Which of the Tohoku Sisters Will Be Your “Doki Doki Sweets Girlfriend”? (App Guide)
Genius Inc. recently released their newest game entitled “Doki Doki Sweets Girlfriend”, featuring the three Tohoku Sisters – Tohoku Zunko, Tohoku Kiritan and Tohoku Itako!
For those who don’t know, Genius Inc. is a Japanese company which was established in 2014, who produce a variety of “Appdramas” (a similar concept to your regular dating sims).
…And their newest “bishoujo” game is no exception to the trend:
Let’s take a look shall we?
Note: since this game has been out for a while, I’ve also added information about the other characters you can meet throughout the game, as well as screenshots from my gameplay. If you’re not a fan of spoilers, proceed carefully throughout this article (nothing about the story or how to achieve endings is explained here, so nothing is really spoiled as such).
The story:
You’re a highschool boy working in a Wagashi store, which your uncle left to you in his last will. You’re despairing over how no customers ever come to your store… when you notice a beautiful girl walking outside.
You’re admiring her from inside your store until… she collapses outside! You rush out to help her, and bring her inside the store. She seems ill… so you try to feed her, but she’s adamant about ONLY eating Zunda Mochi (a type of sweet made by putting mashed edamame on top of mochi). And oh boy, is she adamant indeed.
After a particularly taxing conversation with her, you bring her the requested Zunda Mochi and she perks up, explaining that her name is Zunko. After a while of conversing, you agree to let her help you save your store… but only if you change it into a Zunda Mochi store!
You eventually agree, and allow Zunko to stay at your place. How could life get any better?
In continuing into the next chapter, you will meet Kiritan and Itako, and complete your roster of girls who will help you on your journey to become the best Zunda Mochi store!
Now I’ll explain how this game works.
Once you open the app, you just tap the screen and you’ll be able to choose the name you want the girls to refer to you as (don’t worry, you can change your name later if you want).
Once you choose your name, you’ll start the game straightaway.
As for the actual gameplay…
You start the game with 30 rubies and 3 tickets. The game is divided into many chapters, and you pay one ticket per chapter you play. At the end of each chapter, you can choose to go to the next chapter (1 ticket) or replay the chapter you just did (1 ticket). One ticket will regenerate every 3 hours.
Every now and then there will be the opportunity to choose a dialogue option as you play. Sometimes these options will allow you to increase your affinity with a character by paying for an option with rubies.
When you choose one of these affinity increasing options, you’ll have the opportunity to unlock exclusive scenes with the girls!
So far, it seems like you can ONLY increase your affinity with Zunko and Itako. What will happen when you increase your affinity with the girls high enough? You’ll have to play to find out!
Information bubbles etc.
One of the nicest things that you can find in the game are these little pop-up “information bubbles” which explain details about traditional Japanese culture, like “wagashi”, and “miso”.
Other controls
By pressing the “house” icon in the top right, you’ll get the menu.
By pressing “restart”, you can start the game again from Chapter 1 (all purchases made are kept though). This means that if you’re not happy with the options you’ve chosen, you can start from scratch!
Pressing “Shop” will take you to their in game store, where you can use real life money to buy more “Rubies” and “Tickets” (which I’ll explain later).
“User settings” allows you to change your name (it says that you can change the language, but it looks like the only one available is English). You can also view your user ID.
I wouldn’t recommend the “Autoplay” option, since it doesn’t look like there’s a way to turn it off if you want to. The only thing that seems to work is going into “Game settings” and putting the Autoplay speed to the lowest speed, or closing the app and reopening it.
“More by Genius Inc.” Will take you to a page showing the company’s other bishoujo games.
“News” takes you to their official Facebook page.
“Minigames” takes you to a singular minigame which is a slot machine. Depending on which three icons you match, you’ll get “P” points, which you can exchange for rubies. After matching three icons, the game will ask if you want to triple your “P” points by watching an advert.
“Game settings” lets you dictate the game volume, transparency of the text box and autoplay speed.
“Backlog” shows you all of the previous dialogue from the current chapter.
In the bottom left, there’s a button which allows you to watch an advert to earn 30 “P” points. (You can do this once every 5 hours)
Now all that’s left to do is download the game and play! At the moment you can only play it on Android devices, and the only language is English. However, the company typically makes an IOS version AND adds more languages to their games over time so I’d potentially expect it to be translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Portuguese reasonably soon, since these are the languages Genius Inc. tend to use for their games.
You can download the game (English) here.
I must admit, it’s certainly an interesting game. Despite the simplicity, I’m definitely going to keep playing and see what different outcomes I can get.
That’s all I’ve got for you for now! Thanks for reading, and enjoy playing!
~Tanudama
** UPDATE ON AUGUST 27 2020 **
Yes, you can only romance Zunko and Itako, but there are some other interesting characters from the Tohoku-sisters’ universe that you can encounter throughout the game to make the game more fun!
Since I’ve finished both the Zunko and Itako routes, I thought I’d show you a couple of the images from the game I got! Small spoiler alert before you proceed(?):
Links
Download Doki Doki Sweets Girlfriend for Android here!
Genius Inc.
- Official webpage
- Official Facebook page (otome)
- Official Facebook page (bishoujo)
Tohoku Zunko