I finally finished my first run of Fire Woman Matoigumi, which will probably end up being the last "new" game I beat in 2022. Considering I started this year by doing my first legitimate Shiori run in the Saturn version of Tokimemo, it feels like a pretty fitting note to end on as a dating sim-adjacent game that's plenty inventive in its own right. (And if you're understandably just joining me and have no idea what the hell I'm going on about this time, you can find a basic breakdown here.)
While I overall wouldn't quite call it absolutely essential to play for non-genre fans, my previous impressions still absolutely stand. It's an immaculately drawn and animated game with a lot of heart and surprisingly charming character writing despite how brief and to-the-point your exchanges with the cast members always are. What initially started as a curious Google search after having its box art catch my eye during a routine search for games to buy on Surugaya has now become one of my personal favorite games of its kind in quite some time.
A lot of it boils down to how well it aptly represents the potential of Japanese romance games during their post-Tokimeki Memorial, golden age boom in the 90s. Whereas a lot of people overseas mistakenly pigeonhole dating sims as games that cling to particular type of experience and flow even when they're not erroneously conflating them with visual novels, like many of its best contemporaries, Matoigumi is a testament to the real mechanical and structural diversity that was on display in those years as Japanese developers feverishly explored the ways and limits that romance could be depicted through gameplay.
I try to avoid using other games as comparative shorthand too often when describing how one feels to play because I like to focus on their own individual merits, especially to avoid laying on any baggage that might be associated with those other games in the eyes of readers. But in this case, I think some comparisons are warranted to hammer home just how unique this game remains in its own space 25 years on, no mean feat when many of its contemporaries failed to feel fresh even from the get-go. Knowing that, if you like the:
- constantly evolving NPC storylines and dialogue in Falcom's Trails games
- customizable fighting styles and combos of God Hand
- turn based and real-time combat hybrids found in Final Fantasy and other such RPGs
- abundant freedom and flexible, hands-off storytelling offered in Way of the Samurai
- character raising systems of games like Tokimeki Memorial and Princess Maker and the way that your character builds affect your routing and tactical options
Matoigumi might very well have something for you. Like a lot of those games listed, it doesn't particularly go out of its way to explain itself in-game (and even the manual, while helpful, only offers so much insight), but its sheer determination to offer genuine player autonomy and respect it at every turn, ensuring the game always goes on, even and especially if you fail in pivotal moments, makes it incredibly rewarding to explore and get to know over the course of the in-game year. For a developer as humbly B-tier as HuneX for most of its decades-long existence, best known for churning out scores of respectable, if not terribly impactful visual novels and other such fare, it's a genuinely impressive showing with virtually no direct analogues among its contemporaries that I'll be thinking about for a long time to come. There were still plenty of gameplay nuances that I was only beginning to puzzle out towards the end of this first run and I definitely look forward to taking another crack at it soon enough.
Here's to another year of quality, thought-provoking Japanese romance games from days gone by! 🥂