I used to like the Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side series of otome games. I still kind of do, in my head, but when it came to playing 4th Heart, I realized the games are far too long and the characters are far too childish (or the gamer is far too old, IDK) to make the experience enjoyable. I did one playthrough that IMO took far too long and came away quite disappointed and bored.

1. Raising stats was too easy. Maybe it was like this all along and I didn’t notice. But in the past it felt like you had to make trade-offs to get the stats you wanted, e.g. raising Academics would ding your Athletics stat, raising Athletics would affect your Academics and Attractiveness, etc. Here the penalties still exist, but they are extremely mild, so it doesn’t take much effort to get really good in all subjects. And I mean, it’s more realistic, yeah? Like why should jogging a bit turn me into a drooling idiot? But a stat raiser game isn’t fun if the stats are too easy to raise.

2. The love interests are all flat and one-dimensional. Sassa like sports. That’s literally it. Kazama is your childhood friend who thinks he can waltz back into your life 10 years later and pick up where he left off. Honda is a nerd. Nana is a model who doesn’t want people to know he’s a model even though it’s totally obvious to anyone with eyes. And so on and so forth. That’s fine as a setting, but no change or development over the course of three years? I don’t need super drama, but at least something should happen, or they should realize something about themselves, perhaps overcome a challenge or two? And you know, maybe that did happen but I never triggered those events for any of the characters, so they were static all the way through.

3. There are a lot of date spots and a wide variety of things to do, which is really cool. Buuut, the dates at each place largely play out the same way. Meet, go inside, watch/do whatever, give a closing comment, hang out a little more if he likes you, home again home again jiggety-jig. Same expressions, same reactions, same events. I get that the game wanted to encourage you to visit places with different characters and even date widely for the lulz a la Storm Lover, but the dating process has to be fun (and the characters have to be interesting) to begin with to encourage the player to want more of it.

4. No complaints about the graphics, but the character designs were a bit… uh… not quite ugly, but very plain. A definite step down from the previous game. The designer who looked at Mikage-sensei’s goofy hair and honestly thought “Girls are gonna go wild for this!” needs his head and eyes examined. In fact, it’s not just one designer: there was a whole raft of them in the credit plus art directors and other people who should know better. The only conventionally attractive love interest in the whole game was Nanamori, and even he would barely stand out in the average otome game. Konami really brought their Z game for this one.

5. After two and a half boring years of boringly dating boring Sassa, I didn’t get his ending. It’s probably because I never gave him a birthday present, or maybe because I didn’t paw him enough during the “skinship” events that interrupt your date every five second. Either way, it was disappointing to spend so much time with a guy who was obviously in love with you only to have him pull a complete 404: Date not Found after the graduation ceremony. And not just him but all your friends as well – you’re all so buddy-buddy right up to the final moment and then complete radio silence. Were we ever friends to begin with?

I have that issue with other otome games like La Corda d’Oro as well. Yes, the ultimate point of the game is romance, but surely the friendships we made along the way have to count for something, right? (muses the person who hasn’t spoken to any of her friends(?) from high school and college since she deleted Facebook over 10 years ago)

Well anyway, despite all the negatives I just listed, I do intend to play TMGS4 one more time. This time by following a guide and doing things “properly” so I can see at least one guy’s ending and so I won’t be accused of not giving the game a fair chance. Not that it deserves one, TBH. And not that it will get that chance any time soon, because I’m currently playing Atelier Ryza and having a blast. I missed non-weird Atelier with lots of alchemy. More on that next time!