ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS TOKIMEKI MEMORIAL

Well, ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS Tokimeki Memorial will be live at 1:08pm Eastern on YouTube Dot Com Slash Action Button. I figure this timestamp is fitting for the New Year's Day launch of a video about a video game that takes place in Japan, in which New Year's Day figures as a pivotal moment in each of the story's three in-game years. (Temple bells ring 108 times on New Year's Day, for those unfamiliar with the reference here.)

This video is different from the four before it. First of all, it's different because it has to be: I don't want any two of these videos to be exactly the same. Though also it's different because I understand that only an extreme minority of my viewers have ever played the game under review--I know this for certain because a great deal of you messaged me with your concerns. I know many of you like to play the game under review before my review launches, and I know that many of you didn't feel able to do that with this big, long, dense, weird game that's entirely in a language you don't speak. I assured many of you privately over email, and I assure you again here, for one last time: you don't need to have played Tokimeki Memorial in order to watch my review, because I played it for you.

My review of Tokimeki Memorial, if you look at it as a "YouTube Video," is five hours, fifty-six minutes, and twenty-six seconds long. If you think of it as a "YouTube Video," yes, it's a Six-Hour YouTube Video.

However, I encourage you to try thinking of it as six ONE-hour *episodes* of a mini-series.

In fact, this is how I want people to watch all Action Button Reviews: one episode at a time. All my previous videos, which ran at more or less three hours each, likely seemed to many viewers as intended for viewing in one sitting. Most of the comments I receive regarding the videos concern their length. I  received at least a hundred emails in 2020 from well-meaning viewers promising me that if my videos were shorter, I'd have more subscribers. Many of these nice-enough emailers tell me to split my reviews into multiple videos to "maximize engagement". Maybe all of these people have PhDs in social media! Maybe not. Who knows!

I knew I had to formally address my videos' disastrous length at some point in the future. I figured, why not now? Thus this Tokimeki Memorial review begs you with its big, visible timestamp to watch it in sections. I'd recommend one episode per day.

I faced a genuine dilemma here: how do I entertain you with a video about a game you might never be able to play? The clearest solution was that I should stream the game non-stop for a month, though who has time to watch all that? So instead, I painstakingly logged footage from fourteen playthroughs, and composed two full, feature-length let's plays of two complete playthroughs. In part three of this review, you'll see my first playthrough, in which I fail. In part four of this review, you'll see my fourteenth playthrough, in which I succeed.

I wrote up both of these segments--and recorded their on-camera scenes--thinking I would cut them from the video. Writing them up was instrumental in my formulating the conclusions I make in chapter five.

However, faced with all the footage lined up and logged and color-coded all beautifully, I figured, what the heck? I edited them as meticulously as I edited the rest of the video.

(Trust me: my concept of a "let's play" is probably as congruent with that of the masses as my concept of a "review".)

Overall, I believe this review encapsulates everything I've ever tried (and failed) to like about myself more than anything else I've ever made. It is home to some of the trickiest video editing I've ever perpetrated. It's got some decent jokes. And there's even a sixteen-minute *deleted scene* that I'll be uploading to Vimeo next week, once enough of you have watched the video for it to be relevant. (There may yet be a Vimeo for Pac-Man, by the way. Give me a minute over here.)

The bulk of the difficulty in producing this Tokimeki Memorial review, oddly, all happened at the end. If you read my previous post you know what I'm talking about: Adobe Premiere just didn't like this project. Maybe I hit the limit on how many nested sequences you can nest inside a nested sequence. (Lotta nested sequences in here, Jerry.) Whatever it was, Adobe Premiere became at last a nightmare factory: constant crashes, freezes, blue screens of death--and more! Ultimately, Ryan Taylor stepped in to help me export the most of the video. Peculiarly, though our systems have almost identical specs, he had close to none of the issues I had. Computers are mysterious!

(That's why I'm making a new one this week. That, and for my continuing Cyberpunk 2077 research.)

Also, computers are mysterious! . . . is a theme of this Tokimeki Memorial review, which as you'll see from the intro dives quite loudly into notions of post-cyberpunk speculative fiction. Oh yes, Tokimeki Memorial, it turns out, was the perfect lead in to Cyberpunk 2077 all along.

I confess: I started working on this Tokimeki Memorial video before even launching this Patreon. I pitched it as a series to Kotaku about nine times. I started playing through the game right before I got COVID in March. I was playing it hard-core the day my Square-Enix buddy sent me my pre-release code for The Final Fantasy VII Remake. In summary, this video is everything this channel has been leading up to.

The Cyberpunk video is next. Then, I can finally tell you what "Season Two" is. (Hint: I decided to turn those other two videos to which I previously alluded into "Season Two." Season Two is all about me, uh, sorta having a little vacation and just reviewing games I love, like this Patreon initially pitched. Hmm, maybe I should rewrite the pitch.)

Anyway, see you soon on Twitch Dot TV Slash Action Button for some Cyberpunk 2077 streams!

Having said all that, I'm going to play Demon's Souls all day today in my fancy Christmas Pajamas. We still got four days of Christmas left!