I expect I‘m not the only person who wishes he could play tokimeki memorial but doesn’t read Japanese. I don‘t have any unrealistic expectations for a translation; but are there any games that are in English that you’d recommend, to get something like a similar experience?
Unless I hear a better suggestions, my plan is to pick up Persona 4 again after I'm done with Subnautica. I played P4 a fair bit a while ago, but never finished it; and I think I would approach it differently after watching Tim's last video.
Yeah, play To Heart 2 instead. There is an English patch here. That‘s what I usually see recommended in these type of threads – though I’m not a SLG fan myself, and haven't actually played it.
Bloody Bride on the PS1 got a playable English translation years ago and has fairly typical SLG mechanics. It could potentially be described as fun-adjacent.
Unfortunately, beyond what @bodydouble said, there really aren‘t any good options beyond learning Japanese. English-speaking developers have largely focused on romance-themed visual novels because they’re the easiest to design around (not only the game itself, but the tools to make games like this) and it works well enough if you‘re looking to convey narrative. But dating sims have never been reducible to that (the simulation aspects result in a different style of play and narrative (more general, less planned)), so it’s not going to be the same experience. The closest English-language equivalents I can recommend off the top of my head are:
- Hanako Games' output, E.G. Magical Diary and Long Live the Queen. Magical Diary especially, given the inclusion of both stat-managing gameplay and themes of high school romance.
- The fan translation of _Sakura Wars_, although this one veers more toward visual novel than other dating sims. You could also try out _So Long, My Love_ for the Wii and PS2. I don't know enough about the reboot to say anything about it one way or the other.
- [_Graduation_](https://www.mobygames.com/game/graduation-for-windows-95) got an international release when it came to Windows 95, if you can believe it.
Oh wow Graduation, wasn't that published by Mixxzine/Tokyopop/whatever? I remember seeing ads for it but assumed a physical release never materialized since that whole operation was bad news bears. I wonder what that translation is actually like? Looks like the game is on archive.org.
Honestly @anderbubble#13070 you should scrap this whole idea and just play Princess Maker 2; it's in English, runs really well in DOSbox, and is far more enjoyable than Tokimeki.
Well, if you want to play Tokimeki Memorial… the easiest way, actually, is to play Tokimeki Memorial: Girl‘s Side! There are at least three games in english, for the DS and the PSP. I know it’s an Otome game, but it works exactly the same and it was made by the same company. This is probably the closest you'll get to playing the original game without an english patch.
There are other games like True Love, and that one is in english too. It has quite a lot of H content, so beware if that's NOT what you're looking for.
On the more "sim" game side, there are other games like Princess Maker. That's not a dating sim, but a raising sim. However, both are simulator games and if you are looking for that kind of simulation, definitely go for it.
I can‘t vouch for it personally, but LovePlus was a massively popular dating sim on the DS, and it has an English fan translation. It’s probably mostly known outside of Japan as the game that made a guy marry his DS or whatever.
Sakura Wars was recently fan-translated for the Saturn, and there's a new one out on PS4 (though I have no idea how the quality of that one is.) I played the PS2 remake of Sakura Wars 1 and it was a fantastic time, definitely a classic in the same sense as Tokimeki Memorial.
There's also a partial English translation of the Super Famicom game from 2009 out there. It's mostly just the menus.
https://www.romhacking.net/translations/5686/
Just like Tokimemo, Monster Rancher was mechanically inspired by Princess Maker. Or, you can go straight to the source and play Princess Maker:
https://youtu.be/ZQxQonETN-4?t=396
It was released on Steam recently but I hear the new localization is pretty bad, so maybe dig up the original unreleased English version from decades ago if you can.
@hellomrkearns#13307 This is the closest I’ve ever come to watching a whole entire episode of Game Center CX, and I had a G O T (good old time) doing it. (Didn't get to watch all the way through, due to work demands.) I need to watch more episodes of this show, I think.
There is no substitute for Tokimeki Memorial Hospital. It's better to just play it in japanese, not knowing what the heck anyone is saying, than to play something else in english for a “tokimeki memorial hospital experience”
Timothy Rogers' video has two hours of "let's play", where as he says he is "playing it so you don't have to".
But then again, since every playthrough is different, you may still want to play it and see what your outcome is.
A fan translation won't magically appear, until the day it does. Until then you may just have to play it in Japanese, fumbling around, or.... Just not play Tokimeki Memorial Hospital at all.
An idea I just had, and what I would do: Set up a Virtual Keyboard for Japanese on your computer, and type the first couple characters of each text box into a script translation guide.
Back in my day, I was playing Mother 3 with a translation guide on my 3rd gen monochrome iPod screen. The text files had to be split into something incredible small like 55kb or something, and so I had it in 300 parts. I still cried at the ending. I was on the starmen dot net forums and, if I had made a thread asking for what to do if you Can't Read Japanese and Want to Play Mother 3, most of the games that are _actually similar_ to Mother 3 weren't even in the mother fandom's consciousness yet, games like Chulip or Gunman's Proof (which IDEK if that was translated yet). The closest we were aware of at the time was Contact for DS. A lot of recommendations here are about as good a substitute as Contact is for Mother 3. Still good games worth playing, but not a substitute by any stretch.
Unless you have already picked up Tokimeki Memorial Hospital and played it in Japanese and still have an ache to talk to those creatures... In which case, sure, play Doki Doki Literature club or something.
Semi Related. I wish I knew Japanese so I could play Segagaga. The idea of a game being developed in secret for 2 years and then sprung on an unsuspecting set of executives, who then greenlit it as the business was collapsing, is really fucking fascinating to me. A game about the company‘s own history and decline and saving itself as it was going down. There’s no way I'd be able to get all the injokes and puns without knowing serious japanese, much less the inside-baseball company jokes that would take serious knowledge of Sega to translate.
@Personasama#13377 Yeah! I only just made the Monster Rancher connection myself after watching Tim's video. The training sections are pretty clearly influenced by TM.
