This is a review of kita e Diamond Dust for the PS2. I know most people don't have much expectations for this game as a renai game in the first place (including myself), but I'm a Hokkaido freak, so I bought it anyway.
In kita e, you travel to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, and meet girls while traveling around seeing sights from that beautiful island. The game uses real locations, that's its main selling point. Kita e Diamond Dust is very short - only 5 girls to complete. You can choose to start in 5 different cities - Hakodate, Sapporo, Asahikawa, Kitami, and Obihiro. You will then call up one of your friend that lives in your chosen city and he'll let you stay with him for the time being. You arrives by boat at Hokkaido in your father's car, and you proceeds to your destination.
Once there, you get a overview map and you choose to go where you want to go, either inside the city, the outskirts of the city, or to another one of the 5 main cities. You can choose to go to sightseeing spots or restaurants to try out (look at ^_^) some food. Every movement will cost you a certain amount of time and money. As you travel around, you will meet with one of the 5 heroines.
Generally, you won't know where to find the heroine, so you'll need to constantly use your cell phone to access a fortune telling web site, which will give you hints on where you can meet the girl next time. Unfortunately, they try to make this realistic, complete with multiple links that you have to click through and loading time, so it is very tedious. However, it is necessary to use this so you won't have to stumble around the city every hour every day.
This game uses a 'CBS' system, which is just Sakura Taisen's LIPS by another name. When you're having conversations with other people and the letters 'CBS' flash, you have to press the triangle button to bring up a window with choices. Sometimes if you wait a while and listen to the other person talk a bit more, a new choice will pop up. Instead of a bar timer in LIPS, the window border changes color to indicate how much time you have left to make a choice. Just like ST, see? :)
There is also a 'DBS' system, which works when you're traveling over longer distance (on a scale where you can see the whole Hokkaido map). Basically when you're driving pass a sightseeing spot, 'DBS' will flash. Press a button and you'll stop. Its a simple concept, I don't know why they have to make all these fancy acronyms for it.
The girl dating aspect isn't very fun, each city you're limited to only one girl, and usually you only get 1 encounter a day. So you have a lot of free time on your hands. I tried traveling back-and-forth between 2 cities (very time consuming and costly), but it isn't very practical, because sometimes the fortune telling website is too dumb and still gives you old information about the girl in the previous city. So unless you know exactly where to find the girls, two-timing is pretty hard :) As for the story, some are tear-jerkers, some are pretty normal and boring. Just about averages out.
If you don't want to bother with the renai part, you can just travel around the island for sightseeing. You can also try to collect all the ink stamps at the different 'michi no eki' on the island. I'm not too informed about Japan's transportation infrastructure, so I don't really know what they are. But from the game, they appear to be some sort of shops that people can stop at when on the road for resting and sightseeing. And they have ink stamps. Then again, every touristy place in Japan have stamps. :p I wonder why you can't collect stamps from other sightseeing spots? ^_-
There are probably over a hundred locations that you can travel to, and with some photoshop, the quality of pictures on those places are pretty good. Some simpler things, like a stream or water fall, are shown as a repeating video. However, those videos are pretty low res. Then there are higher res videos, for things like hot-air balloon or ropeway ride. It isn't the most comprehensive collection of sights for Hokkaido, but it does cover a lot of places, over the entire Hokkaido. And incentive to bring a girl along is that they act as tour guides and give you a bit more information about the places. And like the previous kita e, you get to see places in both summer and winter time. Two complaints I have is that I wish they had gone with the 3D city map like kita e White Illumination instead of an overhead map, and some places that you can go to in WI are no longer accessible.
In short, game play - thumbs down, story - thumb down, pictures & locations - thumbs up.
(I found this web site that explains what michi no eki are ... www.hozen.or.jp/michieki/ )