Image: Konami True love lasts forever – and so do some games. Tokimeki Memorial: Forever with You, the legendary dating sim from 1995, is hooking up with Switch next month to celebrate 30 years on the scene. Immaculately presented but bewilderingly complex, TokiMemo is a foundational piece of video game history that defined a whole genre, along with the increasingly universal mechanics of video game love. But for most players outside Japan, it fires nostalgia for someone else’s youth – and with no English release, it remains tantalisingly out of reach. Its arrival is part of a bigger story. Switch has been Nintendo’s ultimate comeback kid, climbing from the Wii U stumble to contender for best-ever-selling console in eight short years. Its life has also coincided with a swell of gamers hitting mid-life nostalgia and an industry finding that bets on “new” have longer and longer odds. The result? More comebacks. We’ve seen re-release after remaster after remake: Metroid Prime, Live A Live, Dragon Quest, Broken Sword, Link’s Awakening, Atari 50, Famicom Detective Club…. The list goes on, from niche to mega-mainstream. And now, Tokimeki Memorial: Forever with You – Emotional is here to beam people back to CD-ROM '90s Japan. Images: Sammy Barker / Nintendo Life Tokimeki Memorial has long been a prize of legend, at the same time unmissable and unobtainable. Revered for its groundbreaking social mechanics, emotional storytelling, intricate simulation, and (let’s face it) fascination with high school romance, it’s a seminal dating sim that remains tucked away behind a Japanese language barrier. eBay had it at the ready and, what’s more, I had learnt a bit of Japanese. Finally, it would be mine. Featuring writing by no less than Koji Igarashi (whose next project was Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – the trailblazing entry in the series he went on to produce), it’s probably as widely experienced by word of mouth and hidden-gem lists as it is firsthand. And now, with a 30th-anniversary, Japan-only Switch port, the myth gets a new lease of life for another hundred million or so to wish they could play it. Even if you haven’t played Tokimemo, you’ve likely felt its notoriously far-reaching influence. If you’ve ever arranged a study date in Persona, fretted over gift-giving in Fire Emblem, or sweated a romance option in Cyberpunk 2077, a short queue of commentators will tell you that Tokimeki Memorial is to thank for it. And that’s why its reappearance on Switch is such a milestone: a wise old mentor is back. But does it have any more to say? Down Memorial Lane Images: Konami Like many of the luckier people during the COVID-19 lockdown, I found myself scouring eBay for retro games. Buying relics was an attempt to get my hands on something out of reach – the futile chase of nostalgia was a parallel to everyone and everything being physically inaccessible, no matter how nearby they seemed. Perhaps games in particular appealed because everything felt newly gamified by technology, from work to social interactions. Whatever was behind it all, for me, the bug that bit was the original PlayStation. Specifically, I discovered that about half of the PlayStation’s 4,000-strong games catalogue was released exclusively in Japan. I wanted to know what was out there. One Japan-only title was Tokimeki Memorial: Forever with You, the 1995 PlayStation version of the previous year’s Tokimeki Memorial on PC Engine. I think I half-remembered it from magazines as a kid, import reviews, or forum threads. That faint recollection of it sent my heart racing with wistful frustration, as Konami would surely never bring it to English-language audiences. But now, eBay had it at the ready and, what’s more, I had learnt a bit of Japanese. Finally, it would be mine. However, when I navigated Tokimeki Memorial’s menus and carefully picked through its layers of dialogue, moving my lips as I read, I quickly discovered that while I was over the language barrier, the gameplay itself was a labyrinth of hidden rules and secret look-up tables that left me feeling impressed, overwhelmed, and really quite stupid. With bungling date etiquette, forgetting homework, and panicking through stingily one-and-done sports day events, I couldn’t really object when the humiliating 'loser' ending rolled after my first three-year stint at Kirameki High. Images: Konami Even once I had got the hang of things and a girl confessed her love for me beneath the school’s tree of legend, where true love is destined to last forever, things were far from over. Beaming through the fog of digital teenagerhood is Shiori Fujisaki, the elusive, red-haired cover-girl-slash-final-boss. She’s inhumanly perfect, the Terminator of high school crushes Shiori demands perfection. Achieving the intricate mathematical balance of smarts, fitness, and popularity, wisely selecting your character’s blood type, avoiding rumour bombs from the other girls, and winning the three-legged race — all in one attempt — is like threading a needle on a bucking bronco. Shiori smiles and blushes, then just stares matter-of-factly at you with these astronomical expectations, like a fairground automaton waiting for you to insert a coin. She’s inhumanly perfect, the Terminator of high school crushes – teasingly close to being won over, only for rejection’s charred endoskeleton to crawl out of the tanker explosion of your teenage affections. As chance would have it, just as my fascination with the game took off, gaming celebrity Tim Rogers released a six-hour Action Button video review of Tokimeki Memorial, including two complete, translated playthroughs. His bottom line: “Tokimeki Memorial objectifies love.” He declared it a true cyberpunk artefact and deftly squelched any question of the propriety of high school dating simulation through comparison with Mortal Kombat fatalities. Quickly racking up a million views, hype for the OG dating sim hit a new peak. Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube809k This buzz no doubt spurred on the completion of a fan translation of the (non-voice-acted) Super Famicom version. Brilliant as this was, Rogers dismissed it in an email to Kotaku as “like watching a movie for the first time with the TV muted and two lines of subtitles displaying both the movie’s dialogue and the director’s commentary […] while waiting for your laundry to finish.” Playing without voice acting probably does deaden the heart-thumping impact of a confession of love, or the humiliation of a post-date brush-off condescendingly delivered. But you can’t help but feel that even a full localisation with English voices would be somehow inadequate for this ultimate connoisseur, locking the game permanently into “you had to be there” territory. You had to be there and you weren’t: this is a must-play game that you can’t play. Modern Love So what now, with the Switch hosting this revival? It’s on the Japanese eShop and importable, but will that actually bring it any closer to the average player? Well, one of Nintendo’s specialisms is to give you something to hold in your hands — from hanafuda cards to toys like Mario Kart Live and Labo — not just platform-agnostic software distributed digitally. Its dominance in handheld gaming is a big part of that, and placing TokiMemo in your hands on a nice big screen is not to be underestimated. Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube809k If there is one hint of international accessibility, it’s that you will be able to choose updated text, giving you higher-resolution kanji over the occasionally inscrutable clumps of pixels in earlier versions. Thankfully, this can be applied separately from the updated artwork, which at first glance makes the game look like one of its many modern descendants. The girls will say your name now, too, so that’s one word you can definitely understand. Tokimeki Memorial: Forever With You – Emotional is more than a dating sim – it’s a time capsule from an era where gamified social interactions were new ground. Now, games are full of socialising, and socialising is equally full of games, from lockdown hang-outs in New Horizons to social media numbers going up, to just swiping right. Forever With You’s debut on Switch feels like a love letter still undeliverable after 30 years, an emblem of the persistent allure of unreachable classics, and yet now, maybe, a blip on the radar of an enormous global player base. Some things will always be just out of reach, but nostalgia is the true love that lasts forever. If you’ve ever felt the pull of retro collecting or the urge to relive youth — even someone else’s — this release is a call to reminisce, rediscover things, and perhaps even to try decoding one of gaming’s most mythologised puzzles for yourself. Image: Konami Time Extension"We could use people with hacking and debugging experience" Releasing in Japan on Valentine's Day Related Games See Also Share:0 2 Roland runs the micro-epic-concept-photoblog Arcade Tokyo while writing and photographing for web and print. He shot the cover photography and wrote essays for Supercade Volume 2 (2023) and regularly contributes to Nintendo Life, Time Extension, and Push Square. Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment... Related Articles Switch 2's Backwards Compatibility List Provides Updates On Two Titles Here's what you can expect