Last year, my one and only sitting with Tokimeki Memorial: Forever With You on the Sega Saturn (Language Barrier Edition) presented me with the videogame equivalent of an absolutely madcap romantic comedy. My only being able to intuit what I could from tones of voice, facial expressions, and a minimal Japanese vocabulary led to what I can only describe as utter thirty two bit bedlam (or at least as bedlam as a football manager-style dating sim on the Saturn can manage to be). That bedlam somehow saw me slap-dashedly, unwittingly, Buster Keaton-ly landing smack-dab in the middle of a happy ending with the girl I'd been hoping for, and a bright future ahead. If there was anything I was nearly sure of after that experience, it's that a hypothetical revisit in my spoken language would be nothing short of a breeze. I was wrong.

My sixteen bit playthrough of Tokimeki Memorial (courtesy of a fantastic fan translation) reflected back some hard feelings, doubts, even truths that I'd faced every day, that I'd never seen made so uncompromisingly tangible. I know I'm indecisive, easily spread thin by the thought of pleasing everyone and fulfilling every perceived responsibility. Dating, or simply developing meaningful relationships in high school and college, felt like a layer I could barely afford to slot into my life without throwing everything else into disarray. I'm enormously lucky to be in the position I'm in and to have the opportunities I do, I know plenty of others who manage (or seem to manage) far better under even higher pressure, but somehow, I just don't know how to be the things everybody needs or wants me to be while also managing the many various roles I want for myself. I'm nowhere as close with my college friends as I might've liked, having recently graduated, and I don't think I would've done much better even without a global pandemic. It's easy for me to blame circumstance. I like to rationalize that there just wasn't any way things would've turned out any better than they did, due to any number of uncontrollable factors, but then comes Tokimeki Memorial, here to put its foot down and tell me "No."

Call it a "reality check" in virtual form. Here's a cold, numerical game system with myriad routes to some manner of "happy ending," wherein I so anxiously scrambled to be "liked" by everyone, to be accepted by my school and my peers while maintaining my health and grades, that I was loved by no one. I found no puppet master-like "power fantasy," not in an honest, straightforward, reset-less playthrough, only the crystalized sensation of what it's like to be caught in the middle. Whatever potentially troubling social implications the "bombing" mechanic and constant, frantic juggling of everyone's impressions might suggest as standalone game systems, I believe they're ultimately in service of a mentality that the game successfully pursues. With each year that goes by, the player accumulates and becomes increasingly torn between desires and responsibilities to themselves and other people. So I never had a rumor bomb go off and poison my reputation, but nobody ever really opened up to me either. After all, I had to manage my increasing "Stress" stat, my grades, the other girls who required my time and attention, my club participation, bouts of depression, a feral Panda at the Great Wall of China, and my appearance, among other, even more granular things. Given the circumstances, didn't I do as well as I could have? Didn't I end up as happy as was feasible for someone like me? The game's own premise, backed by my own naive past experience, disagrees.

Yes, what I'm confessing here is that I'm "bad at Tokimeki Memorial," and that being "bad at Tokimeki Memorial" seemed to reflect back on my handling of real relationships. It seemed clear now that I'd all but failed to commit to any of my recent friendships, be present, or balance priorities with my own well-being — all things I must’ve understood, but had never seen so vividly, so bluntly represented. Maybe that’s not fair to myself, and I hope it doesn’t sound as though I’m criticizing anyone else whom I’ve connected with over the years, but, to at least some degree, I really felt that this silly old game about talking to fictional girls was somehow right about me. Depending on who you are, such an experience might start you down the path to unraveling every possible ending, but, to my future self, I hope this encouraged and helped you to better identify the changes that have to be made to develop stronger relationships in the places you find yourself. If all else fails, move to a country where English isn't the dominant language and roll the dice.