Up And Down Day

I had a lot of frustration with the new game I started on the DS yesterday (with the English patch). Despite getting Rinko's confession and working through the tutorials, I was completely unable to kiss Rinko or even hold her hand! Her affection went right down to the point where she almost gave me the skull face, and everything I did just seemed to make matters worse.

With little hope of fixing the game, I deleted and started a new game (yet again!). Finally this afternoon I got a confession from the green personality Rinko (again!) and things went smoothly this time. I played through a date in Skip Mode, unlocked the kissing and skinship features, and got Rinko up to the big happy face without any problems. Now life is good.

For anyone who's never played the DS version of LovePlus before, here's some advice about how to proceed after you get confession from your girl:

1. After confession, the game will automatically save and return to the sign-on screen.

2. Open in Real Time mode. Be sure to select the "Practice Skinship" option and work through the skinship tutorial.

3. Book a date with your girlfriend on the coming Sunday (the game should prompt you to do this anyway).

4. Save the game and go back to the sign-on screen.

5. Open in Skip Mode. Book a date with the girl for the upcoming Sunday in Skip Mode. After this, select the "Practice Kissing" option and work through the kissing tutorial.

6. Do not close or save the game.

7. Continue playing in Skip Mode until Sunday, then play through the date. You should now be able to access both skinship and kissing normally.

8. After the date is over, save the game and go back to the sign-on screen.

You can now enjoy your new life (in either Real Time or Skip Mode) with your girlfriend. Just remember that the kissing tutorial is only available in Skip Mode, and until you work through this you WILL NOT be able to kiss your girlfriend. So I really recommend the above steps, because they're the easiest way to avoid the kind of problems I had.

Anyway, my "main" Rinko game on the 3DS got off to a good start when Rinko was waiting to walk me to school again. I always like this.

One thing went wrong, though. I got an email this morning starting with "Ano sa..." and which had a number 9 in it. I couldn't find it in my list of emails, so I selected the first option (like I always do when I'm not sure what the message says) and forgot about it. When I opened the game again at lunch time, I had a bad email from Rinko calling me "baka" (dummy). Then I realised that the morning email had been asking me to meet her at 9:00am.

Note to self: Have to be more careful of these emails in the future.

Anyway, fortunately my affection level with Rinko is so astronomically high that she's willing to forgive just about anything. I called her out for a quick meet-up to apologise, and everything was back to normal. What a day!

I met Rin-chan late in the afternoon at the Video Rental Store.

For anyone who's visited the Mandarake stores in Japan, or some of the shops in Nakano Broadway, this shot is sure to bring back memories.

So it was an up and down day. Hopefully tomorrow will be a bit more normal in both games. If there is such a thing as "normal", that is...