Akabaka made a fun dating simulator based on a crazy narrative with Sucker for Love: First Date. Much like in real life, as each date occurs the game gets better and better, but also like in real life, it is still flawed in some areas.
Dating simulators are quite entertaining, especially if the stories are like Sucker for Love. While the longevity of the game is about two to three hours, the warped story, and the odd way the gameplay branches with simple decisions, make for an oddly fun experience. Not a perfect first date, but still fun.
Anyway, let’s dig into this short one.
The Story…err…love story…err…summoning love story…world-ending summoning love story
Yeah, there we go.
The story of Sucker for Love is simple. A guy with too much money and time decides to summon a dark overlord because…well…because he’s bored. Or at least it seems that way. Anyway, our guy decides to summon a dark overload whom he wishes to smooch/date. Not taking the process seriously, he does just what he intended to do, and unknowingly brings the world closer to its doom in the process.
The story is out there. Okay, it’s very out there, but it does enough to entertain through its oddness. Summoning overlords to date is ludicrous. That idea is so left field that it crazily enough entertains through its execution. The story is broken into three chapters, where you get to choose whether to date L’neta, the first overlord who looks like a Cthulhu and seems nice enough, so much so that she offers at one point to kill you first as to skip the horrors she is going to bestow on the world. As first dates go, that’s kind, right?
The second chapter of the story deals with her sister, whom I won’t name because that will give things away. While L’neta’s story deals mostly with compromise and trying to get our main character through the ends of the earth, which he summoned, quickly and relatively painlessly, her sister is quite the opposite. She wants to get our main character to become a slave to her and to keep him alive as long as she possibly can. Then the world ends.
What’s enjoyable about both of these stories is the design that went into them. While the first chapter is linear (with a few moments of branching), it is direct while entertaining. Once you get through the first chapter, the story becomes much bigger. When the chapter begins, you can intermingle between the narratives as the other is going on – yes, that means you can bring in L’neta’s story to co-exist with her sister’s. It’s clever that the story will allow you to pull in details and characters into the other, thus making the decision-making process in chapter two seem much larger and have more at stake. I didn’t know how big the story became prior to chapter two, but it becomes big and the choices you make are a bit trickier, while also upping the stakes of their results.
That’s the main crux of the game, though, the choices you make. Each chapter has its own set of endings. The first chapter is merely an introduction to the second. The first chapter allows you to have two endings, while the second chapter has so many possibilities and choices that you get even more endings to have and discover, but only if you bring the first chapter into the mix. That brings about a bit of replay value to the experience to try and spot the moments where you can reach each of those endings. That’s the purpose of a dating simulator, where you want it to end in different ways so that it contains replay value. In this respect, it works.
Book it! Two books, actually. Maybe more?
The actual devil in the details of how you can get those endings focuses on the two books that you get to juggle between sisters. Each book has its own set of instructions on how to perform rituals. One is a straight-up recipe book of how to summon overlords, hide shadow people, and end the world (while falling in love).
The other book is a stage play that you must follow to the detail. The play is a comedy that requires you to wear and do things to act out the part that you’ve been given. It isn’t too difficult in how it works, but it’s far less flexible than the recipe book. Far less flexible.
The joy of chapter two is that you can mix and match between the books. For example, each chapter requires you to wear a specific mask. Those masks relate back to the chapter they exist within. If you wear the mask from chapter two while summoning L’neta, then you’re bound to get in a whole lot of trouble or maybe you won’t. I can tell you that the ending to that result is painful, but also surprising. The number of possibilities between the books is what gives you a path to explore and makes the game a helluva lot bigger than it deserves to be.
Developer Akabaka did an admirable job of making this game flexible, interesting, engaging, and just enough to warrant the $9.99 price point. The experience is worth that price and even more so when you consider the number of complicated parts the devs had to work with to make Sucker for Love functional and entertaining. As much as I don’t pine to play games like this, I love playing games with branching narratives where thought has been given to the narrative choices. That’s a complicated storyboarding/flow charted process that must be interesting to create, and not easy. Even if the game is goofy and outlandish, it is a complicated puzzle in a sense.
Oh, and there is a secret stage you must unlock through certain actions in the chapters. So, more longevity!
Dull dating moments
The only issues I have with this game are that there aren’t a variety of environments to choose from/explore, and the game essentially gives you the answers, which are just mix/match most of the time.
Starting with the latter part, there might be a lot of trials and tribulations with decision-making rather than honest-to-God Phoenix Wright-like moments of deduction and discovery. Guessing how to make endings/moments happen takes away from the process of intelligently thinking through how they can happen, as it can feel at times like you’re throwing a dart at a dartboard while blindfolded to possibly hit the bull’s eye. That doesn’t mean there isn’t investigation or hard thought given to the process of elimination, it just means that it’s mostly a guessing game. Now, if you’re comparing that to actual dating in the real world, then bravo! It’s probably spot on. Since this is a game, we’re expecting some breadcrumbs here and there to get to solutions, but most of the time it’s simply guessing an outcome. It can get a bit tedious at times, but the personality of the game and its characters help to keep you focused. The guessing part is still prominent, though.
The environments are the other big issue. You don’t really do much outside of your own apartment. There isn’t a world to explore, like in Sakura Wars, but for $9.99 it’s enough. I just wish it were a bit bigger in scope.
Anyway, the game has more positives than negatives. Let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
Akabaka made a fun dating simulator based on a crazy narrative with Sucker for Love: First Date. Much like in real life, as each date occurs the game gets better and better, but also like in real life, it is still flawed in some areas.
