While brows­ing Kotaku for amuse­ment in their only-in-japan cat­e­gory, I came across the Love Plus trailer. I swear I could feel a ter­ri­ble ache in my chest after watch­ing it…

The begin­ning I didn’t mind that much. I’ve seen dat­ing sims before. Trial-played one even, although it’s really not my thing since they sim­ply lack the char­ac­ter and plot val­ues their visual novel sib­lings have ( for the last time vis­nov != dating-sim!!! ). The first half of the trailer sim­ply dis­played Love Plus as a dat­ing sim with more ani­ma­tion than what my men­tal imagery gives.

Then she greeted dear player good morn­ing… (~1:45)

As Cit­rus puts it clearly to the imag­i­na­tion. “…would turn on the game first thing in the morn­ing to just to hear her say­ing that.”

Since the game incor­po­rates a real-world clock, dear char­ac­ter will know it’s morn­ing too, just as she’ll also know you greeted her every pre­vi­ous morn­ing for how­ever many days. She’ll even know if you’ve been ignor­ing her for the past three days to attend to real life.

As 10/10 Japan­ese ladies put it… Kimochi­warui (more appro­pri­ate than creepy IMO).

…and even more ronery than Rain­bow Girl. Espe­cially when Love Plus’ fan­base cel­e­brates Man­aka (one of the hero­ines) birth­day with 3D cakes.

…No won­der why Japan is dying.

So why’s it soul­crush­ing? Because I think, deep down in my sub­con­scious­ness, a small part of me prob­a­bly exclaimed “that’s awe­some!” The remark promptly sum­moned the image of myself play­ing this game, tex­ting a vir­tual sig­nif­i­cant other and can­cel­ing meet­ings with my 3D friends for a 2D date at the appointed IRL time. The short clip brought forth such emo­tions of ronery­ness (and creepi­ness) that all my other per­sonas imme­di­ately decide they must beat the stuff­ing out of this anom­alous being of ronery per­son­i­fied… before doing their best to exile it (did they suc­ceed? I doubt it).

But of course that wasn’t enough to wash off the sink­ing feel­ing, so most of me hud­dled in the dark cor­ners of my own Midnight-Channel-Dungeon for the rest of the day.

Although men­tion­ing that does make me won­der… what would be my Mid­night Chan­nel Dun­geon like ?

I need to do some soul search­ing again…

On a more amus­ing thought, this is indeed a break­through of sorts for the gam­ing indus­try. As a kotaku com­menter writes:

I’m going to ded­i­cate myself to pro­gram­ming, and I will make a fully inter­ac­tive sim­u­lated intel­li­gence of a beau­ti­ful girl on com­puter.
It will inter­act with usb force-feedback periph­er­als (sex stuff), and she’ll be able to inter­act with other elec­tron­ics. IE: Send you occa­sional text mes­sages, or reply to yours. Call you. Appear in a PIP type thing on TV.
I will become rich beyond all human imagination

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 09:18 and is filed under Life-filled Pie, Random Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.