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What? I dated a demon prince while attending a would-be Hogwarts school. Do your really think that I’m beneath playing…
Hakato Games have always made games with a general amount of heart with interesting concepts. What they lacked in polish they usual made up for with compelling design. Science Girls, Magical Diary and, easily the strongest of the bunch, Long Live the Queen, are all games they’ve produced that were at least interesting enough to me to finish once or twice. When I found that the studio had made a dating sim involving time travel, I had to try Date Warp.
You’re 19, you’re stuck on a rainy night in a mansion filled with soft-skinned eligible bachelors, and things are going a bit timey-wimey. As much as I’ve liked Hakato’s other titles, Date Warp felt a bit too Visual which made the whole concept not very Novel. For the most part the game plays itself out with an endless supply of text boxes followed by un-timed… pipe… dream(?) sections where you can get Janet (the heroine) to make a choice at a crossroads. I think the idea could be clever if there were other factors worked into the “mini game” that were representative of the situation (maybe one choice in the pipe dream was harder to reach than another, or maybe symbolism within the game could represent actions occurring within the story, like moving past certain locations would burn the pipe behind you signifying Janet burning bridges with her actions) but instead they just seem like a delayed method of making an A, B, C choice.
Choices are fairly obvious as well with binary outcomes; they’ll either make a character happy or another character sad, but the story ever steams onward. This is disappointing considering the complexity of Long Live the Queen or the RPG tactical elements of Science Girls or the spell-learning/dungeon bits of Magical Diary. I get the feeling the story would be pseudo-entertaining but probably not entirely worth the time put into playing it. It also didn’t help that I didn’t feel any magnetism towards any boytoys I could pick from. There’s the jock, the rich pretty boy, the angsty one, the kind gentle one and the creepy nerdy one. The closest I felt any kindred spirit to was the creepy one, but that’s just because he had one of the only somewhat amusing scenes in the beginning of the game and I’m a sucker for long white hair.
Trust me. It’s not quite as bad as it looks.
Overall, Tier 2; probably great for a day when I don’t give a crap and I want to be a teenage girl looking for romance again. Err… teenage boy. Teenage boy is what I said Vegeta. Certainly not an amazing game but it bears in mind that this was one of Hakato’s early games and they generally do get better as time goes on.
