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Originally Posted by Tsu
The situation of dating sims in the English-speaking world is kind of sad, really. I've only heard about one non-hentai renai game getting translated into English, which is Graduation, published by Mixx.
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I wouldn't call Graduation a ren'ai game, since it isn't romance focused. You're a teacher who has to tutor 5 female students to get the best education before college. You CAN end up marrying one of them if you do things "right", but it's considered a bad ending, I believe. There's really not any romance at all in the game. Well, you can take a girl out to dinner to increase her energy before a new school week, but doing it too often with the same girl might cause you to end up marrying her. It's pretty difficult, balancing the needs of 5 rather different girls.
The dub job on the game is horrible, believe me. As there's no spoken text from the girls, you can't just turn it off either. Well, you CAN, but you'll have to just interpret their facial expressions to know whether you're doing ok or not.
Last I saw, Rightstuf sold Graduation for $8, which is far less than the actual shipping will cost you, especially if you live in Europe, like me.
As for other translated non-ero ren'ai games, you have Amusement Park and Day of Love. Both are DVDPG, meaning you play them on any DVD player, you don't install them on a PC. Both were also ero when they originally came out, but the translated versions have the adult scenes removed.
If we move into the realm of fan translations, you can find a partially completed translation to Kanon. There is a patch both for the adult version of Kanon and the all-age version.
There is a PS1 bishoujo game called
Bloody Bride, which has been fan translated. This game is also non-adult. In the game, you control the young vampire prince Phaid, who has to live in the human world for 3 years in search of a girl who has the "platinum aura", which vampires need to reach "adulthood". In order to mature, Phaid has to such the blood of a girl with this aura. There is only one problem: It has to be given willingly by the girl, otherwise it won't work. Basically, Phaid has to make the girl fall in love with him, then take her back to his world (called "Devildom" in the translation), where he will then marry her.
The game is pretty interesting, and sports a somewhat primitive RPG system with character stats both for combat and normal life. Each stat varies from 0-999, and each girl has her preferred ranges for different stats (like min 250 max 500), and this governs how "compatible" you are.
It takes pretty long to play through the game from beginning to end, I'd say at the very least 10-15 hours straight for each girl (5 girls total). This is partly because of a somewhat strange system:
Usually you will call a girl and arrange a date for either the weekend or a holliday. Now, if you haven't fought a battle and gained at least 1 point of experience since the last time you dated someone, she will refuse. Or rather, all the girls will be eternally "busy" no matter when you try to set the date, unless you have been in at least 1 battle. I suspect this is to make sure you gain enough strength to win the few boss battles you must fight as part of the story.
There are two ways to gain levels: Either through combat, or through "skirt-chasing blood sucking" (yes, the translation is a bit awkward every now and then). Basically, you can wander around town trying to find a girl to feed on. If you succeed, you'll get a lot of experience points and some of your stats grow a little. And don't worry, when you suck some blood from a girl, she is left with "a beautiful memory" of you. Another girl in the game describes it as the most "wonderful earthly sensation" or something like that. It doesn't kill them or anything, it just leaves them a little bit weak from the blood loss.
There are actually two patches for the game. One is for the text, and another contains English subtitled versions of the many movie cutscenes in the game. The text patch is small and not that hard to find, but the movie patch is a 170MB download which is somewhat harder to come by.
I found the game to be highly entertaining, but I'm a sucker (no pun intended, I swear >_<) for games like these, and people interested in bishoujo games might want to consider taking a look at it.