I had fun but mainly because this game is oddly balanced and very clearly scrapped together. I can't imagine actually playing through this enough times to get the S-rank, the storyline I did (Revenge against the Gen 5 Commander) felt like an event chain from Gunparade March at most. I imagine the other storylines from mode 1 aren't much better, and the storylines from mode 2 seem even more shallow. No real desire to continue onwards to s-rank, maybe I'll read the character conversations later online.

Combat is awful too, I think they were trying for a squad RTS, but the draw-distance and clunky controls really prevent it from being anything interesting. It's also really easy unless you get a defense mission, which can be almost impossible to get a great victory on depending on the map as the enemy might spawn on top of the buildings.

I have a worrying feeling this might be the best of the three, but I'm probably going to go through Midori and Ao regardless.

German RPG where you spend as much time fighting off mosquitos as orcs. It's been some number of years since I played this one, but I remember it having a very good balance between ""realism"" and playability. There's stuff like illnesses, but those mechanics mainly exist to make the experience feel more like an adventure, rather than as some attempt to make a game where you blast orcs with fireballs realistic somehow. Would recommend trying.

I was convinced to try this game a long time ago by a little write-up by the lead writer for Age of Decadence http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,2365.0.html I think I tried the sequel at some point but got soft-locked by a bug. I should probably go back and play the first game someday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUkgmB76X8Y

Would recommend watching the intro so you can see what I mean about the 3d models and character designs.

I'll start with talking about the graphics since I think the change to 3D is probably one of the first things you notice if you look up this game. It's a 2002 PS2 game so I'm not going to talk about texture quality or resolution or so on because it doesn't matter, but the main downside with these models is that the individual characters don't look as unique anymore. The character art in Tokimemo 1 and 2 was always full of such character, so immediately it creates a bad impression for this game (or at least it did for me.)

The character designs themselves are also pretty mundane. The outfits are still nice, but there's nothing as funny or memorable as Homura's Mao outfit from Tokimemo 2 for example. The most interesting outfit I remember was Chitose's sexy(?) santa outfit with angel's wings, and that's probably just because it reminded me of Kanon.

However, that being said while I think the models themselves kind of all look the same (except the two guy friends who I guess I'll get to later) the animations in this game do have a ton of personality and do the heavy lifting for most of the game. If you've ever played or seen Idolm@ster it's a very similar feeling, the animations are just very charming. I don't think Tokimemo 3 does it as well as Idolm@ster, but maybe if they kept the 3D models past this game they would've gotten there after another game or two.

There's also a lot of system changes in this game, most notably the introduction of hobbies and the inventory system but insight was also removed, and appearance replaced with the clothing system.

The clothing system is... well it's a bit of a pain in the ass honestly. Maybe I just missed something, but it seemed to be mostly trial and error to figure out what was liked vs not, and it seems to vary between girls, seemingly depends on the time of year/weather, and definitely depends on where you're at. Also, there's not a ton of options for clothes, again, maybe I missed something but you can't buy clothes as far as I can tell so you're stuck with what you get at the start besides whatever you get as gifts or make yourself through the hobby system. I think the Girl's Side games improve on this aspect but I haven't played them yet so I don't know.

Inventory system is fine, it forces you to be a bit more proactive about birthdays rather than just picking whatever seems best the day of, and means you actually get something (not necessarily something useful) from your birthday and the Christmas party. Good addition really.

Hobbies system is also a good addition I think. It's mainly used to get new items or get new topics (for restaurant/cafe dates, I'll get to those later.) It's also kind of vital since this game made it absurdly easy to raise your stats.

All the stats in this game rise really fast, to the point I think I got almost the highest score on all the tests in the game, and was also able to do ok in the athletics events with minimal effort. On top of this, you can prepare for the humanities or science (no idea what the fan translations for these are besides insight) stats on weekends, and then you get a buff to raising those the entire week. You can't do this for art or athletics, but they're also very easy to raise so no big deal. Since appearance is gone, reducing stress and increasing your health is really easy to do as well.

I imagine this was done as a bit of an over adjustment to account for the fact that it's a bit harder (in theory) to date girls in this game, since you can no longer just call someone to get their info: you have to get it from them or their friends now.

You start with the childhood friend's number, but the rest you have to get by taking girls on dates until they like you enough to give you their number while walking home from school. Relationships seem to raise pretty damn fast though so this ultimately isn't an issue. The biggest issue can come from girls you don't have the phone number for going into a bomb state, since it can be a bit of a pain in the ass to get the chance to ask them on a date, and then actually setup a date that works.

There's some nice additions to dates themselves, such as girls readjusting the location or time sometimes (and seemingly dependent on their relationship with you) instead of flat out refusing.

The previously mentioned cafe/restaurant dates are more or less just adding more meat to what I think was an addition to Tokimemo 2 but don't really remember (girls that like you sometimes asking you to go to a restaurant or cafe after the main date.) Running out of conversation topics is kind of an issue, but that might've just been me being lazy since it's so easy to raise your relationship in this game anyway that squeezing more out of the dates isn't worth it. This is where you get info like birthdays and so on by the way. Sometimes you get topics relating to the story arcs of the girl's themselves which is nice.

Oh right, there's two male rivals in this game. I think they were trying to recreate the Tokimemo 2 male friends (who were enjoyable) but these guys suck. I guess they wanted having to hang out with them instead of the girls feel like a punishment. The girls themselves are fine, but not as good as the previous casts and there's a lot less of them.

I think the main drawback for me with this game however is that it feels a lot more subdued in general than the previous two games. I only got 5 out of the 10 or so girls, but all of them were pretty damn tame; even the mad scientist one didn't do much compared to Yuina in Tokimemo 1 (admittedly I didn't spend a ton of time with her.) The most exciting character feature I found was a girl with a Kansai accent. They try and do some more extended character arcs in this (well, extended compared to what I've seen in Tokimemo 1 and 2, which is definitely not the entirety of those games,) but it's just not quite the same. I still enjoyed them, but I can't say I'll remember them.

The minigames also don't include anything too out there like the shoot-em-ups or jrpg parody battles from 1 and 2. There is a pillow fight during the school trip minigame though that reminded me of Tom and Jerry: War of the Whiskers so that made me happy. (Side note: there only seemed to be one school-trip option in this game. Maybe that's just random per playthrough or something though.)

Overall, it's the worst Tokimemo game I've played but it was still fun. I doubt it'll ever get translated, but if it does definitely try it out if only to witness the girls faces going through all stages of grief every time you show up in a bad outfit or say something stupid.

Extra: There's also a fake internet in the game if that's something you enjoy. There's a penpal type relationship you can get into but I don't think it results in dating or anything, it's just a nice little friendship online.

https://youtu.be/StYYmaPAmA0

"A very old, and long, long story. Perhaps it continues even now..."

By some metric a very unoriginal game, but considering the cyclical nature of the story told, isn't that kind of the point? It's hard to dislike a game so earnest in its portrayal of the typical hero's journey. The visuals, music, and combat itself are all excellent, so I have no real complaints.

I imagine the sequel Venus & Braves tells a more unique story, but it's kind of pointless to fault this game for not doing something it had no intention of doing.

Including a generational company management mode as NG+ is also quite the bonus, I didn't really try it out since it seems similar to what Venus & Braves is going to do and I plan on playing that immediately after this. Regardless, a very good addition, so much so they resold it alone as a phone app in 2011.

At first I didn't like this quite as much as the first one but I think after finishing my first run I'm pretty sure I like it as much as Tokimeki 1. It's a bit slower paced, and it definitely doesn't want you to date as many girls as tokimeki 1, but I think it ends up making its own style that works out in the end.

Since I've only done one run I can't exactly go super deep into mechanical criticism but it definitely felt like they tuned Tokimeki 2 to be a bit harder to get the best results in. Relationship rating and stats themselves seem to raise a bit slower in this one, and unlike tokimeki 1 where I messed around and still got into a top-rate university, I was unable to even get into an average one in this. Don't really have a problem with this, it's just different from the first one.

https://imgur.com/KIgPFWd

The childhood prologue is interesting and provides some more reasons to care about the childhood friend this time around (I'll admit I ignored Shiori in Tokimeki 1.) It's mostly just walking around and examining locations/talking to people for about 45ish minutes, but it's a nice change of pace. I don't think it has any impact on the main game, but I could be wrong.

On the character side of things I don't have a ton to say although I do think it's interesting that your guy friends will end up dating some of the potential love interests if you don't spend time with them. I'm not sure if it's fixed who they end up with or not, but I kind of liked it. It always felt weird to me in games with romance options when everyone just remained single forever to avoid stepping on the player's toes.

https://imgur.com/WPn2c3n

When you finish the game there's a nice album feature that has images of various events and dates you had with whoever you ended up with. It's cute, and a very nice feature for this sort of game. Also, during the credits scene there's little epilogues for all the characters you met which I appreciate. Since this game felt like it wanted me to focus I didn't hang out with most of them but it was still cool to see what happened to them in the end.

Overall I enjoyed it, I'll probably go back and play tokimeki 1 again before doing a second run though.

Edit: I forgot to mention the Emotional Voice System which uses a synthesized voice program to have the voice actors say the name you input. I don't know enough about voice synthesizers to say whether or not the EVS is impressive for 1999 or not, but it seemed pretty well made for something meant to work on a PS1. Unfortunately it (in my experience, I'll admit I didn't mess with it too much) can only load one synthesized voice at a time so it ended up being more awkward than no voice acting for the main character's name at all. The voice itself of course sounds a bit out of place but I won't complain about that since it is a 1999 PS1 game after all.

I will start off this review by saying I did not finish this game, I don't think this game is worth finishing. The appeal of this game is mostly in its "real time dramatic simulation," not the obtuse political system or the horrendous combat system.

Story: it's mostly just framing. We're on water-covered Mars in the year 2252, and the first Pan-Galactic War has just ended two years ago. Unfortunately the Martian economy had over the course of this war become dependent on exporting deuterium to maintain itself, and the war having ended there is far less need for deuterium to provide fuel for spaceships. As a result Mars has destabilized and radicals calling for independence from the central government on Earth have begun gaining quite a bit of power.

Beyond that, the Naval Witches (pretty much the Meltrandi from Macross:DYRL) desire revenge for their defeat in the aforementioned war, and the paternalistic aliens from the Country of Light seek to put the Intelligent Races of Sol (as might be guessed by the talking cats and so on, humans aren't the only intelligent race from Earth anymore) under their "protection. All things point towards the outbreak of another violent era.

The protagonist is the player and the player is the protagonist; that is to say you who are playing the game are part of the story. You've been called from the real world to inhabit the body of a synthetic human in the Martian Independence Army, and bring about 100 years of peace (and remove the Martian dependence on war and/or make Mars independent although that's not required to get an ending.) This might sound like spoilers but it's actually the first thing you are told after starting the game.

The setup probably sounds really broad and it is. There's a lot of background information you can learn from in-game books or talking to characters (which is where most of the game is) but there's not much of a fixed story. As far as I'm aware after the tutorial the only real cutscenes are in the ending.

There are some brief text sections that will occur occasionally when pass time doing something (like eating, or maintenance on your mech) that provide some snippets of what's going on elsewhere in the near galaxy but for the most part these just provide you more context and while they do have story arcs they aren't really involved with you directly. Some of the characters from these text bits can join you on the submarine however. You’ll also sometimes get events when boarding a city ship, which tend to be where most of the direct plot is but it’s usually fairly vague and mainly meant to lead to new characters joining the ship.

The best way I can describe the structure of the game is "Social sim focused rekoeition game." Most of the story is indrect, and you feel more like just some person trying to achieve a big goal in a big world. It's pretty interesting and unique, although unfortunately I think the game doesn't fare too well outside of the social sim aspects.

https://imgur.com/2MzG9BN

We'll start with the combat system. I don't really know how to describe it other than "you are a triangle trying to overlap yourself on other triangles so you can incapacitate them. Torpedoes and mines are triangles too, and they desire the same thing." It's horrible to look at in large battles, and really isn't that engaging.

You have a variety of moves to better overlay your triangle but ultimately it's just a case of getting there and once you're there you will probably be able to instantly kill the enemy with your shield ram, or they will surrender, because missing is very unlikely. Also, if you gain enough momentum (you will as a pilot, because you will be killing so many people) you become able to instantly kill with torpedoes and your melee weapon as well as momentum increases your damage.

You may think "well why is it that you won't miss? If you can instantly kill then besides positioning accuracy should be the main thing in this combat system, right?" Well, because accuracy is determined by momentum which as mentioned before is easy to accumulate. It also makes it harder to hit you, which meant that I never used evade or defend once in this game. I simply did not get hit, and killed my enemies before they really ever got the chance to send out enough attacks to hit me.

There is a piloting skill, according to the wiki it adds more commands to better move your triangle (mech). I don't think I ever realized I gained commands from this because I got to 99 within the first 3 days. All skills that you can train for directly (everything besides "Adult" which is used for what you can imagine) is pretty easy to raise. I imagine if you just made an effort you could get all skills to 99 within an in-game week or so since your main character doesn't need to sleep or eat (remember me saying they weren’t human?) and sitting and standing up from a sofa reduces your fatigue enough that it's never an issue.

So the balance for combat and skills isn't great. Admittedly for rekoeition type games I don't think balance is all that big of a deal, the main thing is that the niche that your filling is fun to do (being a swordsmaster in Taikou Risshiden, trade in Uncharted Waters etc) and at least from the jobs I did (pilot and captain, technically did flight chief as well but that was mostly to test the meeting system as I couldn’t stomach captain long enough to get to it as the captain) I can't say that Kenran succeeds there.

Pilot doesn't do anything but participate in the awful combat and maintain their mech. Unfortunately this is the best way to ensure your sub doesn't get destroyed while talking to people (much like any game like this, never trust auto-resolve/simulated combat) so I never moved from it until I tried captain, which convinced me to finally put this game to rest.

Captain, besides being information overload (getting yelled at in German in Silent Hunter 3 was more relaxing than this shit) also has to participate in the awful combat, but on top of that whenever you issue a command in the combat the game switches from the combat screen to the in-game bridge to show you doing it (this slows down things a lot.) Besides that you have to rely on the AI to actually be at their posts, which admittedly I’m mostly fine with as the AI seems to do ok with this during actual combat, but it can add to the frustration.


All of that would be fine because you don't have to be the captain in this, so you did it to yourself, but unfortunately you are unable to determine where you go on Mars if you're not the captain. As you might imagine, entrusting navigation to the AI in a game is miserable experience, and in the 40 hours (according to the emulator, I think actual time played was probably more around 25 hours) I played I think I saw the same 5 or so cities over and over since the AI captain decided to just screw around.


This is actually the fault of the AI politician and not the AI captain, since it’s the AI politician that determines what the ship does next and the captain decides to accept or veto that. Technically I believe anyone on the council can propose, but since the politician is allowed to bring up a topic first and it seems only one topic can be brought up, I think it was always the politician for me. I suppose if you wanted to best control things you’d become the politician, but then you’d be completely reliant on the AI for combat which is a terrifying thought but perhaps more dramatic.

https://imgur.com/hvC7fq2

The politics system is complicated and really not something you can interact with very well (the politician can be sent to do various things but I don’t think I saw him do this more than 2 or 3 times.) More or less there are 5 political alignments going from far left to far right (the names seem to indicate a left-right axis, and the wiki I used refers to them by a left-right axis so we’ll go with that although I really have no idea what it means in this setting.)

I have no idea what the different alignments do besides if there’s a difference they’ll fight, and you want to avoid it. If people are unhappy they become more radical, and if they’re happy they’re more moderate so I think you want to make everyone more moderate but then you also need everyone to be revolutionary (far left, the alignment of the Martian Independence Army as far as I can tell) to create an independent Mars so maybe you don’t at the same time. You can probably just ignore this system entirely and be fine, just pray or something that not too many ideological conflicts happen (such as the case of far-right Earth invading far-left Venus immediately after I started.)

https://imgur.com/LIZa2sT

The economy is presented as the main villain of the game and I have no idea how you’re meant to interact with it. I think your main interactions with it are mainly meant to be through trying to prevent wars with politician actions and/or starting wars? You can’t directly control anything related to it as far as I can tell. Since preventing wars is all you want to do anyway, its inclusion is kind of mysterious. It’s incredibly in-depth, to the point of including people voluntary unemployed vs involuntarily unemployed but it’s mostly in the background and difficult to monitor as it has so many parts from the individual underwater cities on mars to the various powers in space.

Before I finally get into the social system (which is the actual game) I’ll mention that since both politics and economy are difficult to decipher the best way to get an ending in this game seems to be taking out enemy craft yourself. You gain 10 years of peace for every 50 craft you take out up to 450, so you can get most of the way there from that and just hope that shit goes right and you get the last 10 years somehow otherwise. This is mainly what caused me to quit since I wasn’t interested in playing for another 40 hours just to have to hope that I get lucky and peace happens. I think this is meant as a failsafe to ensure that most players get an ending after playing long enough since I don’t think anywhere in the game tells you this. I found it on the wiki for the game.

Character relationships are determined by 4 stats: friendship, eros, affection, and loathing. I believe you gain interactions with characters from all four, although I never saw fights in my time playing which is unfortunate as they were always an entertaining part of Gunparade March. This system is fairly versatile and can bring about some interesting relationships like my eros heavy affair with the executive officer of the ship despite not really being that close with her otherwise. I think Gunparade Orchestra also uses this but I’m not very familiar with those games. It’s a good system, no real complaints with it.

The AI of the various characters is interesting and admittedly feels fairly realistic which is surprising from a PS2 game from 2005. They’ll occasionally do some very odd things like bring up getting their gift rejected half a year ago and how awful that was but I guess that’s also realistic and the whole setting is so surreal odd behavior doesn’t feel out of place. There’s not really examples to base talking cats and dolphins and exosuits off of anyway. They can be pretty temperamental (admittedly I think this is more funny than anything,) and you have to base your interactions with them off their schedules but I find this just encourages you to interact with more of the crew of which there are so many members, especially after recruiting more.

The long “events” from Gunparade March aren’t really present anymore, but if you ask characters about their past, etc, you’ll get similar information and occasionally they’ll just tell you randomly like Gunparade March characters did. When I figured this out I felt like a bit of an idiot because it’s incredibly obvious in hindsight. I think whether you prefer the better characterized events of Gunparade March or the more fluid system of Kenran is ultimately a matter of preference however.

Character variety is also very very good. Probably one of the better sci-fi casts I can think of in a game. It probably helps that it has a Suikoden level of crew members (36, not including main character and the ship’s AI.) I’ve mentioned the talking cat, but there’s also a talking squid(?) man who has his own little language which you can read about in the library to figure out what the hell he’s trying to tell you. Gunparade March had a pretty good cast too, so I guess this isn’t too surprising since they’ve got a setting that supports even more variety. Also, if you ever wanted to beat up Yuri Shibamura, he’s in here too I think.

I guess the final thing I’ll mention is that you can board the city ships and wander around on them a bit. There’s usually some flavor text while exploring and as I mentioned before text events when you board that lead to recruitment of character/getting bullied about the economy again (the game will do this to you a lot.) It’s more or less just a flat image and you click around it to go to places, kind of disappointing but not that uncommon for rekoeition type games really.
Besides that there’s some minor things like time passing in-game depending on real time, but since it’s limited to 30 days at max and you have 3 years I don’t think it’s a big deal. There are methods of PS2 clock manipulation you can do to get around it if you really want to, or just use save states I guess. Since wars and so on take forever you’ll probably want time to pass though.

Looking back at this review it seems pretty negative but I have to stress how unique of an experience this game is. Sure, the actual big picture simulation stuff is obscure, and the combat and so on sucks but the experience of being a crewmember on a submarine on Mars is kind of irreplaceable. Besides that, as I mentioned earlier most of the time is spent on social stuff, which is the best part of the game anyway. My recommendation is to just ignore the 100 years of peace stuff and just enjoy the atmosphere. I think what ended up killing my enjoyment of this game ultimately was worrying about the political and economic stuff which is very difficult to handle.

ヤガミが艦橋で倒れました

Edit: I completely forgot that rekoeition game is a really obscure term so I didn't define it. Rekoeition game refers to a specific type of Koei simulation game that attempted to merge strategy and RPG. If you've ever played RTK10 or another Koei game with officer mode imagine something like that but a bit more story focused and less focused on military. Uncharted Waters New Horizons for the SNES is considered one.

Overall a pretty interesting experience, although I think as other reviews here have mentioned the sheer amount of trial and error as well as the coin flip system kind of cut into some of the enjoyment. Especially with the save system as you can clear out an area of enemies and as a result remove all possible negative encounters from that area, but then still fail the coin flip and "feel a killing intent" from something that no longer even exists! Having to leave and reenter an area just to save is pretty damn annoying.

Exploration I think was the highlight of the game, the areas and enemies were always pretty interesting, and it was enjoyable to just scrounge around the dungeon of Fear and Hunger. I think I probably enjoyed it most up until level 7 or so, the later areas were interesting visually but I think they kind of showed their hand too much. Unknowable horrors aren't that unknowable or horrific when they're just some guy.
The most disturbing enemies in the later areas end up being the normal enemies which is a bit of a shame.

https://imgur.com/vwujokk
(This guy is less intimidating than the first enemies in the game and he's one of the major bosses required for I believe all endings.)
https://imgur.com/MsxOBel
(Pretty nasty for a normal enemy that you can avoid fighting entirely.)

Wasn't super invested in the story. There are some decent twists but the setting is so ridiculously grim all the time I was never particularly invested. The game makes it clear pretty early on that if something good happens you'll just get screwed over later so I kind of just checked out on the plot.
The various horrible things you do sort of just feel like selecting options after a point, which I guess is probably part of the intent.


I only did one playthrough but the three endings I did see (A, D, and E) were satisfying enough that I'm going to call this finished. I'll probably go back and get B done quickly and do a second playthrough for C at some point. I think there are also some special character endings but as mentioned before I wasn't ever particularly invested in the story so I'll probably just skip those since they seem time consuming to get.

Edit: I should also add that the soundtrack and sound design for this game are really really quite good. The sounds kept me on edge for most of the game even once I got to a point where I didn't really need to worry about enemies.

Minor spoiler, but at the beginning of the game if you stay too long outside of the dungeon of Fear and Hunger you will get attacked by dogs and probably die. The dogs barking sound effect isn't too terribly scary but the dogs themselves are pretty nasty. Later in the game this same scene gets reused out of nowhere and hearing those dogs bark was probably more terrifying than the actual dark gods you end up fighting.

Just an excellent example of training the player to be afraid of certain things.