About this project

; Exploring Tokimeki Memorial, a reverse-engineering project

Tokimeki Memorial is a highly influential Japanese video game originally released in 1994 for the NEC PC Engine CD-ROM platform in 1994, and later released under the the title Tokimeki Memorial: Forever With You for the Sony Playstation in 1995, Sega Saturn in 1996, and PC in 1997.

This website, Exploring Tokimeki Memorial, is a project which aims to reverse-engineer this game, primarily the 1995 PlayStation release, in order to shed light on its obscure game mechanics and aid future analysis and translation projects.

Why this project?

On 1 January 2021, Tim Rogers of Action Button published an in-depth nearly six hour long review of Tokimeki Memorial, condensing down hundreds of hours of work into the definitive English-language gameplay analysis of the game. The game’s depth was such that on subsequent playthroughs he continued to discover previously unknown game mechanics.

About a week later, it occurred to me that analysis of 1990s video games for undocumented game mechanics was similar to earlier projects of mine. I decided to examine the PlayStation release of Tokimeki Memorial: Forever With You in the same manner.

Goals

My aims for this project are less ambitious than earlier my earlier projects examining the Commodore Amiga games K240 and the Dungeons of Avalon series, which aimed to fully analyze those games. My reasons for this are as follows:

  1. Tokimeki Memorial is deceptively massive and more complex than it first appears. While the main executable for the PlayStation version is only 674 KB, it also has twenty-six 192 KB overlay files which contain further executable code, and which can be swapped in and out of memory as required, bringing the total program size to at least 5.6 MB. This was obviously necessary to fit the program within the PlayStation’s 2 MB of RAM, but it significantly complicates code analysis.
  2. This game was highly succesful, and a certain amount of analysis has already been performed by others since its initial release. The benefit of a new complete analysis is limited.
  3. Tokimeki Memorial released on several platforms, and in multiple revisions. A truly complete analysis would require multiple separate dissassemblies, each platform involving different tools and methods (for example, while there are disassemblers for the PC Engine’s HuC6280 CPU, it is not supported by Ghidra).

However, with that in mind, my goals are as follows:

  1. To analyze the game’s core functionality, with the aim of documenting game mechanics and potentially discovering new unknown features, for the benefit of players and those interested in the game.
  2. To provide a resource for future users attempting to reverse-engineer games for the original PlayStation (PSX), especially future analysis of Tokimeki Memorial.
  3. To provide documentation which may make a future fan translation of Tokimeki Memorial possible.

Except where otherwise specified, all information on this site refers to the PlayStation version of the game, Tokimeki Memorial: Forever With You.

See the main index for a list of the project’s findings to date.


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