Director Simulator Review

The narrative rarely makes logical sense. When you get a job for a boss admirer, you never do any work and she instead follows to random places. One admirer stays in your apartment and pretends to be dead every time you come home. Another is a gamer who seems completely aloof and talks in riddles.

There is not much finesse to the romance arcs and scenes are thrown together at random to take you to places like an amusement park, aquarium, glass bridge, gym, school yard, boat trip etc. The only narrative thread that links it all together is the player-character’s desire to make a movie, but this is tenuous and might be near invisible depending on choices. Yet all the admirers eventually gang up together to make it happen (was done better in Love is all Around). Then, while making the movie, you have to pick your heroine from the group. It is a fairly shoddy main arc, when taken at face value.

The other problem is the poor English translation. None of the phone text messages are translated and the only silver lining is there are not many and player interaction is never required. All of the player choices arelistedlikethiswithoutspaces, which is annoying, but the worst part is that many are vague in terms of what your character will say or do—thankfully the timeline can be quickly accessed to retry a segment.

Somehow it manages to recover from these major blemishes at the end. When you pick your lead heroine, it begins the final romance arc for them. And here is when their true personality emerges, sometimes in crazy and dramatic ways that are memorable, funny, or poignant. It is almost like 2/3rds of the narrative work has gone into the endings. Failed romances are the default, so finding the good endings takes a bit of trial and error but generally rewarding. The finales are also multifaceted in ways that are hard to describe, and it is a case where those silly parts in the story suddenly make much more sense.

There are some unusual gameplay elements but not much interactivity. QTEs associated with singing take a few tries to get a perfect score, and it is impossible to watch the performance and perform well. Photographs are regularly taken of the admirers, and you have to time your shots with poses, which is a little ambiguous but works okay; in a group setting, the one photographed the most gets an affection meter boost, which is neat and should have been used more. At times you can choose which order you want to visit them—demonstrating the game’s proclivity toward jumbled scenes—but this changes nothing in terms of affection.

Completing one full romance (to credits) will take about 2.5 hours. There is maybe 5hrs more content via branching paths. If you only go through one romance and call it quits, then Director Simulator is hard to recommend. Only when doing 3+ endings do things actually fall into place, and while not the best game of this type, it manages to wipe away most of its poor first impression.