Based on the PlayStation 1 late ’90s release of the same name, which itself was somewhat of a remake, ToHeart has been remade once again, and this time includes an English release. But unusually, this time around it’s a 3D visual novel.
Does this classic last the test of time? Is the pivot to 3D models over sprites something that works well? ToHeart has enough of a reputation that I had to give it a try and find out.
Ordinary Days
While a few of the heroines aren’t exactly normal students, most of ToHeart shows Hiroyuki living a normal student life, with a dash of the supernatural showing up later. He wakes up, walks to school with his childhood friend, and for the most part, the only serious issue he has to face is exams. This doesn’t really change throughout the story, with a few exceptions depending on your choices.
ToHeart focuses far more on the heroines than the overarching story. Most scenes are just casual interactions where you’ll walk home, go to the arcade, or run into someone around town. Sometimes there’s a little drama, but these moments tend to be short.
These everyday moments are where ToHeart shines the most. There can be a lot of enjoyment in seeing the protagonist bicker with Shiho, watching Aoi gush about different martial arts, or just seeing how absolutely adorable Multi is when trying to help despite her clumsiness. And with ten fairly different heroines, you’re sure to find several you like among them. Of course, it can work the other way as well.
Not Feeling Heart
Even outside of personal preferences, I would say that heroines are fairly unevenly treated. The younger heroines don’t actually appear until quite far into the story and Akari has 49 events and Lemmy has 35, while fan-favorite Multi only has 18. Some heroines have at least minor dilemmas (and in one case, a not-so-minor dilemma) to add some unease, while others pass by with little of note happening and feel less memorable for it.
To give a few examples, I found the unfailingly kind focal heroine Akari to just be boring. She just smiles and goes along with whatever Hiroyuki says. It didn’t help that not a whole lot happens over all of those scenes and that she’s essentially assumed to be your current or future girlfriend by most other characters. There’s just no tension. Shiho on the other hand, I didn’t like much at first as she can come across as rather mean-spirited and gossipy, but there is some progression to becoming more than friends and interesting actions based on her being a close friend of Akari. Aoi’s story falls into the typical sports theme of training to achieve a goal which at least added more of an aim, and then there’s the unfailingly sweet rich heiress Serika who had no real challenges in her scenes aside from being interrupted by her butler so often that it got old. I really enjoyed a lot of the scenes with many of the heroines, but it was very much because of the heroines themselves and the interactions, not the story.
One aspect I didn’t really like too much about a few of the heroines’ stories was that if a romantic moment happened before the end, it sometimes seemed to essentially be forgotten about for a while. The next scene with them might just have them acting normally as friends. I imagine this was partially due to the structure, which I’ll get into next. Along with this, unlike most modern visual novels, the story often ends around the time that romance starts, so you don’t get to enjoy many of those lovey-dovey moments. Sometimes the romantic moments lacked build-up as well, leaving them feeling a little sudden and sparsely inserted between a mix of mostly slice of life scenes and sometimes tackling whatever challenge appears. I can’t say that most of the endings felt satisfying when it comes to romance either.
Making Choices
ToHeart has you progress through a mix of dialogue choices and choosing which heroines to spend time with on a map on certain days. There aren’t traditional “routes” as such, but if you meet the requirements, you’ll get additional scenes with that heroine as you play and her ending.
In a playthrough, you’ll have to make a lot of choices, 105 of them for the Shiho ending as an example. Luckily, ToHeart has an in-built route guide. It won’t tell you how to get secret heroines, and it won’t be helpful for certain achievements, which is why we’ve written a guide/walkthrough for ToHeart.
You can choose any available heroine on a day and get their event. This also sometimes means that you can miss certain events for a heroine, but still get ones that occur after that. While many of these may be inconsequential, it might also be why scenes don’t always build on each other.
You will get more consistency if you use the route guide, and I would recommend it, if for no other reason than that ToHeart does fall into that old visual novel style of being very specific about choices and the remake doesn’t change that. You often can’t just keep choosing a heroine and the obvious good choices to unlock her ending. Sometimes the choice requirements are fairly obtuse as well, with several heroines needing you to go partially down the “routes” for other seemingly unrelated heroines or to choose another heroine over them. In one case, you have to specifically get to know and then turn down several other heroines to end up with your chosen one, which didn’t feel great.
Remake the System
The ToHeart remake includes some fairly nice features. The route guide as mentioned is helpful, along with a less restrictive decision guide to add icons showing if a choice is one that a heroine likes. You can now switch between NVL (text that covers the entire screen) and ADV (text box at the bottom). New voices for all characters have been added too, including the protagonist who was previously unvoiced. The legacy voices are still included though, and you can mix and match these as you like. Sadly, the minigames which were added for the PlayStation 1 version were not replicated in the remake.
One less positive component that was added for the remake was sections where you walk around as Hiroyuki after choosing a heroine to spend time with. These seemed completely pointless. All you do is walk to the one heroine who is nearby, and then it triggers the scene. Unless it doesn’t and you have to press a button, which seemed to have no pattern as to why. These can be less than 1 second of walking or up to about 15 seconds. Perhaps this would’ve made sense if it were the choosing mechanism and you had to select the heroine to speak to this way, but it only happens after choosing a heroine and walking to her is the only thing you can do.
There were other painful points too. Whenever the date or time changed, it came up with a screen showing this, which took too long and sometimes happened several times per in-game day. More outright loading screens also took a long time and appeared frequently. I skipped through an entire route as a test and it took me over an hour between all the loading and choices, which makes me wonder how much of my 30 hours of playtime over the 11 endings was actually spent on navigating the scenes rather than reading them.
Perhaps tied into all of the loading time is the performance. The minimum requirements for ToHeart are startlingly high. While I can run it at 60 FPS, even my PC, which can run VR games, seems to use up quite a lot of resources to do so. Testing showed it pushing my GPU harder than both Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma or Persona 5 Strikers, which I didn’t expect.
The controls aren’t great either. Certain things aren’t mentioned in the user interface, and you can’t even use the mouse for turning in the walking sections, only the keyboard.
Between the oddities of ToHeart, the slow systems and poor controls of White Album, and some very poor gameplay design decisions in Monochrome Mobius, I do wonder just how well Aquaplus handles gameplay and the technical aspects at times in development, despite excelling with story and characters. Utawarerumono: ZAN had pretty fun gameplay and lacked any notable technical issues, but it’s beginning to feel like the exception at this point.
3D Models and Karaoke
Perhaps the most controversial change of the ToHeart remake is the use of 3D models. I went in with an open mind, especially since I know it has been done very well before with the story scenes in games like Gal*Gun 2 and Robotics;Notes Elite, but I do feel like it could’ve been handled better here.
The heroines seemed to have a fairly limited range of motions, which were cycled through in the same way that a visual novel on a very low budget might only have a few sprites. They generally weren’t very lively either outside of specific story segments, and even then, key parts were often omitted such as a fight where you get some repeated punching motions, mixed with a black screen and symbols appearing. On top of that, the non-heroine NPCs were essentially statues, generally not moving at all when in the background or in the walking segments. This could be excused if it were the background of a standard visual novel, but here it made the environment feel lifeless.
As often seems to be the case with 3D models, jagged outlines were noticeable. In this case, they were often highlighted with a black or white outline, which made them stand out quite badly. The shading stands out too much at times as well.
It’s not all bad though. I do have to say that the eyes looked particularly nice, and some of the expressions worked really well. There’s a definite advantage to 3D for moments like seeing Lemmy lean right into you, and a handful of the scenes (particularly some of the final ones) were well animated and made for a more immersive experience.
The sound was more positive too. The voice acting, both old and new, was great and there’s a lot of well-known talent onboard. The background music carries a lot of that old visual novel vibe and they even included some karaoke segments.
Verdict
ToHeart is a rather mixed package. Ultimately, it falls short of an unreserved recommendation, despite having an enjoyable time spent with the heroines and it being a very reasonable price considering the amount of scenes. Certain aspects just set it back too much, including how underdeveloped each heroine’s story is, the systems it uses, how the graphical redesign was handled, and some very odd design decisions.
Despite that, while I’d not suggest it’s a priority to pick up, the ToHeart remake does carry over a lot of that retro charm and it’s easy to see why it was so popular when it first came out with just how lovable many of the heroines are. Time has moved on, and writers have learned how to more effectively target the hearts of genre fans, but the roots can clearly be seen here and appreciated for what they are. Even if I’d not suggest that you rush out and get it today, it is worth experiencing both as an important part of visual novel history and in its own right.
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Guide/Walkthrough: Click Here
If you are looking for another visual novel, you may enjoy Utawarerumono: Prelude to the Fallen. We have also covered a wide variety of visual novels both original to English and localized from Japanese, which you can check out here.
Thank you to Shiravune for providing a PC review code for ToHeart.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
