![]() The first is that you can only date any particular girl once in a given day, regardless of how many smaller parts of the day you choose to spend with that girl. There are two things that make the day significant as a measure of time. Each day can be further broken up into 4 parts, Morning, Afternoon, Evening, and Night. The basic unit of time in Huniepop is the day. ![]() This is the standard formula for a dating sim, and Huniepop doesn’t do anything different here. You have to successfully date girls (presumably all of them, but of course it’s okay to stop after you finish your favorite one), while managing 3 resources: Munie (money), Hunie (experience points), and time. I’m pretty obsessive about solving utility maximization problems, and I’m a sucker for really bad harem anime, so the enjoyment I got out of the game was worth the indignity of broadcasting that I was playing Huniepop to all my Steam friends for a few days. The game is two parts resource management, one part Bejeweled, and one very small part dialogue reading. The videos you saw on Youtube are almost all of the dialogue in the game. To make it clear from the start, if you were ever interested in Huniepop because of the outrageous writing samples, you will probably be disappointed. Huniepop is pretty much kusoge – the visuals, voice acting, and gameplay feel amateurish-and I bought it because the game looked fun. To make a long story short, I bought the game because the player on youtube was so inefficient that it actually bothered me. At the time, I wasn’t interested in the game itself (I understood it to be a Bejeweled clone, a game I don’t really have much regards for), so I decided to watch some Let’s Plays in order to find out more about these characters without having to trudge through the gameplay. It was, however, funny in the sense that unrefined verbal brawls between two barbarians can be funny (what makes these kinds of things funny is probably a good candidate for my pretentious ramblings about fiction). It’s not exactly quality writing, and the material doesn’t really showcase enough to judge the voice acting. What caught my interest was this video that got passed around a lot more after the Steam release: I’m aware that some of the sudden popularity was created by some manufactured controversies about the game’s content, but that’s not really what got me interested in the game. ![]() It doesn’t surprise me that less than half a year after I explained that dating sims aren’t really a thing anymore, that Huniepop exploded into mainstream recognition, a game created surprisingly by Western developers targeting an English speaking audience. Games that are well known to the English speaking community like Kanon of Megatokyo fame, or Fate/Stay Night are often put in the dating sim category but the term “visual novel” is more appropriate, emphasizing that these games focus on telling a narrative rather than providing an interactive game. To clarify, what distinguishes dating sims from the plethora of other games where the protagonist develops romantic relationships with a virtual harem is the focus on dating as the primary game mechanic. That is not to say that eroge and galge are no longer popular – the market for such games is probably larger now than ever before. ![]() Back then, I answered that dating sims were pretty much a relic of the 90’s, and that high profile games like Tokimeki Memorial aren’t nearly as common now. A few months ago, a developer that was interested in starting a new project asked me for some background on dating sims.
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