Despite dating sims and visual novels being distinct terms, it’s hard to deny the influence the former has had on the latter. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean it’s easy to trace the history of dating sims. For all the writing I’ve been able to find on the structure of dating sims and their place in a Japanese cultural/economic context, finding a straightforward history of the genre has proven more difficult. Part of this may come down to a reluctance to research a genre with strong pornographic roots. However, it may also have something to do with dating sims lacking a central history. A variety of different games, like strategy games and early visual novels, all contributed to the dating sim in some important way. Yet there’s one game that fans agree put dating sims on the map: Konami’s Tokimeki Memorial. True, it wasn’t the first game of its kind. No Ri Ko foreshadowed much of its design about five and a half years before Tokimeki’s release, and it’s possible that Tokimeki may have modeled itself after No Ri Ko.

Whatever the case may be, Tokimeki Memorial not only popularized the genre, but it also became the standard that future dating sims would look toward. Some of its influences include:

A focus on foregrounding ordinary, relatable settings and events over fantastic scenarios.

The idea of managing a collection of romantic relationships through daily activity.

Gameplay that consists of explicit choices, such as where to go or what to say from a set of given options.

Those choices determining which girl your character becomes linked with romantically, and thus which narrative thread the player follows.

The most important influence was how that gameplay affected Tokimeki’s visuals, and how those visuals would influence the art in later visual novels. Because the game lets the player take any girl to (theoretically) any location in the game, the old strategy of composing shots for specific scenes just wasn’t feasible. While Tokimeki does utilize this strategy from time to time (like here), it’s far from a common occurrence. And for good reason: designing an entire game around them would have proved cumbersome and would have likely exhausted the available memory limitations. (Keep in mind that Metal Slader Glory pushed the Famicom to its limits with this kind of design.) Narrative workarounds were outright impossible. All the game’s characters attend the same high school, and some of them even share classes with the protagonist.

So unable to create distinct images for every situation the player could encounter, Konami instead decided to compile generic assets that could be swapped out depending on the situation. Backgrounds represent generic locations like “school library” or “aquarium”, rather than any specific parts of those locations. Likewise, the characters do not inhabit these spaces, but instead stand against a backdrop. All they can do is change their expression and, on a few occasions, their poses. Although this style couldn’t present an organic world, it suited the game’s needs nonetheless. Not only could any character theoretically inhabit any space in the game, but they could also express themselves in ways they couldn’t before. Where previous visual novels could only muster a few different expressions per shot, Tokimeki’s sprites allowed Konami to create as many as six expressions per character (see: Megumi, Shiori, Yuko, Nozomi).

It is this model — portraits sitting on top of backgrounds — that visual novels have become known for. Many writers have compared this to watching anime or reading manga. Those writers aren’t wrong, but I think visual novels are better understood as stage productions. As Omar Elaasar details in “Theatre, Artifice, and the Flawed Emulation of Cinema”, theatrical games don’t try to represent their events as absolute reality, like many AAA games do. Instead, they go in the other direction. They abstract; they give the player the essence or idea of something. They’re a collaborative effort between game and player, where the former supplies a performance that the latter is expected to complete with their active imagination. For Elaasar, games like Outrun 2 and Final Fantasy IX and Black Knight Sword qualify as theatrical.

And if we return to the Galbraith quote from the beginning, we see that visual novels would also qualify. Very rarely do we see anything directly represented in these games. Actions are implied through basic gestures (if at all), and environments only represent the idea of the setting, not the setting itself. The trade-off from this arrangement is that while visual novels can no long frame a scene to create a specific effect, they encourage the player to approach the narrative in a way early visual novels didn’t. It’s because things are only suggested that the player has the space they need to put the story together as they see fit. Far from watching a narrative passively unfold before them, the player becomes an active participant in it, filling in the gaps that either the story or the visuals leave blank.