Tokimeki Memorial (1994)

Tokimeki Memorial is a surprisingly robust role-playing experience focused on surviving the many demands of high school life, preparing for your future, working on yourself, and most importantly... finding a girlfriend. Twelve young women, each with distinct looks and personality, make up the heart of the game, and getting to know them and balancing a social life with them is really fun.

The bulk of TokiMemo's gameplay involves a calendar system that asks you how you'll spend your limited time each day from a huge set of permutations. Basic daily activities get fun little animations and contribute both positively and negatively to a range of stats that are pretty important for how the game plays out. The gameplay loop this creates is pretty addictive, and the systems as a whole lend themselves to a lot of different ways to focus your play. It's a lot of numbers management, but it's presented in a fun and easy-to-use way (assuming you do some basic reading online/in a manual before you play).

Daily life is the meat of the game, but the real flavor comes from the character interactions. The girls you can spend time with have a wide range of personalities and looks—I pretty quickly settled on two that I liked far more than the others, and one in particular that I focused my playthrough on. Dates and other outings with these characters are short and sweet, not too complex but still asking you to really get to know the characters and choose dialogue options that resonate with their particular quirks and preferences. The writing is both funny and charming and really is what makes it work, along with fun unique music themes for each character and location.

You can't just focus on one person, as much as I may have wanted to, since eventually there will be serious social consequences to ignoring others. This creates a slightly demanding dynamic once you've met a lot of people whose feelings you'll need to carefully juggle to arrive at your desired conclusion. As fun as it was at points, I do think I'd personally rather this be toned down in exchange for the actual relationships having more depth. They're fun, and they do each have some unique events, but I really wanted more from my chosen favorite character.

There's definitely a lot more in the game than meets the eye, though, which you can really tell as you get a taste of interacting with each character and see how many options there are that you can't possibly fit into one playthrough. I still think I would have preferred one or two playthroughs that were deeper, but it's cool that different players will get relatively unique experiences, and that there's so much replayability.

The last thing I'll mention is the version of the game. As of early 2023, the only version of the game translated into English (by fans) is the Super Famicom release, which can be emulated on PC with simulated SNES Mouse input that makes the UI pretty easy to use. This is unfortunately a suboptimal version of the game, which among other noticeable limitations removes almost all of the voice acting, a major part of the game's emotional resonance. Despite that, I still found it really enjoyable to play in this version, especially considering this version doesn't require learning Japanese (or Korean or Chinese for some official translations they have for Windows).

This may not be a perfect game for me—after talking to some fans about it, I think I'd prefer the untranslated sequel—but it was a very likable one, and it's very understandable why it's a huge mainstream classic in Japan. It's unfortunate that this series never officially came to the rest of the world, but at least there's a window into it now that was plenty enjoyable.

easily one of the top games i played last year. i could not fathom what this game was like until i actually played it. it's fun and funny and frantic. the game itself is fun and the playing of it becomes its own game. in one run, i decided to get totally serious. i was making notes and graphs and basically conducting an entire symphony, was top of my class, got into a first rate college, was popular with everybody, played my damnedest yet it was the only run where i wound up alone. great game.

i hope that the psx or saturn version gets translated soon.