Japanese player does blindfolded speedrun of challenging dating sim, becoming a legend

On the final day of a Japanese live speedrun event called “RTA in Japan Summer 2023”, one player challenged the dating sim Tokimeki Memorial: Forever with you in a completely blindfolded state, even offering live commentary the entire time he played. The player successfully completed the run in 1 hour and 57 minutes, leaving the audience astonished and going viral on social media. 

The speedrun event RTA in Japan was held from August 10 to August 15, 2023. Among the various participants aiming to clear titles such as Super Mario, Dark Souls, Final Fantasy etc. in the shortest time possible, one player was anticipated in particular. Player Kazupoon entered the event with the intent of clearing Fujisaki Shiori’s ending in the bishojo dating sim Tokimeki Memorial: Forever with you, with the target time limit of 1 hour and 10 minutes. However, he had another special condition – doing it while completely blindfolded, navigating the game only based on sounds and his memory.

Kazupoon gathered the attention of users as soon as the nature of his “insane” performance was announced. The fact that he arrived at the venue decked out, in a Tokimeki Memorial T-shirt and Star Man blindfold only contributed to the anticipation. 

Tokimeki Memorial: Forever with you is a bishojo dating simulation game published by Konami, in which the player builds the stats of the male protagonist, developing his skills and abilities and making dialogue choices in order to raise his love meter with the love interests of the game. The story takes place over a course of three in-game years (the duration of high school) and the gameplay requires a lot of small actions, such as choosing what activity the character will do for the day or what subject he will study. Each of these small actions can potentially trigger events to happen, such as encountering a heroine, and these events prolong playtime. In other words, from a speedrun point of view, they are not desirable. 

In order to successfully speedrun the game (which, according to Howlongtobeat takes 8 hours to clear), Kazupoon had to not only know by heart all the choices needed to be made to eliminate time-consuming events, but also to be able to successfully choose them while blindfolded.

The very start of the game, in which the player inputs the protagonist and love interest’s birthdays and blood types, was an especially challenging task, as this input has an effect on the story later on. However, Kazupoon was able to successfully input the exact birthdays and blood types he had intended to. As he did so, he commented to the audience, “If I mess this up, you guys will know, but I will find out 10 minutes into the game.” 

As Kazupoon proceeded with his speedrun, he provided commentary to amuse the audience the entire time, also revealing insight on his gameplay strategies. According to some of his comments, he was able to tell which date it was in-game based on sounds, knew when to make a dialogue choice by listening to the heroine exhale and had predetermined what mini-games to choose to play based on whether they are beatable while blindfolded or not.

The player’s ambition to clear the game quickly above anything else gave birth to beautifully contradictory remarks such as “I can’t raise my determination stats too much or it will cause the Valentine’s day chocolate event to happen,” or “I have to ignore the heroine’s invitations over 10 times in order to proceed.” 

Finally, Kazupoon was able to reach the Fujisaki Shiori ending he had been aiming for, with a playtime of 1 hour and 57 minutes, exceeding his target by 47 minutes. As he reached the final scene, Kazupoon proceeded to recite the entire confession by heart, saying each section out loud right before the girl in the game did, causing the audience to finally lose it. 

While enough of a feat on its own, Kazupoon’s unique and frankly very challenging speedrun also gave birth to a well of meme-material, with users collecting and quoting his deadpan commentary to the point of some of them trending on X (formerly Twitter). The Tokimeki Memorial blindfolded Fujisaki Shiori run will no doubt remain a legendary contribution to speedrun history.