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However with a flood of titles with similar elements in the modern market, it’s became a lot less special.Japanese developer Red has established a history of creating excellent games with a quirky sense of humor. Even until relatively recently, there wasn’t too much like it in the west. At the time and place of its localization, it was quite the novelty. While I don’t think there’s an active love for Thousand Arms these days, I do believe there’s a nostalgic view of it that I can’t really fault.
It makes dating a strangely mechanical element, with no real bearing on the plot. Even so, it’s not a particularly romantic conclusion. The real kicker is that it seems like no matter who you build a relationships with, one specific character is more or less the main partner. Coming in cold, nearly every question would stump me. Once you’ve succeeded or failed, you’ll need to memorize the answer for next time. Each responds differently to the answers, so it is more or less a blind shot at picking what they’d prefer. The dates amount to a pool of questions shared between all the characters. What I found was a surprisingly shallow experience. If you’re looking at Thousand Arms, there are plenty of other places to get your fictional romances these days. In turn, non-japanese developers started exploring the space more. While I’m not a Western RPG expert to say for sure, it seemed like BioWare’s dating systems in Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 sparked a taste for party member romances in a mainstream audience. Now many releases are built ground up to fit on the platform.Īt the same time, more games with relationship elements started coming to America. With a growing market, more erotic titles were willing to make compromises to release on Steam. From popular Japanese classics to modern western indie titles, it’s ridiculous how much more of this stuff is available. You could spend a lot of money on that platform alone, without even pursuing some more specialized distributors. I didn’t finish it at the time, but it was a window into a genre I hadn’t seen much of. While I hadn’t gotten over the embarrassment of liking a title of that nature, I did find Thousand Arms novel. Since these games had relatively little traction even by then, it was surprisingly easy to still stumble across Thousand Arms.
Inevitably I started exploring other releases in the same vein. It’s no dating sim, yet it felt like the focus on romance opened my eyes to a new world.
However, as a joke, I ended up playing the demo of the 4chan community developed visual novel, Katawa Shoujo. When I did finally stumble across the genre, I was pretty narrow-minded and viewed it as embarrassing. Personally, I didn’t take much notice of dating in games until about 2009. Nevertheless, they further exposed quite a few people to the same elements. They never seemed to be as blatant about it as Thousand Arms was.
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For nearly a decade, there weren’t many examples you could find outside of series like Persona as well as some western RPGs. The release wasn’t the start of some wave in America. There were a lot of eyes on this space in 1999, so it got more attention than it previously would have. It released when JRPGs were rocketing in popularity in this hemisphere. However with erotic content included, they weren’t exactly accessible by a broad audience.Įven with this exposure, Thousand Arms was likely one of the earliest and most accessible titles in the west that focused on these elements. In the late 90s they localized titles like Season of Sakura and Runaway City.
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More directly embedded in the genre, though less visible, was JAST USA’s PC publishing output. Even the popular Final Fantasy VII featured some light elements, yet they were largely hidden from the player.
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Harvest Moon offered companions for your farming simulator life. While rare, some bits of the genre made it to America in the late 90s. They were popular genres that were already intermingling with RPGs by the mid 90s with titles like Sakura Wars as well as Blue Breaker. It’s easy to find examples as far back as the 80s with games like Nakayama Miho no Tokimeki High School. In 1999, dating sims and visual novels were nothing new. Revisiting it today, it feels surprisingly shallow. When I played it in 2009, it still seemed unique. The more intimate you become with the other female cast members, the more spells and abilities you have access to. It’s a fairly average RPG with dating sim elements baked into it. I’m always surprised by how many people played and enjoyed Thousand Arms back when it released in 1999.