Dating sims are a genre of games that are very niche in the West. However, they have mass appeal in Japan and China. While multiple Western games give players the ability to date characters, dating characters is not the end goal.

Despite this, dating sims have carved out their space amongst video game fans. In the past decade, these games have evolved from strictly visual novels to incorporating cell phones and more elements found in other genres. 

Stories

The center of most dating sims are stories. A hilarious result of this is that dating sims can have some of the most bizarre premises. This makes them questionable to the general audience, but it’s this combination that makes them fun to fans of the genre.

Hatoful Boyfriend places the player, the only human in the game’s setting, in a position to date birds. While the birds have human portraits (to make the player feel less conflicted about dating a bird), they’re still birds. Despite this, the player must complete a year at the bird school while investigating shenanigans on campus. 

However, games like Dream Daddy, Doki Doki Literature Club, and Code: Realize are more traditional in format but provide great stories—these range from slice-of-life to historical fantasy. Good endings tend to be traditional. This usually involves a wedding or something similar to a happily ever after. Bad endings are where the games become creative. Some of these conclusions include scenarios where the main characters are beheaded by their love interest.

Varied PlayStyles

The typical dating sim is a visual novel. However, many games in the genre have taken this and expanded on it. Multiple immersive elements have been added to blur the lines between reality and fiction. This has also been used to test out new gameplay styles. 

The dating sim genre has had some of the most innovative gameplay while keeping everything cost-effective. It doesn’t require anything besides a phone and a computer, depending on which game you’re playing. 

With more and more dating sims being available on phones, devs have implemented more functions to blur the lines between reality and fiction. In the heyday of Mystic Messenger, I’d sneak out of lecture halls to listen to the pre-recorded phone calls from 707. Silly? Absolutely. However, I won’t deny the joy of hearing someone telling me to take care of myself. This, on top of the group text feature, made the game immersive. At times, I’d forget I was talking to video game characters due to how fleshed out the characters were. 

The newest addition to the genre, Love and Deepspace, has implemented features where players go on dates to the arcade, play card games, and even cook with the three main romantic interests. This is a novel innovation to the genre, as it is based on a more traditional RPG format where the character relies on a card-based gacha to progress through the story battles.

As more and more dating sims adopt more typical RPG functions, I can’t wait for the genre to continue evolving.