I’m always surprised by how many people played and enjoyed Thousand Arms back when it released in 1999. It’s a fairly average RPG with dating sim elements baked into it. The more intimate you become with the other female cast members, the more spells and abilities you have access to. When I played it in 2009, it still seemed unique. Revisiting it today, it feels surprisingly shallow.
In 1999, dating sims and visual novels were nothing new. It’s easy to find examples as far back as the 80s with games like Nakayama Miho no Tokimeki High School. They were popular genres that were already intermingling with RPGs by the mid 90s with titles like Sakura Wars as well as Blue Breaker. That was in Japan though.
While rare, some bits of the genre made it to America in the late 90s. Harvest Moon offered companions for your farming simulator life. Even the popular Final Fantasy VII featured some light elements, yet they were largely hidden from the player.
(Image Source: GameFaqs)
More directly embedded in the genre, though less visible, was JAST USA’s PC publishing output. In the late 90s they localized titles like Season of Sakura and Runaway City. However with erotic content included, they weren’t exactly accessible by a broad audience.
Even with this exposure, Thousand Arms was likely one of the earliest and most accessible titles in the west that focused on these elements. It released when JRPGs were rocketing in popularity in this hemisphere. There were a lot of eyes on this space in 1999, so it got more attention than it previously would have.
The release wasn’t the start of some wave in America. For nearly a decade, there weren’t many examples you could find outside of series like Persona as well as some western RPGs. They never seemed to be as blatant about it as Thousand Arms was. Nevertheless, they further exposed quite a few people to the same elements.
Personally, I didn’t take much notice of dating in games until about 2009. When I did finally stumble across the genre, I was pretty narrow-minded and viewed it as embarrassing. However, as a joke, I ended up playing the demo of the 4chan community developed visual novel, Katawa Shoujo. It’s no dating sim, yet it felt like the focus on romance opened my eyes to a new world. Inevitably I started exploring other releases in the same vein. Since these games had relatively little traction even by then, it was surprisingly easy to still stumble across Thousand Arms.
While I hadn’t gotten over the embarrassment of liking a title of that nature, I did find Thousand Arms novel. I didn’t finish it at the time, but it was a window into a genre I hadn’t seen much of.
That was almost ten ago. The modern market is a bit different. Go on Steam and hoooooooly shit, man. You could spend a lot of money on that platform alone, without even pursuing some more specialized distributors. From popular Japanese classics to modern western indie titles, it’s ridiculous how much more of this stuff is available. With a growing market, more erotic titles were willing to make compromises to release on Steam. Now many releases are built ground up to fit on the platform.
At the same time, more games with relationship elements started coming to America. While I’m not a Western RPG expert to say for sure, it seemed like BioWare’s dating systems in Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 sparked a taste for party member romances in a mainstream audience. In turn, non-japanese developers started exploring the space more.
If you’re looking at Thousand Arms, there are plenty of other places to get your fictional romances these days.
This year I returned to beat the game. What I found was a surprisingly shallow experience. The dates amount to a pool of questions shared between all the characters. Each responds differently to the answers, so it is more or less a blind shot at picking what they’d prefer. Once you’ve succeeded or failed, you’ll need to memorize the answer for next time. Coming in cold, nearly every question would stump me. Maybe I’m bad at reading women.
The real kicker is that it seems like no matter who you build a relationships with, one specific character is more or less the main partner. Even so, it’s not a particularly romantic conclusion. It makes dating a strangely mechanical element, with no real bearing on the plot. It’s all solely to get stronger.
While I don’t think there’s an active love for Thousand Arms these days, I do believe there’s a nostalgic view of it that I can’t really fault. At the time and place of its localization, it was quite the novelty. Even until relatively recently, there wasn’t too much like it in the west. However with a flood of titles with similar elements in the modern market, it’s became a lot less special.
