The Action Button review of Tokimeki Memorial caused me to go back to True Love, a hentai game I…

The Action Button review of Tokimeki Memorial caused me to go back to True Love, a hentai game I had fond memories of from my teen years — and one clearly influenced by TokiMemo.

True Love was very popular on abandonware & warez sites in the late 90s and early naughts, but I haven’t played it in many years, because (while I kept my copy) it or its crack couldn’t run on versions of Windows past 98SE (nor would it run on WINE).

I had this vague idea that it was made by JAST & Gainax, but that was actually a false memory caused by the fact that its ugly brown menus are basically identical to the ugly brown menus in Princess Maker 2, which I was playing around the same time & which was developed by Gainax.

Unbeknownst to me, FAKKU tracked down the rights to True Love & fixed compatibility issues and released it on Steam (as True Love 95).

Also, Gainax is selling it? So I guess my memory was not quite so bad. However, I doubt anybody at Gainax did art for this game.

Today, I played through True Love once. I stumbled upon Minae’s route — the childhood friend — despite trying for Rumi (the student council president).

True Love is, essentially, diet TokiMemo with porn in it.

By diet I mean: it seems basically impossible to accidentally fail at this game, and very easy to max out stats (and thus get your choice of girls).

I played the game to completion in, like, 4 or 5 hours, with no hints or walkthroughs.
True Love has a set of stat bars on the right hand side:

• Passion, which maxes out at 99 and grows when you have romantic events (or possibly other stuff)
• Fatigue, which grows with effort. I have never seen it go above 30, & taking a break will singlehandedly take about 15 off
• Studiousness, Physical Strength, Attractiveness, and Art (which grow via studying, sports, fashion, or art activity, respectively, and which all max out at 160)

There’s also a hidden luck stat of some kind, a hidden ‘games’ state (which may be the same thing), and a visible bank account balance.

The gameplay is basically the same as TokiMemo. Each day, you choose the activities for that day, in three segments: “Daytime” (school hours), “Evening” (which starts sometime around 3:30), and “Night”. “Evening” should probably have been named “Afternoon”.

During school days, the “Daytime” slot is set by default to “College”. (Obviously this is a high school which has been termed “College” in the translation.)

The other slots can be filled in with “Break”, “Study”, “Fashion”, “Sports”, “Art”, “Pleasure”, “Shop”, “Work”, or “Promise”. “Promise” can only be selected if you have promised a girl a date.

Some events may be dependent on the activities you choose, but the events I saw during this play through were imposed upon me — the swimming contest was mandatory, and girls would find me at school, at my flat, or on a walk I inexplicably decided to take.

Unlike TokiMemo, dates often had multiple choices. Also unlike TokiMemo, the “wrong” answers are very easy to identify.

Within the first hour of playing True Love, I had Studiousness maxxed out.

This is because all you need to do to max something out is spend all your time doing it for a couple in-game days, after which you are visited in the night by the “god of studiousness” who gives you a bonus.
This bonus will give you about 35 points, and if you do the task again the next day, you will get another 35 points. So, by itself, you get 70 points in 2 days. Normally, you get 1–3 points per period you spend on a task, so you can get up to 6 a day (or 9 on sundays).

The game begins on July 1st. You get an exam on July 4th, and shortly after that, summer vacation begins. It is interrupted by a swimming contest & a practice exam, but it lasts until August 31st. So you get a month and change of an extra task slot.

Right off the bat, you can max out one stat and then get your others up above 50, before most of the plot happens. Nearly the whole game is ‘endgame’.

Likewise, working is a bit overpowered. You get 3,000 yen for working; your dad gives you 10,000 yen on the first day of summer vacation; if you go shopping, you can buy a lottery ticket for 1,000 yen that has a very good chance of giving you 1,000 yen every month.

Meanwhile, the stat-boosting items “Energy Drink”, “Textbook”, “Art book”, and “Adult magazine” are all 300 yen. (Not that you need them.) The most expensive “unusual item” in the dodgy store is 1200 yen. Dates rarely cost anything, but one cost 1200 yen.

The most expensive “gift for a girl” is Flowers, which cost 9000 yen. That is one Sunday of full-time work.

Unless you are intentionally trying to fail at the game, you will never get so gross that none of the girls are interested in you, nor will you run out of money. I did the swimming contest with a physical strength stat of 1, and could have with zero.

It’s possible that some gettable girls are harder to get. There are a lot of them, and I don’t actually remember how to go about getting most of them.

I vaguely recall getting H scenes with the school nurse (who I didn’t run into at all in this playthrough), my friend’s younger sister, and the fashionable older woman you sometimes run into on the street when I played this like 15+ years ago. (This would have probably been around 2004 or 2005, since I played it on a scavenged Win95 PC.)

This was back when I had approximately no experience with:

• VNs
• video games in general
• talking to girls

Back then, I was happy that I was able to get to the H scenes without much thought or effort. These days, I’d like a little bit more challenge.

Modern VN dating sims (especially western ones like Katawa Shojo or Everlasting Summer) are often about gaining a good enough understanding of well-drawn characters to appeal to them, even as they have fairly complicated hangups.

In comparison, the TokiMemo model of VN dating sim is a bit more like a pick up artist attitude. Your goal is to get with some chick, and so you perform highly stylized forms of “self-improvement” (go to gym/read book/buy clothes) as though it’s your day job.

Git gud at understanding someone you care about, versus git gud at extremely broad categories of “desirable traits”. But both are challenges. You have meaningful tradeoffs.

True Love is like a Ben Shapiro version of this PUA strategy.

You need to max out your stats to appeal to the girl, sure, but you’re living in a universe where food and rent don’t cost anything and so spending two days at work gives you all the money you need for the rest of your life. Cram for a week and you will only need to study once a month to stay within two or three points of your biological maximum intelligence. Spend a week at the gym and the same is true of your muscle tone. Brush your hair continuously for a week and you will be the hottest man on earth for a month.

Playing this brought up a lot of nostalgia, but at the same time, I spent most of my time playing instead thinking about how I would improve it. How I could singlehandedly write a game with the same core loop that was more interesting and satisfying.

I like grinding, because I like watching those numbers go up. As somebody who’s really shitty at video games, grinding is the only source I have for the kind of satisfaction that more skilled players get from actually winning video games.

VNs (and games with turn-based combat) let me get narrative closure from games without having highly-trained reflexes.

This style of game combines the numbers-go-up joy of grinding with the narrative closure of VNs. Plus it has anime tiddies.

But this game is too easy even for me!