Toheart

Playtime: 43.0 Hours

Finished 25 September 2025.

Played through it on the Steam Deck because my Surface Pro couldn't handle this game on integrated graphics... not sure if optimization is really that bad given that the visual fidelity isn't super notable, or if the Pro's iGPU is just super weak. I did every route including both the DLC stories, and got all the achievements because almost all of them are just for route completion anyway. I didn't really see any reason not to use the route guide except for one achievement so I kept it on for pretty much all of the routes.

I don't really have a specific ranking of routes, nor do I really remember the exact order I played them in (there's like 12 of them), but I remember really liking Akari's, Kotone's and Rio's routes in particular.

The original ToHeart is a classic VN that really popularized the entire "dating sim" subgenre, so it's pretty cool that Aquaplus decided to remake it after all these years. The modernized 3D graphics style is quite well-done outside of the serious performance issues, and it's also further set back by the fact that I played it on the Steam Deck, so it ended up looking a bit blurry at times. I get the vision, but it doesn't feel at all optimized; a style similar to Utawarerumono or Monochrome Mobius could have worked better, and I feel like redrawn CGs could have also been fine. Nevertheless, I don't think it's bad overall, just a bit short of what it could have been with a bit more technical work.

The game itself also needs to be played with full knowledge and context of the era of the original's release; kind of like Never7, I don't think this holds up particularly well as a standalone title today, and is carried somewhat by its legacy. A huge chunk of this comes from the fact that it has 14 routes in total (!), which is quite absurd by any standard and severely limits the attention and care that can be given to each individual character. Routes are very short; the game's schedule takes place across only a couple of in-game months (March to May), and each route tends to be made up of only a few major events outside of brief conversations or happenings. They also generally cover only up until the point where the MC & the heroine start dating, and several characters (like Multi, who's an android) have other non-romantic dating events. The biggest issue with all this, however, is that your route is determined by decisions you select throughout the entire game, and you cannot skip through any part of the game in subsequent playthroughs, forcing you to essentially replay from the start for the last ~10% of each route. Even with skipping enabled, the slow transition animations meant that you waste hours in every route trying to get to the actual relationship, with only a few short events to keep you interested. Of my 43 hour playtime, I'd estimate that less than 30 of those hours were actually "meaningful", and about 15 or so of them were spent just holding R to skip through the first month and a half of the calendar to get to the actual route.

Most of the routes are pretty decent but not too worthy of much elaboration, given that the characters and the routes' plots tend to be quite straightforward. There's a couple of relative stinkers: Tomoko's route is poorly paced, with her being ridiculously aggressive for the first 80% just to do an instant 180 for the last 20%. Meanwhile, Serio's DLC route is really short and somewhat meaningless, consisting of just a couple of brief events where she attempts to find emotions. It does end with an unexpected and pretty funny Terminator 2 gag though. A pretty big issue that plagues several of the routes is that some of the characters are introduced very late into the game, when the new semester starts; this leaves ~2 weeks of in-game schedule time for these relationships to be built from scratch, given that these characters do not appear at all in the game prior to this.

There are a few exceptions, which I've kind of mentioned already. The entire game feels like it's built around Akari's route, given that she is the main heroine of the game. She's one of very few characters who constantly shows up throughout the entire game, and has plenty of other unique events; her route is about twice as long as most of the others', and given that she already has a long-running friendship with the MC, the route is able to bring up a lot of details from their shared history, deepening both of their characters. Rio's route isn't super deep or anything, but starts pretty early in the game and has lots of interesting & unique events that differentiate it from the other routes. She's also a bit of an airhead which I find endearing. Finally, though Kotone is one of the junior characters, I really like her personality and the psychic powers are quite cute (there are some little animations where she moves ping pong balls around with her mind). Her route also ended up being one of the longer ones, just given the density of the events near the back half of the schedule, and went through several different plot points. It even has a short "after" segment!

While it might not be a particularly notable game by today's standards, I still found enjoyment in the time I spent with it - clearly enough to at least go through all of the routes. I don't think I'd be interested in spending much more time with it (and if I do, it'll only be for a few specific routes) but it was nice to get a modern glimpse of a piece of Leaf/Aquaplus's ancient history. Maybe they'll do something like this for ToHeart2 someday?