Tokimeki Memorial: Densetsu no Ki no Shita de

"Somebody call the CIA. These girls are terrorists!"

The Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side games are some of my favorites for the DS. Recently I was overcome by curiosity about the original game that started the whole *pure* dating sim phenomenon. If you've watched enough romance/comedy anime you've probably seen the final scene spoofed before, but what is the game itself really like? This past weekend I fired up the Tokimeki Memorial version released on the SNES in 1996 and discovered this awesome experience for myself.

Story
Every Tokimeki Memorial game has the same story. You're a freshman in high school. You've got three years to find yourself a girlfriend before going off to college. Good luck!

Oh, and don't forget the old myth/legend/mysteriously prophetic dream you end up fulfilling at the end of the game. This time it's a special tree in the school. Legend has it if a girl confesses her love to a boy under that tree, their love will last forever. Naturally you make it your goal to get a girl to love you enough so that you can get that special little confession.

Gameplay
So you're aiming to get a girl to propose to you at the end of the game. But to do that you've got to be proposal-worthy material, right? To that end the game consists of beefing up your physical and mental stats enough to transform yourself from a dumb, skinny, pimply dweeb to a handsome, studly badass bookworm by the end of the game. You work with a weekly calendar. Every Sunday night you enter which stat you want to work on during the week: academics, humanities, science, art, sports, etc. Then your avatar carries them out with various degrees of success depending on his biorhythm that week. Lather, rinse, repeat. Since you're in school you're occasionally interrupted by exams and school festivals and the like, but the majority of the game consists of building up your stats over and over again.

Unlike later games which severely reduce other stats when raising others so that getting smarter wreaks havoc on your fitness stat, the original Tokimeki Memorial is much kinder in that regard. Stats go up much faster than they go down, stress doesn't build up that quickly and resting does not set you back by very much. It's an easy game that anyone should be able to get the hang of in no time.

On Sunday mornings you have three choices. You can stay in and work on one stat. You can call your friend Saotome and ask him for the lowdown on how girls feel about you, about their vital stats and important stuff like that. Somehow this eats up the whole Sunday. Third option, call up a girl and ask for a date. If she accepts, you've got a date for the next Sunday. You can stand her up if you want, but you'll be SORRY. If she turns you down, you just wasted a day. Point your finger towards the reset button and try again, Sundays are precious.

Say you're lucky enough and she accepts. If you're smart you already know what kind of places she likes, so you're not taking a quiet girl to a rock concert. After a few lines of dialogue you'll watch/see whatever you came to watch/see, and she'll ask you a question. The answer is always, always the first option! That is just too, too, too easy! It's impossible to mess up, even if you don't understand a lick of Japanese. Just pick the first option every single time. It's so stupid I have to subtract a full point from the score because the challenge of dating = 0. You pick the first option, the girls go “Yes, I think so too” and boom, her affection for you goes way up. That's just silly.

So essentially the game boils down to improving your stats so the girls think you're sexy, and dating your girl regularly so she gets to like you more and more. If at the end of the game she's in the “blushing” stage and your stats are the way she likes ‘em, congratulations, you've got yourself a girlfriend! The first two years of high school will fly by before you know it. And then, in your last year, you'll run into… The Bombs.

Bombs
Simply put, all the girls want you. And if they don't get enough of you they're going to be mighty mad. Apart from your obligatory childhood friend Shiori and your friend's spunky sister Yumi, all the other girls introduce themselves to you depending on how high your stats are. You only meet mad scientist Yuina when your Science stat is above 100, for example. A normal player will have met 7, 8, 9 girls by his senior year, and woe betide you if you don't date any of them often enough!

When a girl decides you haven't been paying enough attention to her (i.e. you haven't taken her on a date for 2 weeks even though you walked home with her every day), she'll get mad and start spreading ugly rumors of you. Your first hint: “A weird rumor has been going around lately.” Maybe about you being a molester or having a small…vocabulary or something. Next you'll run into the girl, say hi and she'll totally blow you off. Second hint. If you still don't take her out, pretty soon Saotome will give you the infamous Red Phone Call of Doom. Boom, the bomb has gone off and all the girls hate you now. Good luck trying to get your special girl now, with two in-game months left to go and 3 more bombs waiting to go off. Al-Qaeda would be so proud.

By the time I figured out how to delay the detonation (refuse to walk home with any girls that week), I was already well on my way to getting an ulcer. I had also lost my chance at getting Shiori and had to settle for Saki, the second biggest bomber of all. Talk about negotiating with terrorists!

Characters
Konami put a lot of effort into creating girls that run the whole spectrum of personalities, from super-perfectionist hard-to-get girls to “consolation prize” girls you can win over with barely any effort. Girls that care about your looks, girls that care about your brains and girls that just want your hot body, they're all there. The sweet ones, the snooty ones, the sporty ones, so many girls you're bound to find one you like. In fact I liked them all so much it was a matter of trying to decide which one not to go for.

Strangely enough, no matter how hard you'd been trying to get Girl A throughout the game, when you show up under that tree at the end and it's Girl B, your main character is still going to go “Actually I was in love with you all along, too” and live happily ever after with her anyway. So, err, why did I bother?

Graphics
It's a 1996 SNES game that I'm playing for the first time in 2009, but even after factoring all that in I'm not impressed with the graphics. There are plenty of SNES games with smoother, better graphics and saner color palettes than Tokimeki Memorial. In particular the livid green menu and some of the brighter hair colors might give you a migraine on a bad day, but you'll live.

The character designs are as good as you might expect from an anime-type game, i.e. nothing special. Generic anime girls with big eyes and small features. Which girls you think are pretty and what-not all depends on your personal tastes. A few of the girls might look same-ish, but their personalities are different enough to prevent any confusion.

As a treat, once you get friendly enough with a girl, you will be treated to occasional stills featuring them in certain situations. I got one with the model Mira where she took off her bikini top (true story!!!), lay down on the beach and invited me to rub suntan oil on her body(!!!!!). That scene alone was enough to cancel out every complaint I might possibly have about the graphics. Well, almost.

Sound
A bit of a low point. Ignoring the sound quality (SNES midis, ick), the attempt was made to give each girl her own theme. The idea was good. The themes themselves were not. This is a highly subjective statement, of course, but I just finished the game last week and I don't remember a single one. The game plays the theme before the girl appears but I could never which theme went with which girl. They just weren't distinctive enough. I also muted large parts of the game because the daily tunes got very repetitive.

Overall Impression
I loved this game, hectic as it was near the end. It was never boring, that's for sure! For anyone new to dating sims and with some Japanese ability, I recommend it. The graphics are certainly dated and parts of the game are extremely easy, but the overall result is still fun as the day it was made. Play it!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 04/23/09, Updated 04/28/09

Game Release: Tokimeki Memorial: Densetsu no Ki no Shita de (JP, 02/09/96)