Imadoki no Vampire: Bloody Bride is a dating sim published in 1996 by Atlus. In this game, you play as Phaid, a (very awkward) vampire prince who was sent in the human world for his 3 high-school years in order to drink the blood of a rare “platinum aura girl”. But you can’t just find a girl that meet the criteria, drink her blood, and leave: you have to date her, and she must give her consent so you can drink her blood.
The game's front cover
Contents
Gameplay¶
The core gameplay of Imadoki no Vampire is pretty much a TokiMemo like: time passes and, during each day of break, you can perform an action: raising your stats, calling a girl for a date, summoning a demon to gain infos on a girl… Classic TokiMemo-like mechanics. However, there’s two little twists to this formula. First, one day is divided into two periods: daytime, the only time during which you can call a girl, and night-time, the only time during which you can summon demons and try to gather some intel. If you go out during the day, it will just be some chill walking in the city, but if you go during night, you will soon be assaulted by the army of hell in turn-based combats.
The game also has the particularity that there’s two types of girls: the five main girls of the game, who are met with mandatory story events and all has a route, and the random girls. Those random girls are secondary characters, and your sole purpose when meeting them is to drink their blood. There’s several ways to do that, and it all depends on this girl’s personality. Simple dating, buying her lots of things to please her, 1v1 fight against her… There’s always a different strategy.
Note that the game is also more “linear” than a Tokimeki Memorial: you can’t choose the place of the date because they are all predetermined events that play in a certain order, and there is a lot of particular story events, that can be either some dialogue scenes between the characters, animated cutscenes, or sometimes RPG boss battles.
Translation¶
This game has been fully translated in English since 2003. Link to the translation can be found here.
That translation is very jank. It has some very strange phrasing, keeps a lot the honorific and is at times way too literal. However it isn’t bad to the point of ruining the pleasure, and has some charm. --Dark
Content Warning¶
The game contains some nudity shots of girls when you drink their blood (only in medium close-up/shoulder shot), has some explicit blood/gore in some of the enemies you encounter (overall very dark and Megaten-esque enemy designs).
I’ll also add that one of the antagonists can be VERY pushy, to the point of sexual harassment. --Dark
Images¶
Vampire Hunter REO
The game's battle screen
Erika Goto
Personal Reviews¶
Dark¶
So I’ll (try to) talk about some of the key points I found interesting in the game, in a more or less structured way.
Note that I did only one route, and it was the one of the local Science Girl and paranormal enthusiast, Erika Goto.
But I won’t talk about her now. Instead, I’ll first talk about the main concept of the game: the fact that you’re a vampire. Because it’s not here just to have a funny pretext to date girls, it really is well exploited. Devildom, the world where you and all the devil entities come from, has some real lore, with its own internal rules that reflects on the scenario and on small details of the gameplay. For example, vampires are more powerful on Friday the 13th, so each time there’s one, you gain an extra night action. Halloween is the only moment when the protagonist can roam around in his true vampire form, and he’s weakened by everything that’s Christian, including Christmas.
The fact that you play as a vampire also add an incredible comedic layer to some of the scenes. The protagonist, Phaid, is clueless in every domain of the human world (he doesn’t know some traditions, what’s a mosquito, the sea, etc.) and EXTREMELY awkward and stressed. He’s even more awkward than your regular dating sim protagonist! It creates some really funny scenes where the protagonist is like “well…uh… mmh… I’m sorry miss!” right after sucking the blood of a poor girl. Another example is that scene when you can pick the dialogue option “Act like yourself”, in which the protagonist reveals to a random girl that he’s in truth a vampire in disguise, and apologizes because he talks to her just so he can suck her blood. Worst. Vampire. Ever. Oh, and you regularly have to fight That One Annoying Vampire Hunter, too!!!
I think what makes this game interesting is also one of its main flaws. The game is very story-driven, and that plus the fact that there’s a reduced cast (5 main girls and 2 boys without counting the protag) leads to a lot of very cool character interactions, which creates very good group dynamic. For example, during my run, we saw a very fun dynamic between Erika, the protagonist, and That One Token Rich Kid Character. They felt like a trio of mysteries explorers, the two guys always being dragged in the worst adventures by Erika. We called them… The Scooby Gang.
However, it also means that they had to cut the number of of individual dates for each character. I don’t know if the other girls have more, but I finished all of the daytime-date loops of Erika Goto… 3 times in one run. So, during a good part of the game, I was doing the dates I already knew in accelerated speed so I could rise my affection with her, waiting for the story or date related events for new content. Moreover, I don’t know how much of the story segments are the same in each route. In the end, I don’t really think that game will have a great replay value. I’ll probably update this part once I did another run.
The game also has some interesting development and thematics, even if I didn’t get to see the end of it because it probably wasn’t the route for that. I think I’ll recommand it, despite some flaws like the loops or the random girls that can be very… strange from times o times. I guess you just don’t have to do the same thing as me and space out the dates with your favorite girl?