Bad game was bad. I didn’t enjoy it at all. I see what Konami tried to do there (create a girl’s version of Tokimeki Memorial, which they eventually managed with the Girl’s Side series), but Meine Liebe just sucks.

You play a girl in a high-school in the fictional country of Kuchen around 1937. The time setting is pointless because you don’t do anything you wouldn’t do in a game set in 2015. Same with the pseudo-European setting.

Gameplay is the same school-going stat-raising stuff from the Tokimemo games, just severely dumbed down so your stats go up in leaps and bounds and you’re over 200 in everything by the end of the game.

On weekends you call guys and your girl friends to ask them to hang out. Your player character has an annoying roundabout way of asking guys out – instead of just saying “Hey, let’s go to the woods” she’ll be like “I’ve always wanted to walk through the forest, but it’s too dangerous for a fragile young lady like me *hint hint*” Rrgh, no wonder she gets turned down 90% of the time. Thing is, your friends/love interests don’t want to go out with you unless they like you, but they won’t like you unless they go out with you, so it’s Catch-22. You basically have to beg and plead and call over and over again and hope you get lucky. Plus any affection you build up drops very quickly so you have to keep dating the same guys and girls very frequently to keep them happy, etc etc. Argh, so annoying.

Not available (sigh)

Your girl friends are particularly irritating because you get all these cutscenes and events where you guys act all buddy-buddy, but you fail to hang out with them a few weeks in a row and they start spreading ugly rumors about you to all and sundry (and not just once per game but every time you make them mad). Your love interest’s affection for you will drop like a rock, months of work will be undone and still your so-called “friends” will pretend you guys are besties forever and ever. It’s so… high school.

Unfortunately just straight up ignoring the girls is not an option because most guys have some requirement where you have to balance affection levels between guys and girls to get their ending, as shown by the blue-pink bar in the screenshot below.

I decided not to bother with all that nonsense and resigned myself to being forever alone, but by some fluke of chance I got Ludwig’s ending by getting him to love me and the other girls not to completely hate my guts. In this supposedly ‘romantic’ ending, Ludwig flatly refuses to say he loves MC and will most likely dump her immediately if it’s ever politically expedient, but Konami says that’s romantic so who am I to argue?

Oh btw, just FYI, Meine Liebe is technically a dating sim, and it does have lots of dates in it, but that doesn’t mean the dates are any fun at all. Sure there are some nice date spots and interesting seasonal events, but the date conversations are horribly poor. The characters don’t directly answer anything you say to them, they just have stock responses instead along the lines of  “I agree”, “I disagree” and “What a terribly stupid thing to say” that they use for all situations. It doesn’t matter what unique location you go to or what witty response you give, they’re always going to say the same thing and react in the exact same way. I stopped reading after a while.

tl;dr, Meine Liebe is a really crappy game. Stat-raising is a joke, your female friends are hateful two-faced bovines, the guys have nothing interesting to say and aren’t that handsome, the dates aren’t fun to go on, if there’s an overarching story I don’t know what it is, the great setting is wasted, etc etc… Disappointing experience. Give it a miss.

Related posts:

Love Plus early info Tokimeki Memorial Girls’ Side 3 – Ruka GET! Tokimeki Memorial 3 – Emi Tachibana GET! La Corda d’oro – Forever alone! (spoilers)