Nakayama Miho no Tokimeki High School
My attempt to review a 1987 NES game you can't really play
In news from a different world, last December J-pop idol Miho Nakayama passed away, quite shockingly so at the age of 54. I have no connection to her music or acting, but of course I do appreciate her role in the very early history of video game development and dating sims via the 1987 Famicom game Nakayama Miho no Tokimeki High School, which is a wild part of gaming history. It tried to blur the lines between gaming and reality as much as the 8-bit tech of the time would allow - throughout the game players would get screens displaying a telephone number they could call to listen to voicemails recorded by Nakayama herself to progress the game:
Furthermore, the whole game was structured as a competition, where the first players who completed the game could visit their local participating game store, and use the “Famicon Disk Fax” system they had set up to send in their scores and receive prizes in the mail. It was one of like a half dozen games to ever use this system, and the only one of note to really succeed at doing so. To make this race competitive for a dating sim, the game was advertised as having real difficulty via pairing dialogue choices with a facial expression selector - you had to not only select the right words, but also the right tone.
I decided to play the game "in memoriam", as it were - it does in fact have an English patch, and you can see a playthrough of said patch on YouTube here. It was time to experience my very own 80's high school idol love story <3
To the surprise of no one, this game sucks. It essentially had to, no real fault on the developers, but that doesn't change the facts. It is working with incredibly limited graphical capabilities of course, with the average scene looking like this:
Which just isn’t enough for “ambiance” immersion to work, every setting is generic by definition. That can of course be saved by a good plot or gameplay, but neither shows up here; there is barely any story to speak of. Main Guy goes to new school, meets “Mizuho”, realizes she is secretly pop idol Miho trying to live a normal life, they start dating, and paparazzi-types and the pressures of her career get in the way such that eventually (based on your route progression) she breaks up with you or you stay a couple and ride off into the sunset together. Literally by the way, a friend loans you a motorcycle so you can escape the press:
You might be saying “surely you are skipping some things” but I assure you it is nothing important. Neither Miho nor the main character have any personality, and your time is filled generally by comedic hijinks or just the mechanics of progressing the relationship. There is a fat-faced friend who gossips about school, you have a family that ~exists, there is a stuck-up rich girl you speak to about twice before she kidnaps you in order to serve you drugged food so you will date her (as was typical for 1980’s courtship norms) which happens solely to make you late for a date with Miho to create drama, and so on - it is all as tiresome as it is irrelevant. You can even poke your head into the girl’s locker room at some point, the crown jewel of filler content:
This isn’t even arcade-cabinet-strip-mahjong levels of hot, I know video games of the era could do better than this! Though for all the extraneous plot beats and side characters, I did like “The Trio”, a group of cackling girls who follow you around like a Greek chorus taunting you for your desires:
In another game these fey spirits would devour your organs at the right moment, mad respect.
Anyway, all of this plot filler is used to stretch out the non-story but in that task it gets a helping hand from the game mechanics, which are a classic example of arbitrary progression gatekeeping. Half the dialogue options are just variants of the same core emotion, and the right answer is inscrutable. You get moments like this one, where Miho is apologizing to you for a misunderstanding:
And all of these answers are pretty dismissive? But the right answer is A, the meanest of them! Guess she has a type, but since you as a player haven’t negotiated her safe words yet you don’t know that and are just gonna facecheck your way through these.
As the cherry on top the advertised facial expression system is actually a letdown - it is very rarely used, most dialogue options don’t ask for it, and when they do you have six options:
But you actually never use half of these, and 90% of the time the correct answer is “normal”. At least this was bad in a “too easy” way, so it doesn’t waste your time, but you could just remove it as a mechanic and miss nothing. All of the “interactive” elements could be replaced by linear narrative, actually, and nothing would be lost.
Besides the aforementioned competitive media mix aspects of the game, obviously. Which is what it is all about, right? This ain’t some random 8-bit idol, this is Miho Nakayama! And even in-game she is pretty cute, I do like the design for the close-up convos:
The glasses-for-disguise are nice with her moe eyes, the details of the shading really pop in an 8-bit context, and really the whole framework of the UI as this sort of flip picture book is adding value here (as opposed to being irrelevant in the location shots). They even give her a bunch of different outfits on your dates because as the heroine she deserves it:
“Ash, those first two are literally just palette swaps” “No man, look, the red one is using dithering to create a fade effect on the colors, implying a more complicated pattern like plaid thatching, while the blue one uses bold lines to imply a striped coat”. It was impressive in 1987, alright! This girl has no textual personality but there is life in this design that stands out from its peers.
But of course it isn’t the in-game graphics doing the heavy lifting here. As mentioned before, this was a “Telephone Game”, where players call phone numbers to hear Nakayama’s voicemails. These voicemails are, to the best I can tell, lost to us - I have not found an existing recording online. They were only up briefly actually, for a few months after the game was released - this was not an era where longevity for games was considered important. We do have transcripts of them though, and I can imagine that picking up your house phone, calling a phone number, and getting the actual voice of the “character” in the game talking to you - making your heart go doki doki if you will - must have been pretty cool.
(Miho even travels throughout the game, and the phone numbers - according to this blogger - actually use location-appropriate area codes so it feels like you are really calling Osaka or Hokkaido! Very cool...unless - according to another blogger - you got hit with long distance calling charges for your pursuit of troubled love, as was reported in the media at the time. Now that’s authenticity?)
This mechanic is essentially a ludomantic experience that is impossible to capture today, because voice acting in video games is incredibly common; so much so that it would come off as gimmicky to make someone go through such a multi-device process. But since the Famicom couldn’t make vocal sounds, it had to make you use your phone, which created the simulacrum of actually calling a real human outside of the game to talk to. That is pretty neat!
And of course we have the competition, as helpfully explained in the instruction manual alongside photos of the IRL Nakayama:
And the big prize of a VHS tape of behind-the-scenes Nakayama stuff has been preserved, and is easily available if you want to watch it1. Don’t though, it isn’t worth it; it is primarily b-roll footage of her doing typical day-to-day tasks and softball interview questions about “what is her type” with generic answers, stuff like that. Solid C- for the genre. But still, you didn’t know that when competing, right? The pressure to get your game file in was fierce. This competition ran for three months on release (until February 1999), and outside of that window it is not the same game.
I mentioned how the game essentially “had to be bad” at the start, and I want to dig into why that is. If you see commentary in the west about this game, you often see the claim that it had a development time of “2 weeks”2. You see that because the game’s Wikipedia page in English3 says it, and so it is now common trivia on the net, but I don’t think that is true. I believe this fact comes from a mistranslation of interviews like this one:
岩田: 坂口さんは『ファイナルファンタジー』の開発を終えて、『トキメキハイスクール』に合流されたんですか？
坂口: ええ。チームの何名かが合流して、３カ月間くらいでしょうか。で、最後は１０名くらいのメンバーといっしょに京都にやって来て、２週間くらいカンヅメになって、なんとか開発を終えることができたんです。
Or:
Iwata: Sakaguchi, did you join the "Tokimeki High School" project after finishing development on "Final Fantasy"?
Sakaguchi: Yes, that’s right. Several team members joined the project for about 3 months, I think. And then near the end of development, about 10 of us came down to Kyoto and we holed up for around 2 weeks until we somehow managed to finish the game.
So what is going on here is the game’s development was a joint production between Nintendo - in Kyoto at this time - and up-and-coming game company Square in Tokyo. And yes, they were literally working on Final Fantasy right before this game, and switched gears to tackle this new project. Or at least some of them did, for 3 months, and only then did famed-director-of-Final-Fantasy Sakaguchi came down to Kyoto and lived out of a hotel for two weeks doing crunch to finish it off. That final trip, probably because Sakaguchi is the famous person reporters would care about, got transformed into the idea that the whole game took 2 weeks to make.
In this same interview they talk about how, at the end of that crunch, they all went out for drinks to celebrate...until they got a phone call about how the motorcycle in the ending credits was glitching out and flying off the screen, which they thought was a hilarious, beautifully fitting bug to mark their time together. And that is hilarious, for sure the primary reason I am recounting it, but I also think it goes to show that this was a hot mess of a game dev timeline. 2 weeks or 3 months, both of those are not enough time. And with two companies in different cities, doing crunch out of a hotel, wrangling with a record label for a pop idol’s permission, setting up phone line recordings and VHS tapes and a bonus competition using experimental fax machines, all aligned with a media blitz? All for a game genre that honestly hadn’t been done before? I have checked, and you can authentically argue this is the first ever dating sim, at least on a console. People overstate what it is inventing - it is pulling tropes from romance anime and manga, of course - but even that process of transference is tough. This wasn’t a genre yet, and in a way they weren’t even trying to make a dating sim. They were trying to make an event.
One that today you just can’t experience. Very few people care about Nakayama Miho “like that” anymore, we aren’t seeing the commercials or the magazine ads or buying the discount unofficial strategy guide that invented a fake protagonist and never used Miho’s name because they didn’t have the rights. Today you play the game just because it is a game, and when you hit the phone numbers you tab over to a transcript of the voicemails...or maybe don’t even bother. The game was just a vessel for the hype. That doesn’t make the game good, by the way, I don’t want to go that far. The game was a not-very-good vessel for the hype, and an anachronistically better team could have made a better game. It isn’t really worth playing, in the end. But it is worth researching! As an event, it is really cool. As a piece of history, it is probably unique. And I respect the team behind it for that.
The second-place prize was a limited-edition autographed “telephone card” for the game, essentially a gift card for using public telephones featuring bespoke art that in the 80’s & 90’s was a big collectors fad in otaku circles. They are quite common as retro merch on auction sites, you could absolutely buy one today!
...Man, I could buy one today...
I myself have repeated this claim, in my posts that eventually became this essay.
If you check the current Wikipedia page you won’t see this error, because I fixed it - I’m doing my part!