the important things in this apartment that make a house a home. You know, the indispensable stuff every place needs to function.

The galge-yness of this apartment thickens. Because this place is actually split across two floors, I decided as soon as I moved in that it would be fun to make the staircase a nightmare corridor of all my dating sim and adjacent genre posters. So, in addition to the OG Tokimemo release one at the bottom of the stairs right at the entrance to my apartment, today has seen two new additions: the poster for the original PS2 Amagami release, located at the center of the stairwell (so Tsukasa can glare down at me in shame, of course), and then another poster for the PS1 version of Fuuraiki at the very top of the stairs leading into my office.

I've still got several more posters to frame and hang and have my eye on even more, so as far as I'm concerned, this is still only the beginning. 😌

As folks who followed me on Twitter might remember, I ended up selling off a small-ish portion of my game collection, partly to cushion my moving costs to Japan, but also to just straight up have enough space to bring everything that really mattered in the boxes I was allotted. One such game I sold off was Refrain Love 2, a dating sim (or as its director told me, a dating adventure game, which is more apt) from Riverhillsoft. Easily one of the best written games of its kind in that era, I only sold it off because the case came broken and it was one I figured would be worth hustling for a copy with an obi so the next time I owned it, it would be truly complete.

And now I do! Refrain Love 2 was pretty much the game that finally sold me on the Retrotink 5X's scanline generation capabilities because of how well they masked the compression artifacts of the FMVs on my last TV. While those flaws stand out a little more on my much nicer current set, with those OLED colors and HDR enabled for even better scanlines, it's frankly never looked better than ever. I think my time to resume my courtship of cover girl Yoko that started around New Year's will finally arrive in earnest soon and I for one can't wait. 😌

Anyway, dating sims, they're cool.

In addition to needlessly muddying genre waters for foreign players trying to properly grasp Japanese history, one of the most unfortunate side effects of western players and critics' tendency to erroneously lump dating sims, visual novels, and adventure games together is that it robs actual dating sims of the genuine mechanical and structural variety that they came to encompass over the course of their roughly 15-year golden period (ie: 1994 to 2009). While my last couple of posts have focused somewhat on the raising sim style variety first popularized by Tokimeki Memorial, in truth, by the time dating sims entered their twilight towards the end of the PS2's lifespan, the very definition and scope of dating sims had expanded significantly and with it, the types of stories that they could tell in turn.

So for the next several posts, I'm going to turn my attention to the sheer diversity of gameplay and narrative design philosophies you can find throughout the genre, something that's incredibly easy to miss as even the handful of available fan translations that are playable as of this writing only barely scratch the surface. With arguably one exception, which I'll discuss later, all of these takes on dating sims fulfill the basic genre definition I outlined in my earlier post, which is to say, dating/relationship-building-themed games that feature some sort of gameplay meta that players must strategize around in order to achieve their desired ending. In other words, games that are noticeably more involved than many of the visual novels these games are often incorrectly made synonymous with, which may feature basic branching paths, but few, if any, deeper mechanics and systems that are intended to simulate human relationships in some way. With that, let's start our exploration of subgenres! Specifically...