Heartthrob Memorial

Le jeu

Tokimeki Memorial (Tokimeki Memoriaru, lit. 'Heartbeat Memorial') is a dating sim video game developed and published by Konami. The first game in the Tokimeki Memorial series, it was first released for the PC Engine's Super CD-ROM² System on May 27, 1994. It was directed by Yoshiaki Nagata, with Koji Igarashi working on scenario writing. It later received ports to the PlayStation in 1995, Sega Saturn and Super Famicom in 1996, Windows in 1997, Game Boy Color in 1999, mobile phones in 2004, and PlayStation Portable in 2006. Heartbeat Memorial (SNES) The game is considered one of the major titles in the dating sim genre, and eschews the sexual content of other games in the genre. Tokimeki Memorial is a dating sim game in which the player controls a male freshman from Kirameki High School. The game is particularly notable for its 'bomb' feature, where neglected, infrequently-dated girls would eventually become angry and gossip to their friends, severely reducing love meters across the board. In the middle of the game, when the number of known girls is high, these 'bombs' became the primary concern of the player, forcing careful planning and strategies like round-robin dating. Although the feature was still present in the later games, these games considerably reduced its importance and the difficulty in avoiding it. Players pick options as responses when prompted by the characters in the game. The dating simulator genre was preceded by the raising simulation genre best codified by the Princess Maker series by Gainax, which focused on child raising rather than dating. Writer Koji Igarashi says when he was tasked with writing the story for the game, he got assistance from his girlfriend at the time, who would later become his wife. She gave him advice on how to write the story to the game, while he would play Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, the game she was working on at the time. Igarashi requested to not work on a sequel to the game, and instead was allowed to request to work on the next Castlevania game instead. The goal of the developers was to hearken back to high school days. Konami director Akihiko Nagata said 'the person who created the game wanted to have experiences like this back in his high school days'. Tokimeki Memorial sold 1.1 million copies by 1996. The game, a classic of the dating sim genre, was voted as the 23rd Favorite video game of all-time in a 2006 reader poll by Japanese magazine Famitsu. Tokimeki Memorial popularized the use of social statistics-raising mechanics in games for following decades. The game became more well-known in English-speaking communities after a video essay by Tim Rogers gained attention, and a fan translation of the Super Famicom port was published.