Puppy Love Story, or わんわん愛情物語 (Wanwan Aijou Monogatari), is a visual novel released in 1995 as a launch title for the Casio Loopy. The script was written by Kenji Terada, well known for his storied career including foundational work on the Final Fantasy series. It's aimed at a younger audience, centred around growing up without losing touch with your childhood.

The game starts in a somewhat misleading way, so without spoiling anything I can only advise you to stick with it for a few minutes. Total play time is only about 2 hours, and there are some simple puzzles and minigames. Kids aged 9-12 may resonate the most with the themes explored in the game, but it can be enjoyed by all ages. As far as content, there's light fantasy violence, and some (kinda surprising) violence towards animals.

Of course, Loopy games are all about the stickers (or "seals"). But Puppy Love Story, as opposed to other launch titles which are essentially sticker makers, uses seals as a reward for completing the whole story. If you're itching to try it out, you can use the secret debug menu by holding LT+RT+B+Right during boot, or try my Puppy Trainer that will generate completed save files!

I've really enjoyed working on this, and had a lot of fun with the wonderful script. I believe this is the first Loopy game translated to English, and I hope not the last! (If you feel strongly about which one you'd like to play next, feel free to get in touch…) This year, 2025, marks the 30th anniversary of the Casio Loopy, and we want everyone to be able to experience this unique console!

As a bonus downloadable, to thank you for playing, I've included an English translated version of the manual (PDF, 10mb).

—Roger (@partlyhuman)

Patching

The patch should be applied to Wanwan Aijou Monogatari.bin, a big-endian dump of the commercial cartridge:

CRC32    10c5f568
MD5      fb86fc827b7fcd1fc457294523465377
SHA-1    4a306e64f5e4743d943efb41c6deb2af4dd85974
SHA-256  3ccdfd7db00110d6d13b23ca9eb2e8e448559055df2fa5356a80a5b1c00fcd72

Running

This was the only cartridge released for Loopy with expansion audio: samples are used for dog noises and other sound effects. The best way to get the full experience with expansion audio is using the Loopy My Seal Emulator. If you include the "pcm" folder full of numbered WAV files next to the ROM, MSE 0.4.0 or greater should recognize and use it. You can also flash the game to your Floopy Drive and play on a Loopy console. The expansion audio will not be heard, but the game is perfectly playable without it. You'll still get music and basic sound effects.

Credits

Romhacking — Kasami
Translation — Partlyhuman
Special Thanks — VideoDojo