As those of you who know me more personally than the random person who stumbled upon this blog, one of my latest gaming obsessions is the DS dating sim, Love Plus.

I’ll note now that Love Plus is not an eroge.  It is, however, meant for ages 15 and up.  Nothing in this post will be NSFW, but it may be embarrassing if you’re caught reading it.  Then again, I don’t think there are many aspects of anime that wouldn’t be embarrassing if you’re caught watching/reading/etc. at work… anyway, on with the review.
First, let’s put Love Plus in a reasonable subcategory.  Being a dating sim, you know to expect dating… but what beyond that?  For me, it harkens back to True Love… the second eroge I ever played (the first being Season of the Sakura).  Yep, classics!
The reason why I compare it to True Love is because the main objective of the first half of the game is to raise your stats (athletics, knowledge, sense, and charm).  From what I remember reading, Anegasaki Nene is supposed to like charm, Takane Manaka likes athleticism, and Kobayakawa Rinko likes sense.  All of them are supposed to like knowledge.  In actual practice… the stat building is used for checks (more on that later) and is just a lot of fun (for me, anyway).  Anyway, let’s mention the heroines before moving any further:

(I was going to wrap the text around and make this look all cool and stuff, but it was turning out to take too much effort, so just enjoy the image all by itself.)

Character: Takane Manaka
Blood Type: A
Birthday: October 5th
Grade: 11th
Description: Takane Manaka is not your average student… she’s a super student!  Top grades, ace of the tennis club, beautiful, popular, and her parents are doctors… she essentially the hime (princess) of the game.  On the other hand, she’s very quiet and doesn’t know how to loosen up and have fun.  In the end, she’s kind of avoided because no one feels they can get close to her image of perfection.  This is your entry point!  Manaka is the first character I went for, by the way. =P

Character: Anegasaki Nene
Blood Type: O
Birthday: April 20th
Grade: 12th
Description: Anegasaki Nene is your senior, both at school and at your part time job.  She’s obviously the onee-san archetype.  Very mature, very understanding, and well liked because of these features.  Personally, I found her a little annoying… didn’t really care for her.  Sorry, Nene fans!  Don’t kill me for not liking your wife!

Character: Kobayakawa Rinko
Blood Type: B
Birthday: August 17th
Grade: 10th
Description: Kobayakawa Rinko is your underclassman, who works with you as a library committee member.  She doesn’t want you working with her.  She doesn’t like you.  Tsun tsun.  But then, after hard work, she does like you!  Dere dere.  Quite apparently, the tsundere character.  Her backstory is that her father re-marries, and she gains a mother and brother… both of whom she does not like.  It’s not that they mistreat her, but she feels that she gets in their way.  Well, I’m only partially through her story, but that’s what I’ve got of it so far.  Rinko is an interesting character to me, and I had a hard time choosing between her and Manaka in my first playthrough.  Manaka confessed to me first, though, so…

Friendship phase

Okay, now that all of the characters are introduced, let’s get back to the stat system.  First off, you start with 0 in every stat.  You’re so pathetically weak, feeble-minded, tone-deaf/artistically-challenged, and ugly that your existence should not even be mentioned.  Quite interestingly, even you, you pathetic worm, can evolve into something worthy of dating one of these heroines!  Bringing me to a quibble of mine.  Why do you start out with 0 points?  The game starts with several questions into your personality; your blood type, how you refer to yourself (the more passive boku, or the more aggressive ore), and what kind of room you prefer.  Why not start you off with some stats based off of these decisions?  No matter how pathetic a person is, they usually have some kind of good trait…

Anyway, to evolve from your pathetic base form of Caterpie, you must plan your actions for the day.  Four actions per day, morning day, afternoon, and night.  You can’t skip school, either!  So you’re limited to school activities for most of the week.  Your activities include (but since I’m doing this by memory, may not be limited to): school – science, literature, gym, art, music, library committee, tennis club; free time – part-time job, studying, workout, dressing-up, hobby (the image for this is hilarious, but not very descriptive.  What is the main character’s hobby!?), or going out.  In the first half of the game, “going out” just means you wander around town, and you may bump into a heroine.  In the second half of the game, you scout out date spots to raise their levels (more on that later).

Each activity you perform gains you a little (let’s say 2) in one stat, but drops you a little less (let’s say 1) in another.  Performing especially well at that task gets you a little more (4), while still only losing the original amount, or maybe a little more (2).  And then there are checkpoints… occasionally, you’ll have something like a pop quiz, or an athletic contest, or will be challenged at your part-time job, etc.  If you have enough of the stat being checked, you will gain major points (say, 8) to whatever stat the activity would have normally netted you.  It also seems you lose more of the other stat, though (maybe 4?).  All of this is measured visually by me, and since my vision sucks, we can say it’s not necessarily very accurate.

As I mentioned before, each of the characters has their own preference for a stat… or, supposedly.  In reality, all this means is that their personal checks (tennis club for Manaka, library committee for Rinko, part-time job for Nene) require higher levels of those stats to pass.  You do not need to pass these to impress the girls enough to win them over!  The stats do not otherwise matter for the first half of the game!  And they kind of don’t matter in the second half, either!  So… everything’s made up, and the stats don’t matter!

How do you impress your potential girlfriend(s), then?  The way you impress anyone, really… hang onto them like peanut butter on the roof of your mouth.  Eventually, they’ll come to see that they can’t live without you, and will eventually ask you out.

Okay, okay… in reality, that alone won’t help you.  You have to say the right things to them (generally).  Don’t constantly karate chop them or hit their knees.  Those are fun choices, but probably won’t win you many points with them. =P

Getting a girlfriend requires two parts, from what I’ve observed.  Identification of problem with girl, and solving problem with girl.  Admittedly, this game will not win any awards for storytelling.  I’ll take this part to mention another gripe with the game.  There is basically no story.  The characters are quite 2D.  Amusingly enough, they’re rendered in 3D on the DS!  However, that’s actually a minor gripe, because that’s not what this game is trying to be good at.  It’s trying to be good at being a fun dating sim.  And there, it succeeds.  So, let’s continue.

So, netting a girlfriend requires you to basically explore a character’s problem identification and problem solving routes, and then just generally be nice to them.  Amazingly complex… but!  You have to do this within 100 days!  If you do not have a girlfriend in 100 days, you will never evolve into a Metapod, and you will be forced to wander the earth as a Caterpie for the rest of your life!

Assuming you’re paying a little bit of attention, you shouldn’t have to worry about that.  I was going for two girls (Manaka and Rinko), and still managed to get confessed to by around day 70.

You’ll notice you’re getting somewhere when, instead of having to ask the girl if she wants to walk home with you, she’ll start showing up in the morning (“Oh, I thought if I waited here, we’d meet…”) and asking you if you want to walk to school with her.  You’ll have conversations with her on these walks, and she may ask if what type of girl you like, or what kind of hairstyle you like… not out of random curiosity, but because she wants to please you.  She’ll also start messaging you on your phone.  Once you’re getting along well enough and she finally confesses, you move onto the…

Love phase

So, you’ve suckered some poor girl into dating you, eh?  You’re not quite a Butterfree yet!  The second part is where the main action starts!

The first part ends the confession with some credits.  Technically, the game has “ended”.  You can still continue your game, however.  When you select the game again, it will ask if you want to continue in real-time mode or skip mode.  Skip mode is basically what you’ve been doing up until this point; set four events to execute during the day, build stats, message your girlfriend.  Real-time mode is exactly like it sounds; you set four events, but they only execute once those times have passed in the real world.  More importantly, in real-time mode, you can actually do more detailed events, particularly those in school, which are unavailable in skip mode.  I’ve read that real-time mode is preferred for dates, while skip mode is preferred for stat-building (more on this necessity later), but I haven’t noticed any significant difference between the two in that aspect.

What’s the main attraction of the second phase?  Dating!  After all, you spent all of that effort to get a girlfriend.  Might as well do something with her.

How do you date?  Simple, my friend!  Just give her a call!  Different from messaging her, calling her is reserved for meeting up (real-time only) or setting up a date.  Choose a place to meet up at, choose a time, and you’re done!  Note, of course, that your girlfriend may not want to go see the live action tokusatsu show with you, so you may have to choose a different location until you find one she will agree with.  I do not believe she ever objects to the time.

What are your objectives on a date?  Well… your girlfriend will want some skinship with you.  Touch her when few people are watching (there’s a meter in the upper left) to activate this mode, and then touch her in various spots (hair, forehead, cheeks, ears, hands, etc.).  Note that some of the girls do not like being touched in certain spots (Manaka won’t let me play with her ears ;_; )… you’ll learn what spots your girlfriend likes as you get to know her more.  This part actually starts in the friendship phase, but what happens next is exclusive to the love phase.

Assuming you did a successful skinship phase with her (or assuming she really, really likes you), you’ll move onto a more intimate skinship mode… instead of being at a normal talking distance from each other, you’ll be only a few inches away from her.  In this mode, you caress her hair, forehead, cheeks, shoulders, etc… but you play for points!  Basically, she will either enjoy wherever you stroke her, and you gain some hearts to fill a giant heart meter… or she will dislike it, and you lose an enormous amount of the heart meter.  Failure, my friend, is not an option.

Depending on how many times you fill up the heart meter, your girlfriend will allow you to kiss her that many times.  If you don’t fill it up even once (or you dip below the first heart meter since you screwed up), you get no kisses and your girlfriend dislikes you a lot.  Assuming you’re quite the technician, she will assume a pose, and you will have to guess where she wants to be kissed.  You can screw up here, too.  For example, if she wants to be kissed on the forehead and you kiss her on the cheek, you may get the blue hearts and she’ll dislike you for it.  What’s worse is that your overall score for this seems to be based on the average of your success/failures.  If you only get one kiss, but do it right (100%), you’re better off than getting two kisses and getting only one right (50%).  Well, all I can tell you here is to learn your girlfriend’s habits and aim to be a better technician!

And this is all done when you first meet your girlfriend on a date!  What’s that?  It’s almost as though you’ve done the most exciting things first?  Well, you’re absolutely right!  The rest of the date goes like this, assuming you succeed every time…

Meet up ->
talk -> skinship 1 -> skinship 2 -> kisses ->
talk -> move halfway to destination while talking -> skinship 1 -> skinship 2 -> kisses ->
talk -> reach destination -> talk -> skinship 1 -> skinship 2 -> kisses ->
talk -> talk while doing the activity regarding the destination -> skinship 1 -> skinship 2 -> kisses ->
talk -> agree to go home (unless you did really well and have high enough levels of athletics and intelligence, in which case, she’ll want to go somewhere else… start pretty much from the beginning again) -> skinship 1 -> skinship 2 -> kisses ->
talk -> move halfway home -> skinship 1 -> skinship 2 -> kisses ->
talk -> reach home and talk -> (assuming you have high enough levels of athletics and charm) skinship 1 -> skinship 2 -> kisses -> end

Some things may be exaggerated, but that’s pretty much the gist of a date, assuming you have high enough stats.  This is the real reason why stats are important!  But fear not, while you typically may have only gotten 2 to 4 points per activity in the friendship mode, your character tries extra hard and gets about 8 normally (16 when doing especially well, 32 on checkpoints… again, determined visually by me).  Building stats in love mode is thus extremely easy and not a worry.

That is the basic gist of love mode, the raison d’être.  There are a couple of other things to note, however.  As I mentioned before, ‘going out’ in love mode is used to scout possible dating locations and level them up.  As you do level them up, the likelihood of someone seeing you (when you do the first skinship phase) decreases.  In fact, you cannot even ask a girl out to a location that is below level 1 (though if she asks you out, she can select one at level 0).  You might also want to note that a location’s level will gradually decrease if you don’t visit it every now and then (but will never dip below level 1).

You will have dreams about your girlfriend.  Please don’t wet the bed…
The first dream is given to you as you first start the game in love mode.  The rest are only activated once you accomplish very specific actions.  You will know what these actions are if you reference a walkthrough… or, if you pay attention to the dream guide who gives you various tips on your cellphone throughout love mode.  Thanks to him, I know I can get a beach dream if I go out on a date to the beach with Manaka three times during the summer.

There are also other various things to collect.  Ringtones, which are gained by going on a date(s) to three locations mentioned online (on your computer in the game, not actual online).  These are refreshed monthly.  You can also gain 1/3 pieces of CGs by accomplishing a  given random task (my current one is to pass a checkpoint while doing library committee activities).  These refresh every week.  Given their refresh time and how long it will take to complete them, these provide staying power for the game.

There are also items you can collect.  I’d love to detail these, but I have not yet obtained a single one, despite my long hours of playing the game.  From what I’ve read online, the only known items can be obtained only on your girlfriend’s birthday, if you go on a date and visit the shops within the mall.

Last but not least, there is Love Plus mode.   In this mode, you can “converse” with your girlfriend.  She’ll give you the time or set an alarm for you, too.  The part I find the most fun is the rock-paper-scissors game… if she loses, she’ll even cosplay for you!  The conversation mode is actually pretty fun, too, as long as you let her lead the conversation and just answer her questions.  I personally found asking questions to be rather hard, since it had a hard time understanding me… my lack of a native Japanese accent might have been killing it.

The actual, you know… review part

This review naturally started with a long introduction, given the fact that my blag is in English and you need to know relatively fluent Japanese to get anything out of the game.  Now that I’ve covered pretty much every major facet of the game… we can get onto the actual intention of this post.  My opinions!

The good

Fortunately, there’s a lot to like about Love Plus.  Dare I say, there’s even a lot to love!

• Graphics:  For the DS, this game is quite pretty.  My initial reaction was shock… dating sim characters do not usually get 3D treatment.  The 2D scenes are nice; not the best art I’ve ever seen (my standards are high since I’ve expanded my knowledge for the past few years), but not bad, either.
• Sound:
  • Music:  Distinctive, appropriate, and pleasant.  It’s no Tenmon or Nobuo Uematsu, but it’s good.  I personally already have the (3 disk) soundtrack ripped, tagged, and added to my playlist.
  • Voices:  Every (non-main character) line in the game is voiced.  In case you did not quite understand what I said… every line is voiced, on a DS game.  This is a game with a lot of conversation, too.  There are probably hours of voicing in this game.  This helps the immersion quite a bit.
• Gameplay:  I personally find this game to be really fun.  I don’t have much to back this up on… essentially, compared to other games, there’s not much to do here.  Most of it is good, though.
  • Building stats will be your first and primary task for most of the game.  And… I find this to be fun!  Maybe it’s just me, but I enjoy creating characters and building stats quite a bit.  Way back when I was first playing Icewind Dale, I literally spent days creating my first party… only to get bored of the game rather quickly, and go back to creating characters (for reference, I did eventually beat the game, but only much, much later… it was fun, just not as fun as creating characters/rolling dice for stats).
  • Interacting with the girls actually feels like interacting with someone (relatively speaking, of course).  Obviously, the game cannot emulate the spontaneity of real life; but it works well with what it does do.  Every line being voiced is a major factor in this… from the cute “nee nee!  fu fu” invitation to the more serious, “anata ni deaete yokatta”, everything is very well voiced.
  • Customizable heroines are a plus, particularly how it is implemented in this game.  Rather than going into some detached editor and removing the “human” element from the ordeal, you have to basically influence your girlfriend into wearing certain things.  You can’t choose exactly which hairstyle, exactly which hair color, or exactly which clothes she should wear.  And she will change them on a whim, anyway.  Just like real life!

• • Your character is, literally, you.  You input your name, your birthday, and your blood-type.  You choose how you refer to yourself.  You choose what kind of room you like.  All within the first five minutes of the game.  Most importantly, most of this has an actual impact on the game; the heroines will call you by your name (yes, your name is voiced!)… impressive and immersive.
  • Not having everything in the game handed to you on a silver plate is, in some ways, a good thing.  It pulls at your (or, at least my) incessant desire to collect/see everything in a game.  Or even just most of it.
  • Prevents power-playing.  That is to say, you cannot simply reset and hope to get a better event/make the better choice/etc. so easily.  If you do reset without saving (and exiting) first, when you enter the game again, your girlfriend (I’m not sure whom if you do not have a girlfriend yet, but presumably all of the heroines) will lose affection for you.  And from the second incident onwards, you’re increasingly punished for doing so… the second incident results in you having to say “gomen nasai” to your girlfriend/the girl with the most affection for you.  Hazukashii!

• • Janken (rock-paper-scissors) mode is fun.  She cosplays for you if you win.  Enough said. =P
  • The game never ends.  It also benefits from that timeless sort of feel… like Tetris or Pacman, one can easily pick up their DS and continue a save file and be hooked on it for hours on end.

The questionable

Random things that may or may not be good or bad for you.

• While listening to the character speak and making numbered choices is good, the game gets a little flaky when it demands voice input.  Used primarily in Love Plus mode, where you try to keep up a conversation with your girlfriend by either answering or asking questions.  Well, since there’s no manual of what to ask and I have no imagination, I have a hard time doing this.  Nothing I ask ever works, anyway; either due to my non-native accent or the crappy mic on the DS, the game almost never understands what I say.  I’m guessing (or hoping) it works better for the native Japanese.
• This game is very heavily reliant on the ability to read and understand Japanese.  Not a problem for me, but it may be (in fact, probably is) a problem for you readers (all two of you).

The bad

Unfortunately, this game is not perfect.  Few games really are.

• DS:  The very platform that allows for a lot of the game’s innovativeness is part of its biggest flaws.  There are so many things that can be (and should have been) better but were not due to DS limitations.
  • The graphics could have been much improved on a better system.  Not a big gripe (the 3D is great, but not as polished as I’d like.  It’s what you’d expect in a DS game, really), but I’m putting it out there.
  • The voice clip quality.  I noticed stuttering in several of the voice clips… I imagine this was due to compressing the game to fit on the DS.
  • The voice clip quantity.  I know I praised this in the good section, but… while there is a plethora of lines voiced, you will still run into the same five or six clips played three times a (game) day.  This is because your girlfriend will, once you raise her feelings towards you, comment on every activity you do at school.  This becomes greatly annoying after you’ve heard every line she can possibly say for the fiftieth time.
  • The name calling.  While it is impressive that the heroines will refer to you by name and that your name is voiced… your name is only voiced if you happen to be lucky enough.  See, the developers quite probably did not have enough room to fit every voice into the game… even if this weren’t a DS game.  Needless to say, the options you have seem to be fairly limited.  It took me between thirty and sixty minutes to choose a name that was actually voiced.  Fortunately, the game warns you whether or not the name you choose works before you start playing.
• Story:  Being a dating sim, one can either expect a decent story or a gimmick.  Fortunately and unfortunately, this game chose to go the gimmick route.  The gameplay is fun in itself, but do not expect to get anything decent from the story.  Very uninteresting stuff.
• Characters:  Only three heroines, and all with rather flat personalities.  This could go under DS faults due to shortage of characters, but the flat personalities cannot be blamed on the DS.  It’s kind of amusing how the personalities are so 2D while the character models are 3D…

Overall

8/10.  Hard to come up with a solid number, but I feel it’s definitely worth more than a 7, but less than a 9, so… here you go.

This game is one that is greater than the sum of its parts.  It has numerous flaws, but the sheer fun you have with the game more than makes up for it.  Now, this game isn’t for everyone; it’s rated for ages 15 and up, after all.  But neither is it only for weirdos you might see in the news or other plain weirdos.  I think most people could get quite a lot of enjoyment out of the game… assuming they know enough Japanese.  A translation project (or multiple) is in the works, so feel free to update yourself on that if you wish.  As for me, I need to go and woo Rinko a little more…