What can you expect from Tokimeki Memorial: Girl’s Side 4th Heart?

One of the finest otome series is about to return. Konami is preparing Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side 4th Heart. But, very little is known about it. People are aware of the six classmates the heroine will be able to date and have learned who her homeroom teacher is, but other details haven’t been announced. Fortunately, the Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side games are rather predictable. While lots of things remain a secret, there are certain elements we can count on to appear!

Expect over 10 romance options.

I know that sounds like a large number of potential bachelors, but hear me out. Every Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side game has eventually ended up with 11 characters for a player to date. Of these, six are classmates who are considered the “official” romance candidates. At least one teacher, in the case of 4th Heart Mikage Kojiro, will be a possible bachelor.

The remaining characters will be “secret” love interests. You’ll only be able to date them if you trigger specific events and have your protagonist achieve certain hallmarks. Maybe you’ll need to have specific stats. You could need to earn a certain title for your accomplishments. In 3rd Story, you had to touch Kenta Taira, a background character, whenever he showed up on the touch screen to unlock his route!

You will get to befriend girls in your class.

You aren’t the only girl in school. Every Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side game has other women in your class. This means there will be at least four classmates to interact with. Usually, these friendships can be connected to certain clubs, and they will then appear if you initiate certain activities connected to their interests. If there are four others around, they will also be your rivals for four of your classmates.

But, there is a chance that Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side 4th Heart will take after 3rd Story. In that installment, you didn’t have four women who could become your friends and rivals. There were two: Karen and Miyo. They were your friends no matter what and never “fought” you for certain guys. Friend events with them would appear throughout the game. You could even earn endings with either one of them.

Being fashionable will be a big deal.

In Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side games, you end up going on dates with love interests and need to look your best to make a good impression. This can get tricky, as each guy has a specific sort of clothing he favors. The mechanic has been present since the very first game, so it will absolutely be back in Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side 4th Heart.

We’ll probably see a repeat of the 3rd Story fashion system. Here, people were encouraged to mix and match clothing items and accessories. Different combinations might be more fitting for certain dates and bachelors, and you could never wear the same outfit two dates in a row.

There probably won’t be love triangles.

When considering what may or may not happen in a new game, it is always a good idea to see what its immediate predecessor did. With Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side 3rd Story, one of the new mechanics was a love triangle. Depending on what stats you invested in and the decisions you made as you played, you could end up in a 3P mode where you dated two of the classmates or a Pride vs. Pride mode where the two guys in a pair would fight over you.

This could be an option here. However, it doesn’t seem like Konami is setting up obvious pairs in 4th Heart in the same way it did with 3rd Story. There, we had the Sakurai brothers, Kouichi and Ruka, as the “main” bachelors and one pair. Arashi and Junpei were set up as the second duo and Seiji and Tamao as the third. However, the six classmate bachelors here don’t really have the same sort of connections. Rather than a sense of potential camaraderie or rivalry, it seems more like Konami is calling back to the original game by having the “model” Minoru in a Kei Hazuki role, Yanosuke filling the all-purpose artistic Shiki Mihara position, and Nozomu being as sporty as Kazuma Suzuka.