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.

Reviewed on Apr 20, 2022


17 Comments


1 year ago

I feel it is obvious that I could not disagree harder with this but your perspective on this game is something I've been waiting for for a while. I can certainly respect the point of view that dating simulators are dirty, and I'm not sure I really disagree! But I definitely felt that the personalities of the girls stretched beyond that which faces you, and I think that is part of what appealed so much. It's something I vibed with in Cyberpunk, of all things, too... Maybe I'm just a sucker for some personable character writing.

1 year ago

I maybe came off too hard on the game here in order to keep myself coherent, but I did like how some of the girls were written - at least once you had worn them down with repeat trips to the mall. I just couldn’t commit myself fully to the skeeviness of building a filofax of little sister swimwear preferences just so I can take my punk godess to a Deftones concert without getting a game over. It felt inauthentic to an otherwise pretty neat little numbers simulation of daily life.

1 year ago

You know, I think it has been a long time since I've read a review that ends (or indeed starts) with a 'Graphics: 7.83/10' and I am very grateful for this site because of that.

1 year ago

Been thinking about this review overnight and I think I really sympathize with a lot of the thoughts here on capital-D Dating Sims. I've enjoyed a lot of romance VNs and stuff, but things get thornier and thornier the more Mechanics you add, the more you stray from this just being a romance novel that contains multiple realities where the protagonist has different relationships with different members of the cast. It just doesn't really feel right to me, on multiple levels.

I think it is possible to make a game that is experientially reflects what it means to date but everything I've read about this game suggests that it Is Not It. frankly I would be deeply disturbed by anyone who professes to find any verisimilitude in tokimeki memorial's hilariously unhinged Bomb mechanic.

1 year ago

Bingo. The bomb mechanic is probably the crux of my problem with the game - it essentially forces you to interact with every character and keep them "happy" by feeding chatup lines and presents learned by colluding in secret with Yoji, a dude who keeps a creepy little datapad on all the girls and sets you up with opportunities to watch them showering. Having them arbitrarily spread rumours about you because you went to the mall with someone else (despite the fact they're often otherwise happy with you) feels like a Video Game Mechanic wedged into what is otherwise a simulation.

There's a more palatable bombless version of the game in here where you can just pursue the girls you're interested in getting to know better and improve your relationship with them by gleaning preferences from what they say and do. For instance, Shiori never tells you that she enjoys romance movies - you can only find this out from Yoji's book. Instead of her just going "ohayo letshugbro-kun, genki da ne???" or whatever for the millionth time after school, it would be more interesting if you could pick these things up in conversation. But I guess I need to cool it and remind myself this is a SNES game and this was their first run at it.

1 year ago

I think whats interesting abt yr closing inquiry is that even tho it relates very heavily to an entitled male abandonment fixation we find in incels and the like. There's actually an even more unsettling and paternalistic norm underneath it. Far from these games and these apps causing people to shrink in to whiny channers or get really upset. They may actually try and be pretty damn well good at it to. Buying the right dress for somebody or even just holding yourself up to the sentiment that material items is the stock necessary to get to their hearts. You might feel good about it, put a sort of identity into these other objects of affection.

The only dating game I ever played was Katawa Shoujo, all that was between your relationship and the girl you wanted to pursue was a few dialogue prompts. No hot saving features necessary, no weird item gimmicks. All content. On top of that regardless which girl you picked. While that game may show its age and arguably come off as exploitative considering the disability theming, this simplicity and anti game design approach when telling a story around romance seems much closer to the warmth found in more effective interpersonality. To the point you are fine to find it 'cold' and the pupeteering dating VNs is certainly weird. But as a girl who's taken to the whimsy charms of E-Dating, and lived a rather full romantic life that way, the nature of a 'plastic' relationship is not rare to me nor nessecarily a desservice. On the contrary, the synthetic divide probably healed a lot of my interpersonal insecurities rather than adding to it. Modern tindr dating also has 1 other appeal we often try to overlook which is that it allows us to get a more clear range of hobbies and expressions. As cruel and heartless as it sounds I don't exactly want to walk up to every girl in a park to know their hobbies and interests. Disregarding the fact its a bit weird, its also just a huge time sink when I can get a more firm and fast form of self expression online. Consider for a moment that the branding for most of these games is probably going to focus on the assets of each of the women and try to sell their persona in as short a blip as it can. You know it can be grotesque when used for the wrong things, but there's definitely an appeal there in figuring out just how much you and another person might 'match' it clears a lot of the guesswork. Ironic then that this game in fact does not clear up the guesswork but instead just continues to contribute to it.

It's a shame that it probably just wasn't enough to 'satisfy' the average SNES gamer to just have the story play out without these excessive artificial game design additions.

1 year ago

*Regardless which girl you picked it would mainly let you focus on them and off of others, although a lot of the cast share each other as friends which feels more sweet natural and real rather than just honing in on them.

1 year ago

Also I find it funny you would hate dating games this much but then play this LMAO I can't even imagine playing this shit XD

1 year ago

Haha! I guess because of the ACTION BUTTON video mentioned above I became really interested in this particular dating game despite my misgivings about the genre as a whole. Always like to try (or retry) stuff outside of my comfort zone once in a while and see if my feelings/opinions can be changed. Thanks for sharing a really interesting perspective on the review.

1 year ago

Yeah I suppose that's fair enough, 5 hours is a good chunk of time to dedicate without doing your own followup. Also tbf I get it, there's a lot to dislike in this genre and modern dating in general, I'm not trying to mitigate that even remotely.

Anyway It's nice to hear your thoughts, and thanks for showing a way to do footnotes on here, I might have to yoink that. Cheers!

1 year ago

Praying we get blockquote and superscript one day.

1 year ago

I have been ruminating on this for a while and after reading your follow-up comments I feel like my way of playing the game was extremely different to yours. I never rang Yoshio except to grab a girls' number, and I kind of just took the people I met places I thought they might want to go. Sometimes it went badly, and that was ok? But I certainly picked up different girls' preferences just through that, and learned a lot about these people as a result. That in itself was a really pleasant experience, and probably why I felt the game less grimy than you did.
I think the bomb system is too gamey, too greasy, though. It's a teenage boys' idea of what girls do and should be treated with the derision that opinion kind of deserves. But I am fond of the attributes as a way of getting to know people - after all, is that not kinda like life itself?
I think the most interesting result of Tokimeki Memorial is how popular it was with women despite all this, to the extent that Girls Side ended up with way more games. Maybe that's just an indictment of how everyone's a bit grimy underneath.

1 year ago

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1 year ago

i have no clue how anyone sees a game like this and views it in such a diabolical light. nobody playing this is treating it like an actual substitute for dating or even thinking that "skills" acquired ingame are going to apply to real life. and if you'd argue otherwise then you might as well also take the stance that shooting games are degenerate because we shouldn't kill each other

it's a punishing trial & error strategy game with a cute coat of paint. it ain't that deep chief. nobody's winning over a 16-bit sprite and thinking it means anything to their real life - if they are then they've got plenty of problems upstairs as is

hell i thought the bomb mechanic hit those points home hard enough on its own. the characters literally get mad at you for not dating all of them at once. if that isn't enough to separate the whole experience from reality then i don't know what is. i can't justify any point of "sociopathy" when the game literally doesn't operate on real world rationality in the first place

not liking it's one thing but the whole foundation for your stance here just feels totally tone deaf. might as well run up to a kid beating contra and say, "nice job dipshit but you didn't actually save the world lmao"

1 year ago

So I think the vast majority of video games are power fantasies, experiences you want to inhabit or at least understand - saving the world, getting the girl, being insanely strong, ruling a kingdom, making friends, etc. etc. Even games about depressed teenagers in rural Michigan or whatever are still things we want to experience to enrich our lives on some level. Contra, for example, was at one time the most exciting simulation of being a Stallone supersoldier battling against alien forces - a common 80s/90s fantasy byproduct of the period's action movies that people wanted to safely play a more active role in. Obviously these days we're more inclined to look at Contra on a pure pixel mechanical level as just "a game", but there was a time where people felt (with a bit of imagination) like they really were killing God or vanquishing evil in games like Final Fantasy III or A Link to the Past.

I think the Tokimeki Memorial experience meant something on an emotional level to a lot of people - otherwise it wouldn't have become a series where people queued around the block on launch day for each new release. It's a lynchpin of the Tim Rogers review that he developed honest-to-god relationships with the characters and gained new personal insights as a result; it's almost undeniable that this is the sort of video game that can influence thought and real lived experience. If this was just a pure mechanics fantasy that was meant to be fully divorced from reality, the developers wouldn't have included dialogue, storylines or all the other attempts at creating emotional bonds between you and the girls - it would just be a bunch of spreadsheets.

We're a sum of our experiences, real or virtual, and to deny otherwise by saying "its just a game bro lol" would be to essentially deny the whole purpose of this website. With the review above, I'm just talking about a personal dislike of the experience this game made me inhabit and what I thought the implications of that were for myself and others. But it's just my point of view. If you like the game, that's cool.

1 year ago

First time I've ever heard somebody who works banking admit that spreadsheets are not that fulfilling :p

1 year ago

Spreadsheets can be fulfilling. It’s just a matter of finding the right one.

1 year ago

I'm sorry but if Tim Rogers was the Vergil to my Dante I would've jumped of Charon's ship