Lately I have been playing Tokimeki Memorial: Girl’s Side, a dating simulation game for the Nintendo DS. Normally I don’t play social or dating sims because I tend to find them either boring or creepy, respectively, but I’ve made an exception for the Tokimeki series. You see, we have a history, this game and I. When I was in the undergrad program in university I took a class called Japanese Gender and Popular Culture (or something along those lines) in which we examined books, films, comics, and even one video game that were written for and marketed toward female audiences in Japan. That game was a Tokimeki game.
The game that I played in class was actually Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side 2nd Season, and as the unwieldy title suggests it’s the second game in the series. None of these games have been translated into English, so we had to play it Japanese, a fact that more or less ensured my failure. At the time I was a fairly dedicated gamer and was neck-deep in my Final Fantasies and Xenosagas and Civilizations, so not being able to beat this stupid little dating sim severely wounded my ego as a gamer. Time passed and I got over it, but after moving to Japan and having studied Japanese for a bit, I remembered that game and realized that I might actually have a shot at it. I also thought it might be fun to share my experiences with it, so here they are.
The game begins with a young boy telling a story about a prince who lived long ago. Legend has it that the prince encountered a beautiful princess in the woods one day and the two fell in love, but her father was against their union.
The king gave the prince some tasks to complete to prove his love for the princess, and every day the princess prayed at a certain church for her true love’s return. Flash forward to today, as the player takes control of a teenage girl embarking on her first day of high school. She discovers the same church that exists in the legend—conveniently situated right behind her school—and literally runs into a young man there.
The young man’s name is Hazuki, and he proves to be the fellow that the game desperately wants the player to court. This is despite the fact that Hazuki is a selfish, moody whiner that no woman in her right mind would never even look twice at. More on that later.
The game takes place over the span of three years, following the faceless protagonist from her first day of high school to graduation. The singular focus of the game is to get a boyfriend, which is actually far more difficult than it may first appear. I’m sure it’s partly because of the language barrier, but the truth is that Tokimeki Memorial: Girl’s Side actually has quite a high level of difficulty. This can be attributed to the fact that beneath its girly frills it’s a fairly intense strategy game.
The game manual provides a roster of the eligible bachelors, and from there you can select which character you’re going to pursue. There is definitely a creepiness factor here, because two of your potential suitors are grown men (one is your homeroom teacher) and two of them look like they could be in junior high or elementary school. This is despite the fact that, as previously mentioned, the protagonist of the game is a first-year high school student, and the average age of first years in Japan is fifteen years old. Anyway, you need to start planning whom you’ll go for right from the beginning, because you need to start acting on your strategy right out the door.
There are a number of things you can do in order to woo your man. The first is choosing weekly activities: you have seven skill categories and each activity you choose will affect these categories. For example, if you choose to study all week, your abilities in school will improve, but your movement (or physical) skill might decrease.
There’s also a random element to how the skills are affected, which is part of the strategy. You need to continually be thinking ahead about the possible outcomes and risks of your actions. You also have a stress category, which fills up no matter what you choose to do. The only way to decrease your stress is sleep, which not only prevents you from improving skills that week, but also drains random skill points. It’s a delicate balancing act.
The best way to reduce stress is to sleep on the weekends, because that knocks a large chunk of points off your stress meter with almost no penalties. But that presents problems of its own, because the weekends are the only times when you can go shopping for clothes or set up dates.
Clothes shopping in Tokimeki Memorial: Girl’s Side is one of the most tooth-grinding experiences in the game. You have a very limited budget with which to shop, and the whole point of buying clothes is to please the man you’re attempting to date. The clothes are divided into certain categories like “sporty” or “pure” or “sexy”, and part of your strategy is creating outfits to wear on dates.
The problem is that there’s no way to know whether an item of clothing is “sporty” or “pure” just by looking at it—the game has its own ideas about what constitutes a certain style, and the player has to hope that his or her ideas line up with the game’s (and they often didn’t, in my case). You can end up wasting a lot of money and weekends on shopping.
There are also a few mini-games that give you the chance to attract the interest of your potential beau. The sports day is a good example; there are a few activities to choose from, such as a three-legged race (you know the kind I mean: two people try to run with one of each of their legs tied to the other person’s). In this mini-game the boy you’re trying to attract will be your partner and will shout out “migi” (right) or “hidari” (left), and the player has to hit the right or left side of the touch screen with the stylus. If you can successfully win the race by tapping the screen in the correct place with the correct timing, the boy will be impressed and compliment you on your athleticism.
Another mini-game, and the bane of my existence, is the chocolate-making game. As previously mentioned on this site, Valentine’s Day in Japan is the day on which a young girl can express her feelings for a crush by giving him chocolate. In Tokimeki Memorial: Girl’s Side, the protagonist can likewise bribe a character in the game into loving her by mixing chocolate properly.
It was hard for me to figure out the instructions to this game and I never succeeded in making satisfactory chocolate. In fact, I’m not kidding when I say I made poison on most occasions. Anyway, if you can successfully make chocolate on Valentine’s Day and if the recipient likes you enough, he’ll reciprocate by giving you chocolate on White Day.
The boys themselves have different personalities, and this is the crux of the game’s strategy elements. As in any healthy relationship, the boy will immediately lose interest in the protagonist if her personality is not constantly being molded to mirror his own. So, if the player chooses to woo the sporty Kazuma, the best strategy is to join a sports club at school, have the protagonist work out constantly in her free time, and wear nothing but “sporty” style clothing.
I made the mistake of following the game’s implicit urging and going after Hazuki, the “mysterious” young man the protagonist encounters at the church. Hazuki basically treats the protagonist like dirt for the first few months of their relationship, and it’s up to the player to buy “pure”-style clothes and get good grades in order to win his affection. This is despite the fact that Hazuki himself often sleeps through exams and wears clothes that suggest his mother does his shopping for him.
The guy is a bit of a hypocrite, is what I’m saying. His interests include cooking, studying, and walking around the local botanical garden, and his personality is on par with a sponge. Most of his time is spent brooding and whining about the things he doesn’t like. I get the feeling he’s meant to be a mysterious, tortured soul, but he comes across to me like just another spoiled high school brat. Then again, I’m about ten years older than this game’s target audience, so the real problem here could be me.
My final verdict?
Well, as a game Tokimeki Memorial: Girl’s Side might appeal to its target audience—junior high school and high school girls—but there isn’t much there for anyone outside that specific range. I suppose it was a decent way for me to practice reading and listening to the language, but the gameplay is fairly repetitive and the characters are largely bland and stereotypical. And worst of all, despite all of my efforts, I wasn’t able to get Hazuki to date me. I was unable to avenge my gamer’s ego.
But I guess there’s always the sequel…
Nihonglish 