Sonata

Sonata is a dating sim/RPG hybrid from T&E Soft. The game begins with the protagonist watching a movie with his date. Afterwards, they are both swept up in a mysterious light, just like the fantasy-romance flick they just watched (also named Sonata). He awakens in an alternate world called Paradigm, unable to remember what his date looked like but knowing he must find her.

Paradigm is split up into three parallel realities – Tokugawa Academy, a modern-day school; Blue Moon, a fantasy world like most RPGs; and Nano-Sec, a futuristic world where you jack into cyberspace. The game will randomly send you into one of these scenarios, though you can pick which one you’d like to tackle first with a secret command on the title screen.

Each of these worlds features the same eight heroines, who have the same basic personalities though they don’t remember you between worlds. You pick two to join your party and head off for an adventure in a dungeon for some typical RPG stuff, complete with random encounters and a turn-based battle system. Your battle performance as well as your dialogue selection determines the affection level of the heroines. Once you complete a scenario, you’re reincarnated into the next one, with your memories wiped and your stats reset. After completing all three, you enter the final dungeon, paired up with the girl with the highest affection level.

The character art is by Sachiko Sugimoto, with the character designs filling the usual 1990s bishoujo game tropes. It also features a “finger-beat” system where the controller will vibrate in tandem with the girl’s heartbeat. The main appeal is seeing the way the similarities and the differences between the girls in each scenario – in the Tokugawa Academy chapter, the pink-haired girl Mizuho is a high school video game fan; in Blue Moon, she’s a 208 year old dark elf; and in Nano-Sec, she’s a programmer. There’s also a long opening cinema, along with a unique animated ending and song by each of the eight heroines. Altogether, the idea of chasing love across multiple realities is interesting, even though it feels weird so much resets between reincarnations.

You can also unlock the Famicom version of Hydlide Special, the 1985 RPG also from T&E Soft. This was released separately on the Japanese PlayStation Network in 2019, even though Sonata was not, probably because it’s reportedly quite buggy on anything but the original hardware.