Mystic Messenger is awesome, we all know that. But if you’re looking for something new, you need to check these other games like Mystic Messenger.
1. Dandelion – Wishes Brought to You
To know where we are going, sometimes we must look back to where we have been. In the case of developer Cheritz, it began with a basket of cuddly critters who morphed into cute, non-threatening boys!
It sounds like the weirdest superhero origin story since Bouncing Boy, quite frankly.
In Dandelion, your stats are the main factor that dictates the likelihood of you successfully seducing one of several hot furries.
Trying to juggle this kind of madness with the daily rigors of being a hard-working young college student is no small task, but the rewards are great and the bedroom eyes are greater.
The awkward stares you’ll get from anyone who catches you playing this? Why, they’re the greatest of them all.
2. Nameless ~The one thing you must recall~
Another classic from the Cheritz vault, Nameless casts you as Eri, your average high school student with a penchant for collecting ball-jointed dolls.
She treats them like family, but cannot tell a single soul of her hobby, for fear of being branded as ‘that freak who keeps the creepy doll things in her bedroom, oh god burn them with fire’.
When her grandfather dies and leaves her all alone, she turns to the dolls for company. As one tends to do. This is until she has a bizarre dream where feathers come out of her diary, and she awakens to strange sounds coming from her kitchen.
It sounds like the premise of a survival horror game, and if you’ve ever actually looked at a ball-jointed doll, you may think that perhaps it is.
Needless to say, her BJD — which is a most vulgar acronym — have sprung to life, and have fortunately taken the form of cute, non-threatening boys!
All of the dolls have their own unique foibles, such as an early model that feels inferior because he was designed without all of the features of his successors (aww), and one with a gorgeous yet insincere face because he was designed for adults (eww).
3. Hatoful Boyfriend
Otome games are inherently weird. At its most rudimentary level, it represents your attempts to woo fictional characters by selecting the appropriate responses, with your ultimate reward typically being some kind of still image that encapsulates your newfound love.
So don’t you begin to think that a dating sim about birds is too unusual for this list, lest the pot be calling the kettle black, and so on, so forth. Most modern kettles are actually chrome, but that’s a moot point.
The tone of Hatoful Boyfriend is so tongue in cheek, you’d think it had been surgically implanted there, but dig a little deeper and you’ll begin to see the true heart that beats at the center of everything.
Many of these characters are genuinely likeable, and if nothing else, Shuu Iwamine is well worth the price of admission. He loves every bit of you, and will show you piece by piece, if you give him the chance.
4. Samurai Love Ballad
It seems like an eternity ago when we first introduced unsuspecting audiences to the insanity that was Ikemen Sengoku, a dating sim about a woman who travels back in time and decides to dress Japanese warlords in fashionable threads.
Incidentally, that was also our first opportunity to talk about the magic of Nekojishi, and yes, I merely brought that up with the sole intention of continuing to force Nekojishi into your life like eccentric octogenarians forcing unwilling kittens into knitted sweaters. Poetic justice, really.
But if the time travelling aspect of Ikemen didn’t quite do it for you, perhaps you’d prefer a much more grounded dating sim where you are a humble waitress who masks her gender and enlists with a warring clan?
Whichever game you opt for, Nobunaga is a straight-up hottie, so you can’t really go wrong.
5. Lifeline
We’ve looked at the dating sim aspect, but now let’s flip the script and explore the other major component of Mystic Messenger: sending text messages to a character that can change lives. Sure, it’s not the same as telling Yoosung that he’s cute when he’s angry.
It’s more like advising Taylor whether to turn left or right to avoid the hideous beasts hungering for human flesh.
As a character literally dubbed ‘the lifeline’, your goal is to guide the hapless hero stranded on a hostile alien planet. Do you have the wherewithal to prevent disaster? Do you even know their true motives? Is Taylor also cute when angry?? Augh, the pressure!!
6. On the Hook
Continuing with the text messaging theme, we arrive at a game that sees you dishing out love advice to your friends while presumedly racking up an incredibly high phone bill. Like Mystic Messenger, it hails from the wonderful land of Korea, but there’s a caveat that could slow down your potential enjoyment.
At this present time, On the Hook remains completely, 110% in Korean. Do you understand Korean? 나는하지 않는다.
…That last bit means ‘I do not’, incidentally. Jokes are less funny when you have to explain them.
Many of us have fumbled through games written in unfamiliar languages. You tend to figure things out sooner or later. But when a game is about words and nothing but words, it throws a wrench in the works.
Should you be brave enough, maybe you’ll even begin to pick up a new language by the end? Why, you could be en route to meeting your Seoul mate!
…Jokes are also less funny when they are terrible.
7. Cibele
Now we delve into a title that is so meta, it sometimes feels less like a video game than a biopic. It’s up to you where that blurred line actually exists.
Based upon game designer Nina Freeman’s actual experiences while playing Final Fantasy XI, it thrusts you into the MMO world of Valtameri. There, you will use the powers of your avatar Cibele to fight enemies as you develop a relationship with a fellow player named Blake.
Between gameplay sessions, you can explore a desktop that contains actual photos and emails from Freeman’s past, you voyeuristic fiend, as you watch the narrative unravel.
To be clear, this isn’t quite a dating sim, but it falls quite close to the literal definition of a ‘visual novel’. It treads uneasy ground that may resonate with our own dark dalliances in the world of online relationships.
It’s sometimes icky and often awkward, but so is love. Deal with it.
Published: Aug 17, 2018 02:33 pm