About halfway into this game, I made an interesting discovery - you can take any girl to the planetarium at any time and tell them that our stars are millions of years old; they no longer exist, and one day the same will be true of us, too. It will always make them really happy. It doesn’t matter if it’s the preppy girl, the nerdy girl, the clumsy girl or the punk girl - reminding someone of the pale blue dot will improve your relationship with them.

What does that mean, exactly? That people, regardless of personal status and beliefs and perceptions, find comfort in being reminded of their insignificant end? Or that you aren’t talking to people at all - you’re just stirring electrons across silicon to simulate a conversation with a girl, sending your light millions of miles away to a virtual Tokyo in 1997 that doesn’t exist? Or did the programmers just forget to account for variance in this one scenario out of thousands, and had all these digital girls react in the exact same way to your Carl Sagan impression? Who knows.

This “infinite diversity, infinite combinations” style of game-reading defines a shadow that will perpetually be cast over this game’s existence in the West by ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS Tokimeki Memorial, the video-essay that more or less lays the blueprint of many classic Backloggd reviews we’ve all grown to love. In my opinion, Tim Rogers (or at least the character of Tim Rogers that Tim Rogers presents in ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS: Season 1) is a patron saint of sorts for this site - a mortal archetype of game-liker who acts as a guiding light for the infamous reviewers here who like to compare 1994’s Game Boy port of Taz-Mania to a fond midsummer’s day, or speculate on the Gulf War-adjacent cultural implications of Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal for the PlayStation 3.

To me, these ‘deranged’ assessments of video games are the most enjoyable way to respond to what is essentially a consumable product - honestly documenting your personal reactions and mental explorations as prompted by a game and its world, eschewing even the slightest hint of constructing a GRAPHICS: 7 | REPLAYABILITY: 4 | STORY: 6 table, rejecting the need to perform a fumbled technical analysis of the ray-adjacent teralighting and polytetrahedro-counts. Years of reading games magazines and games websites has taken a dreadful toll on us, and I think we can unlearn what we have learned by dreaming of the stars while fragging pigcops in Duke Nukem 3D: Duke’s Penthouse Paradise.

This push-and-pull between souls and spreadsheets came to define my playthrough of Tokimeki Memorial: Densetsu no Ki no Shita de¹. To get it out of the way early: I don’t really approve of dating games. I think there’s something insidious and oily and ungodly about them - this idea that you can simulate a power fantasy where an entire class of schoolgirls dance in the palm of your hand, a hand that grips a cold plastic controller in place of the warm human hand of another soul. It is, in a word, pathetic. I don’t approve of dating games in much the same way I don’t enjoy the idea of the dating games we play with each other in reality. It’s not a healthy way to face our interpersonal realities. Dating sims write poems for the emasculated.

To give credit where credit is due - I think the functional bits and bytes of the gameplay here could easily transplant to a game where you are a 27 year old single person with a smartphone and an office job. Switch out Yoshio’s notepad for a Tinder contact lists and the local park for a local bar and I think you’d have a remarkable facsimile of the modern adult dating landscape. But that game doesn’t exist, and you instead find yourself trying to find meaning in a Japanese game developer’s longing for a high school experience he definitely never had. Applying this idea in reverse, does skinning the disposable round-robin experience of modern online dating with a coat of PG13+ 90s chou kawaii high school paint make it somehow more desirable to us, in much the same way we covet Japan’s urban sprawl and sakura scenery over the views of own environment?

For me, Tokimeki Memorial isn’t “the Rosetta Stone of gaming” by any meaningful stretch; I feel like Tim Rogers did a six-hour gold-panning in a dirty digital river, trying to find nuggets of meaning in an exploitative little product for lonely boys that isn’t really all that far off from the insidious pachislots that Konami are now infamously known for. Make a number go up until a girl acknowledges your existence, and then manipulate her into liking “you” by reading a strategy guide inside or outside the computer game. Roll the dice on whether your girlfriend likes blue dresses or green dresses. Got it wrong? Too bad. Perhaps you can live without regret by reloading another of your save files. Put another coin in the slot and hope the right number comes up this time. Want to form a meaningful, long-lasting bond with your oldest friend? Manage and manipulate the lives and hearts of everyone around you like a ruthless restaurant manager filling out a work schedule. And so on, until you stand under the Tree of Legends and pretend to yourself and your trophy sprite that this was all destined to be. You "love Mio"? What the fuck is Mio in relation to you? The sociopathy here is amusing to acknowledge, but can be worryingly internalised, like all bad jokes. How long before gamification inverts your digital and physical lives, and you demand that genuine girls give gratifying gamerscore?

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¹ Known as Heartthrob Memorial: Under the Tree of Legends when the English translation patch is applied.

6 stages of enlightment:

1. dp is bad

2. dp is so bad its good

3. dp is good in a genuine way, despite the controls and graphics and everything else besides the story and characters being bad

4. dp is good in a genuine way.

5. the endgame and the final bosses are bad for reasons relating to how dp treats its characters in need of the most crucial care, with the turn of events throughout being too dumb for its own good. and in retrospect the sequel may have only made it obvious that swery is not all that great of a writer, as far as the main stories around his protags and major supporting characters in general goes. every other problem with the game that has been talked to death about, i really dont care. the scale of greenvale and the scripted lives of its residents remind me that swery is a genuinely good director/designer if nothing else (not to ascribe too much credit to him over others). york in this game is a neurodivergent king and im not interested in anything to the contrary. the lynch comparison is inevitable even if its a little overspoken, and you can say that swery's attempt to translate the humanity of loss that made twin peaks what it is yielded mixed results, at the very best, of dp's climax. but expressing mundanity in the weird is dp's greatest asset; its more self-aware in its camp than it will get credit for, and it is always sincere in its ambitions to make the player become accustomed to both the socially oblivious weirdo you play as and the people of a pacific northwest town that is not so far off from him in their own quirks. and i think it does have some humanity in its more understated moments, particularly the series of sidequests that kicks off after talking to anna's mother, or from talking to certain character once they are arrested. even if there is some kind of auteur excess type ugliness to be found underneath the "ugliness" of the gameplay that is truly not as bad as its made out to be, sometimes monotonous and something to just get out of the way wrt the combat sections at worst imo--it can never detract from the passion within this game i feel when i am simply in it, without any flair or tonal whiplash to disturb that. a lifechanger for me that, in all the ways that really matter, still mostly deserves that title.

6. tee hee (executes a mathematically perfect 90 degree turn with a flick of the e-brake, blowing off the police investigation YET AGAIN to collect [Right Hand Bone] while york feeds me tremors movies trivia bc im about to starve to death) yay!

Headbone connected to the headphones
Headphones connected to the iPhone
iPhone connected to the internet
Connected to the Google
Connected to the government

so many reviews of this game have people saying "oh it sucks but i love it" or "it's obviously not GOOD but it's good" which is The Coward's Copout. I have no respect for this line of hedging your bets for fans and people who hate it, especially since Sonic Adventure is good.

I am bold enough to say that Sonic Adventure IS a good game. It's creative, made with love and passion, and actually makes good on the no doubt stressful task of translating Sonic into 3D. Of course not everything is going to work, Sonic Team were just fucking nuts, and I have way more respect for a game that shoots for the sun than something that is just another product.

So enough with this "The game is bad but I like it" bullshit. I think for having no other template to work off of, the amount Sonic Team gets right here for technology of the 90s, is genuinely impressive and shouldn't be given backhanded compliments. Sonic Adventure deserves either your love or hate, not some shit in-between.

"I'LL CRUSH YOU"

~me to ANYONE who talks shit about jack garland in any fucking capacity. the protagonist to surpass caim has arrived

EDIT:

ok here's an actual review - this is the best action game to come out in well over a decade. play on hard with party disabled and you'll have a thoroughly challenging experience with some of the best boss design the genre's seen period. come for the stellar combat; stay for more of it plus a godlike narrative. jack garland IS the best protagonist in ff

and he did it HIS way

Tetsuya Takahashi: "i skimmed the abstract of like 5 different philosophy books and arthur c clarke novels and i'm here to just vomit all that back at you for 70 hours without saying anything meaningful about any of it"

Me: "sounds bad"

Tetsuya Takahashi: "i've also included kung-fu and robots"

Me: "sounds sick"

Yoko Taro: (furiously taking notes)