Heartache 101 ~Sour into Sweet~

(this review is of v0.71)

So some kind of dating sim eh? I have to admit I have sort of a soft spot for those. Usually they're crappy flashgames and occasionally they're a minigame within a larger game. One of my first encounters with this type of game was actually in International Superstar Soccer 2000 but there hasn't really been a lot of variation in between.

Not that I'm an expert. I'm more fascinated by the genre and always love the small dating games within games.

Essentially in this game you build up stats and win the affection of a girl. Much like every single other game in the genre I've played. The gameplay is simple, you have a bunch of days to complete your objective, which is a wager with an old friend about who's going to get a girlfriend/boyfriend first. (of course this friend being of the opposite sex there's obviously the solution that you can girlfriend that one. Though who wins then I don't know because I didn't manage that solution and I only played through the game once)

A day is divided into two basic segments. First there is the school day which is a board game where you roll a die and move spaces. When you land on an event space things happen. On a girl space you have an encounter with a girl, which can be generic or a story thing. You generally have no choice in what kind of event happens or what girl you will meet in such an event. On a question mark space a random event happens that usually boosts (or lowers) a stat. There's also crystal marks that are items that upon use will let you move backwards and forwards. Adding a bit of a strategy into the otherwise random die roll.

There's also a couple of other spaces you can land on. Arrow spaces for alternate routes, heart spaces for confidence boosts, weird spaces for massive level ups and so on. Essentially you nearly always want to land on an event space if possible. Except for the bug space.

The second part of the day you can choose to do one of a number of activities. These will usually give you items, stats, story events or random events. There's a lot of locations but not a lot to do in the different locations. I'm guessing there's a bunch of random events that can happen if you happen to be in the right location but for example the store only seem to have one item and once you've bought it there's seemingly no reason to ever go back (except for that second time where it says "there's nothing in the store" and you go home having wasted a day). Somehow I have a feeling the game might have benefitted from the locations being merged into multi-action locations.

On sundays there's a pacman minigame where you make money. Occasionally it is a stealth game. Though one where at least once I was confused about how it worked since one of the guys noticed me over a wall. And since there's a limited amount of Sundays to work from this could be a problem.

Actually that could lead me into one of the minor problems of this game. There isn't much in the way of help. When first starting the game up I noticed a help file which seemed like a lot of text so I thought "Cool. I'll go back to that if there's something I don't understand."

Well it wasn't like that. The helpfile was basically only about the customization which is apparently a big feature of the game where you can add and remove story and characters from the game as you see fit. Not exactly a bad feature and since this isn't a complete game I suppose the customization feature is the most important for documentation purposes. Overall though a little more transparency wouldn't have been too bad.

For example. I decided to roleplay this a little bit. In the game there are horoscopes and occasionally you get a horoscope mag thrown in your face and there's a choice whether you believe in it or not. I thought "This is bullshit" and never chose to believe in horoscopes. This probably meant I got cut out from a bit of the content of the game (undoubtedly) but it also meant I never asked any girls what their signs were.

This meant I was cut off from another part of the game (that I only found later, gaming the game a bit) which is evening phone calls with girls. A fairly big feature that was the reason I went to the helpfile to see how I had misssed it. First I thought I couldn't make calls because my call plan sucked (even though in the beginning it said I had one call per night) so I upgraded it and nothing changed.

I had to get a girl's phone number somehow and the only way to get it was to first ask her what her sign was to open up the choice in the dialogue box. I would count this as a major oversight. I basically played two thirds of the game without the phone mechanic. Which I guess worked out alright in the end but there should have been some kind of hint as to how to get those phone numbers.

To me this was a major playability oversight, especially since the only way to get dates are through phone calls, and generally a lack of transparency in some areas brings this game down a little bit. Of course too much transparency is a bad thing too, I rather liked the mechanic where you asked girls what they liked and you got a partial answer that you would have to puzzle together later.

Overall the writing in this game is just the kind of cutesy innocence I come to expect from these kinds of games. Though at their core they are sort of disturbing (as Beautiful Escape Dungeoneer proves), since they're usually about manipulating and gaming the system. Though in this case not so that you can torture and kill people but the more innocent part of it. In fact this game never goes further than kisses and the occasional Japanese nosebleed moment (something I will never fully understand)

This game is not yet finished but if there was one complaint I'd have it would be the lack of character portraits. All the girls get a couple of portraits that appear from time to time. But it would be nice to get paper dolls also of other characters (especially named ones) throughout the game. A little more visual flair to the game. The first time I was in a classroom talking to a named character (in this case the main character's friend) I fully expected there to be a paper doll of that one talking as well. Though it became pretty apparent early on that every paper doll that appears in the game is a potential love interest.

A bit more of those graphical flairs would add to an otherwise fairly sterile environment most of the time.

I mentioned the writing early and then got sidetracked. The writing, apart from being cute, is pretty good most of the time. Although the characters are fairly weird and some of them don't have much depth to them (though who knows, maybe I just didn't trigger the right side-mission) that's just what I expect when it comes to anime.

Yeah the anime. Well I always say I'm a hater of anime. It's probably not true. This game is very japanophilic, being set in Japan and even commenting on it once (something about English class being sucky). But overall it didn't bug me even though it doesn't circumvent any tropes. This is basically exactly what I expect anime to be like. Especially dating sim anime. I talked about the innocence and nosebleed moments. This game has that. It is what I expect of school romantic comedy anime. Nothing more, nothing less.

In closing I've probably written far too much already. The game's a solid one. Except for those major oversights I've written about earlier. The story missions seem to trigger arbitarily and with little regard as to what the player pursues. For example I was pursuing one girl but there basically never was any triggers for her so I ended up romancing two completely different girls by mistake. It would be good if the player got more choice (though the phone calls gave me that choice, but I didn't find those until it was essentially too late). Even in the boardgame with the random die roll it would be nice to be able to affect it more. Maybe just by increasing the item cap from four to a couple more. Maybe even introducing some kind of gamey aspect where you can buy those die rolls or affect them by spending somethingn else. I assume there's some kind of player interaction in them since you pick when to stop them, but no human alive can really do that so it's essentially random.

Hmm my closing thoughts became part of the review and not summarizing so I should have another go. The game's solid, and very predictable. I only have a passing aquintance with the genre and it basically hit every single trope I imagined there could be. It's very innocent in the way the story is told. And there are essentially no real conflicts. (At least I never got into any proper conflicts, there's a hint of one early on and there's a character who seems to be perfect for it but it never amounts to anything)

This is basically popcorn entertainment where you don't have to think too much.