Let's talk about a competitive woo-'em-up
This post originally ran on Cohost on 2023/2/13 and is being reuploaded here for future posterity. The content has been lightly edited for enhanced readability.
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One of the things that gets lost in western players' and outlets' tendency to conflate Japanese romance games with visual novels is the fact that there was actually a huge amount of design diversity in terms of structure and mechanics, especially in their formative years in the 90s. While plenty of games openly attempted to clone Tokimeki Memorial and its epoch-defining character raising gameplay (and, quite frankly, often failed), Japanese romance games generally found more success by branching out and pursuing other subject matter and design ethoses entirely. As a result, as the genre matured, it could entail just about anything, including travel simulations by way of Sentimental Graffiti, conversation-driven games in the True Love Story series and its various spiritual successors, quiz games from the likes of Capcom and Namco, and even open-ended, quasi-sandbox affairs like HuneX's charmingly peculiar Fire Woman Matoigumi. One tangent that's particularly easy to miss abroad despite its relative ubiquity was competitive multiplayer games, which is the bucket that today's game, (deep breath) Taisen Renai Simulation: Trifels Mahou Gakuen, falls into. We'll call it Trifels for short.
Trifels is something of a niche within a niche in that it's a spinoff of Fujitsu's first entry in the Eberouge series. The original Eberouge is a game I've lightly covered elsewhere, but is notable within dating sim history for two reasons. First, it's the rare post-Tokimeki Memorial character raising dating sim to actually display a fluent understanding of that game's mechanics and iterate upon them in a meaningful way. It's not perfect and runs in the original release especially can get long in the tooth, but what saves it is both its character writing and second defining trait: it's the rare dating sim with substantial lore. To briefly summarize, it takes place in a magic academy, Trifels, but one where the world's own understanding of magic is still a work in progress. Notably, creation magic is essentially a lost art and while it's represented as a stat that you can attempt to raise, doing so is a much slower process than virtually every other ability because you're having to figure it out from scratch like everyone else in the world. There's a lot more meat to chew on that I'm skipping over for this post, but there's enough material that informs both the overarching plot and your interactions with individual characters that uncovering the lore is more or less as paramount as your academic and romantic pursuits. All of which is to say, Eberouge is a game I really like and would recommend to Tokimeki Memorial fans wanting a recognizable, yet tonally and stylistically different take on the most prototypical variety of dating sims around.
I'll just say upfront that while Trifels the game is much lighter on overt lore drops given its setting in the original game's elementary school years, it all but assumes you're familiar with that first game and its cast, as it does virtually nothing to get newcomers up to speed. I imagine this was done to keep things briskly paced as a competitive and (optionally) multiplayer game, but it means your enjoyment hinges heavily on having some level of investment in the cast. In many ways, it's like a doujin fan game sold at something like Comiket that's meant to be an excuse for existing fans to indulge in more time with some beloved characters in a different genre context of dubious canonicity. For those sorts of people, it's a charmingly resounding success, myself included.
Basically, Trifels has you and the other player, whether a human opponent or CPU, each playing as one of four boys from the original game competing for the affections of eight girls throughout different seasonal outings in the hopes of receiving the most chocolates from them on St. Valen's day, the series' equivalent to, you guessed it, Valentine's Day. During these excursions, you have a limited budget of action points that you can spend in various ways. For example, when you and another boy split off to do your own activities, you each try to recruit girls to accompany you. During this process, you can spend points trying to invite additional girls to join your group if they don't volunteer at first, including ones who may initially join your rival. Or, when you all come back together for lunches, you can also spend points in an attempt to impress the girls at your table with some sort of amusing story, or to challenge the other boy to a speed eating or drinking minigame in the hopes of making him look bad to his own cohort should you best him. There aren't that many ways you can spend those points, but the options that are at your disposal during a given phase all feel meaningful. As opportunities to otherwise recover your action points are also far and few between, the gambles that you choose to make with your limited budget feel satisfying to pull off.
Of course, much of the game revolves around spending time individually with the girls during outings. When you're in a group with your assembled posse for a given activity, you're always prompted to focus your attention on one girl in particular for the duration. While it's obviously important to sometimes dedicate yourself to a favorite heroine or two in order to view character-specific events and ideally get them to confess to you at the end of the game, if you do want to win the chocolate competition on top of that, then, like Tokimeki Memorial before it, you need to spread that attention out fairly evenly in order to at least have them view you more favorably than the other boy. Regardless of whoever you choose for a given activity, you're always treated to a bespoke scene for just that situation with them. While the writing itself isn't all that deep compared to its source material, it's still sweet and endearing in a very low stakes way given their age while also feeling authentically respectful of that original game. These scenes are also usually accompanied by unique CGs, which help make these interactions that much more rewarding even when you're not spending time with the characters you might really have your eye on.
Yet for as inventive and genuinely enjoyable as the game's actual competitive aspects are, it's arguably the visuals overall that are the star of the show. As a late PS1 release in April 2000 that came out after the PS2's Japanese launch, the sheer craftsmanship on display in the artwork honestly never ceases to impress. Although the original game looks perfectly serviceable for its time, its roots as a PC game tend to give it a more dated aesthetic overall, a genealogy most evident in the prerendered portions of backgrounds. Trifels, however, is consistently sumptuous from start to finish, featuring impressively large character portraits when when talking to individual girls and charming, richly animated chibi sprites when coming together as a group. The environments also boast a similar attention to detail that make them a joy to take in; my favorite touch is how, on the ski resort in the very first stage, characters not only leave distinct footprints in the snow as they walk around, but those footprints slowly fill in over time from the ongoing snowfall, a remarkably rare touch for a game of its vintage. While portable devices including cell phones would continue to remain a bastion of excellent, traditional sprite art for the better part of the coming decade in Japan, on consoles, Trifels admirably displays the sort of clean, elegant mastery of 2D visuals to be found at the end of the PS1 and Saturn generation before giving way to even wider adoption of polygonal art.
All told, on this site especially, Trifels might well be a game that's literally only for me given the prerequisites you have to meet in order to fully enjoy it. It may not quite be my personal favorite competitve Japanese romance game, thanks in part to some fairly brazen rubber banding to maintain tension, as someone who does tick off the necessary boxes, damn if it isn't charming and if I haven't enjoyed getting to see these characters again. It shouldn't be anyone's first introduction to Eberouge's world and characters by any means, but on the off chance you already have a rapport with that original entry, there's plenty to smile at in this unique take on dating sims and romance games overall.
For those of you who aren't that target audience yet but have the Japanese chops, I really do encourage you to make yourself that audience and give that original Eberouge a fair shot. It's a slow burn, but the setting and thought-out lore make it a dating sim well worth playing to this day. Then when you've knocked out a route or two there, come back to this game for a victory lap to see your favorites more beautifully drawn than ever. Chances are, you'll be glad you had the reunion.
