"Tokimeki Memorial broke more ground in 1994, than game designers even today, in 2020, know what to build on top of. On the surface, Tokimeki Memorial is a game about taking cute anime high-school girls on G-rated dates to the zoo, aquarium, amusement park, movie theatre, mall, stadium, concert hall, local park, temple, or library. From a historian's perspective, Tokimeki Memorial is an exploratory inversion of Gainax's 1991 Childrearing Simulation, Princess Maker. From a game designer's point of view, Tokimeki Memorial's multiple-choice dialogues represent a sublime kindergartenification of the sprawling brain-spiderwebs of interesting decision-diplomacy abound in Sid Meier's Civilization. For fans in its day, Tokimeki Memorial provided a benevolent, non-violent, shockingly more open-ended riff on popular graphical adventure games, such as Hideo Kojima's Snatcher. However; taken afresh as all of a piece of itself, today, in 2020, Tokimeki Memorial towers as a perfectly narratively-cohesive graphical adventure game of masterful audio-visual presentation, expressing complete ownership of the capabilities and limitations of its hardware platforms. A deep look at Tokimeki Memorial reveals to us the absolute best example of a video game with multiple endings. The absolute game-design apex of dialogue choices mattering in a video game. Tokimeki Memorial is bountifully big, deep, dense, luxurious, mysterious, hilarious, serious, weird, and relatable. Tokimeki Memorial contain enough characters, plots, side-plots, hidden side-plots, minigames, references, meta-references, cutscenes, secret cutscenes, and secret secret cutscenes to kill Hideo Kojima!"
— Tim Rogers, Action Button review of the game
"Yeah, obviously! I want to see you naked!"
— Ayako Katagiri
