game eater blog

Amagami kinda blew my mind.


 

My experiences with traditional dating sims, ones that are biblical to the stat raising and points based systems laid out in genre staples such as Dokyuusei and Tokimeki Memorial, are rather slim. I have watched dear friend of the blog Ophelia play both Tokimeki Memorial 1 and 2 (had I played 2 for myself, I likely would have written about that, because that game is amazing); I have played maybe one hour of Love Plus despite owning a Love Plus 3DSXL, and that is it. I have always been drawn to this gameification of conversation and socializing, even when it is really simple as it is in most games. But these dating sims have a shocking depth to them that surprises me to no end. In games like Tokimeki Memorial, you just pick what to do on your turn and pick what to do on dates, with the occasional random event or holiday spicing things up. It takes place over the years of high school's entirety, so a lot can happen and there are a lot of possibilities. In Tokimemo 1, you can ignore most of the girls and get into RPG battle gang wars with other kids to win the favor of the rich upper classman, who of course turns out to be a woman who is in love with you. I've heard of people getting randomly extremely ill during their playthrough and missing most of the year, I've heard of people encountering a mysterious stalker girl who shows up in the backgrounds of dates, etc. Tokimeki Memorial through multiple playthroughs gives the impression of a game with no end, an infinite breadth of dialogue and possibilities each time you start up a playthrough.
 

In Amagami, there is not as much crazy you can do in terms of gameplay, as the game is more focused on forming a narrative arc around the development between your character (protagonist Tachibana Junichi, though I named him after myself cuz I kinda like doing that for novel games with a bit more mechanical depth like this) and one of the women you can date in the game. While other dating sims make it more difficult and game-y to get an ending for a girl, it is pretty straightforward in this game. You don't gotta do anything too out there to see the most important and memorable stuff, and you don't have to date multiple girls at once to keep them from getting mad at you. Once I was doing a girl's route, I hard tunneled on only her event nearly exclusively until I got her best ending. For getting Love Best endings or Friendship endings or what have you, though there will be differences in any given playthrough, the major narrative beats of the relationship play out largely the same. It matters not if I met Nanasaki Ai behind the school or at the arcade, or if I walked Ayatsuji Tsukasa home the day she got attacked by a wild dog, they will still share their hardships and growth and high school struggles with you the reader.

What makes Amagami feel nearly as endless as other simulation/novel games is the way it presents its information to the player. During your turn, a colossal board of nearly 4000 spaces is laid out before you. Starting in the middle, you can select events in each girl's narrative four times a day to “move” outwards and unlock more events. Some events are forced upon the player, some take no time, some can only be selected at certain times, etc. By showing the limits of its scope, it strangely makes the game feel larger than if it were just picking who you want to hang out with that day from a simple list, even if it had more dialogue than it does in its current form. Sure, some of these events on any given random square are really out there with strange conditions, some are counted as parts of other events (i.e. pressing “attack” in conversation mode counts as seeing another square”) but given how much variation there is with choices within events, an absolute boatload of dialogue to see in conversation mode, later changes in dialogue with girls remembering your choices during earlier events (In Morishima route, a throwaway piece of dialogue had her ask me what I wanna be when I grow up. Detective seemed the coolest option to me, and wouldn't you know it, my protagonist was a detective in the epilogue!).

And these systems would be cool and all on their own, but they are elevated by the home run cast in this game. I love every girl here! They are all multifaceted, having interests far outside of what you would expect, their lives taking turns as they become closer to you. Conversation mode is such a gem of a system. Few games let me just talk about extremely mundane stuff and crack jokes with people. It adds a shitload of realism to a usually cartoonish genre. Fuck, it is a small thing, but I figured the “ecchi” button would just be stupid and always get the girl to hate you or something, but later in the routes girls actually can have normal feelings about sex and wanting to have sex! Around my third route, I used a bit of a guide for conversation mode, as I was having some trouble getting as many points as I want. Using the guide definitely got me more points, but it gave me a different problem that made me abandon the guide very quickly. Finding all good and great conversation topics with a girl at a specific turn, tension, and relationship level makes her say a stock phrase about how cool you are and then skips your turn, giving you a free point. Sure, you get the point, but I had far more fun intentionally fucking up in conversation mode to lower the tension and get different dialogue during this mode. Low tension is the only way I found out about the answer to Ayatsuji's cooking riddle from an earlier event, or how otherwise rather traditionally-minded Sae is a lowkey bisexual and fujoshi, and so much more.

Having such a focus on the granular, low-stakes conversation makes the moments of true change and understanding feel towering. It is a really small moment and I do not think it is handled perfectly, but a single line of dialogue changed what I figured would be a sour plot point into an understated moment of acceptance. Sakurai Rihoko loves food and eating, and the beginning of her route has the odd unfortunate line about how she is gonna get fat or is getting fat from eating sweets and food. I winced whenever they came up. One time the protagonist shares some food with her and says something along the lines of “You don't have to hide when you are eating from me. It doesn't bother me when you eat”. Combined with her friendship route where her attempts to diet have the protagonist say essentially “You literally look pretty and nice you do not need to diet for no reason”, and fuck it made me cry a little bit even though its really nothing much in the story. If someone I really cared for and respected told me that in high school and stuck with me it would have changed my life. Playing this route first was really lovely. Sakurai and protag are childhood best friends and have a really natural rapport. They joke, share memories, play small pranks on each other, and do little running bits. Plus, the way you and her start going on proper dates is just adorable. Your male friend who is a supportive rascal sits you two down and says “Listen. It is so obvious that you two like each other that I am making y'all talk about it so it does not drive me crazy anymore”. My first serious relationship started the same way so it got a smile outta me.

When you are not dating Sakurai Rihoko or any other girl (or doing a “friendship” ending), you can see their “estranged” events during gaps in other events. Sakurai is a hell of a lot more successful, becoming a rising star idol who gets on tv. This is really bittersweet if you already romanced her. One has to figure the brutal world of being a celebrity will make her body image issues far more of a struggle, despite her success. “More successful, but less happy or mature” is generally a theme of these estranged events. It puts a quiet yet important weight behind the relationships of this game. For instance, Nakata Sae is a younger girl who has been sheltered in the world of her old haughty school and her mountains of shoujo romance manga. Much of her main narrative when dating her is the push and pull between her desire for this perfect, storybook romance she sees in her manga, and the jaded older protagonist believing such a relationship to be impossible after he had his heart broken when he was younger. She is very traditionally minded, often doing things a wife or girlfriend would be expected to do (often in a white-picket fence nuclear family sort of way) because that is what she thinks would make the protagonist happy even when that just is not the case. The protag definitely really likes her, but must get through his own hang ups and dating trauma before she can have her feelings returned. When she is not dated, Sae becomes the president of the anime club, where she does cosplay and is revered by a bunch of otaku. While she is clearly successful and enjoys this position, she is in a spot where further lofty and unrealistic expectations will be placed on her. It is a really good balance of having your relationship feel important without making the girl seem like a lost cause without you. Even the relationships I have had in real life that have been sour spots in my life in one way or another have taught me something valuable about myself.

The protagonist grows from these relationships as much as the girl does, which just makes it all the more satisfying. Being rejected by his crush at the end of middle school is a big moment in the protagonist's narrative. He is pushed on by the universe, by his friend Umehara, by his love for the women around him, not to give up on romance. And of course, this is a video game after all, things work out in the end. Even if you really mess up and make a girl really upset, you can always load your save or press “return to morning” and make things work out alright.

After achieving an ending with the six main girls, Amagami's two secret routes open. The first of these strangely took me many attempts to get the ending. I am not sure if it is just jank, or if the PS Vita translation patch is buggy or what, but this struggle strangely added to my experience. I will get to that later. One plays the first hidden route (for the girl dubbed ? ? ? for most of the route, but her name is Kamizaki Risa so I will just call her that) as normal, romancing a girl of their choosing, though this time it occasionally cuts away to Risa, a stalker who has fallen for the protagonist after a random act of kindness he does way back in middle school, trying to sabotage your relationships. She tries to doctor photos of you cheating and show them to the other girl, mess up your date plans, so on and so forth. It is perhaps the most cartoonish the game gets in narrative tone. Risa finally works up the courage to give you a love letter. After meeting her, the atmosphere is incredibly odd. Risa tries to offer herself to look and act like the girls in the playboys that the protagonist likes, she tries to force the protagonist to call her by her first name, she has a conversation mode event where pretty much every answer is chosen for you and she is fast tracked to being crazy in love with you. You can accept her, if you would like, causing you to abandon your current love and stay with her. Her epilogue continues this strange tone. Fast forward to university, a friend asks you if you wanna go to a dumb little matchmaker event he has been planning, which you deny because of course, you have Risa. Even if she is strange, awkward, creepy, and the like, there is something strangely likable about her. I couldn't put my finger on it. Even if you reject her, your protagonist ultimately feels bad for her and wishes her success in her future.

Risa put into place the message the game was trying to tell me in its mechanics. She is trying to sabotage your relationships. If you date her, she reveals she fed your middle school crush a false change in location so she would not show up for your love letter. This was apparently to protect you, as your crush was planning to merely laugh in your face alongside her friends waiting nearby. Risa is this strive for a perfect, problem free adolescence. She is overprotective, like a player who follows a guide to get maximum affection points in a dating sim, or like a reader who reloads a save to pick the right option. Even if she cannot make the perfect romance from her crush from afar, the game and the player still love and forgive her. Amagami shows you its sprawling board not because it wants the player to do all of these events. It is precisely because it wants you not to. It encourages fucking up, saying the wrong thing, making a fool of yourself, because it is those moments that lead to the most important ones where you grow. It loves every moment in the game, having a sense of play with love and conversation unlike any other game I have played. By getting you to love these moments, the moments that make you you, it teaches the player to love themselves, including and especially their fuck ups. The second hidden route adds a lot to this too. You are just as much made by romantic love as you are familial love, being able to tell your sister to kick rocks because she beats you at monopoly and being able to support each other even when others cannot. It gives you a pep talk through the game's teacher character, saying that even she still fucks up, but that you are young and making mistakes is what being young is about. It is a pretty simple and cheesy message but one that hit me like a train. What lovely little routes, wrapping up all that the game wants you to learn.