To Heart

To Heart is a romance visual novel. Its gameplay requires little player interaction as much of the game's duration is spent on reading the text that appears on the screen, which represents the story's narrative and dialogue. The text is accompanied by character sprites, which represent who Hiroyuki is talking to, over background art. Throughout the game, the player encounters CG artwork at certain points in the story, which take the place of the background art and character sprites.

A gallery of the viewed CGs and played background music is available on the game's title screen. To Heart follows a branching plotline with multiple endings, and depending on the decisions that the player makes during the game, the plot will progress in a specific direction.

Set at a high school in the near future, the main character, Hiroyuki Fujita, is a student. He encounters ten pretty girls, including his childhood friend Akari and a maid robot Multi HMX-12, and must make the right decisions so as to win their hearts. In the anime adaptation, the story focuses on the relationship between Hiroyuki and Akari.

Hiroyuki Fujita (藤田 浩之, Fujita Hiroyuki)

After completing Shizuku and Kizuato, main planner and scenario writer Tatsuya Takahashi began conceptualizing the third entry to the Leaf Visual Novel Series, which would later become To Heart. Takahashi originally considered creating a story with dark fantasy and gothic themes, but changed his approach in order to avoid making three consecutive works with dark themes. He then settled on creating a romance, and later incorporated comical elements. Early in development, Takahashi consulted frequent collaborator Tōru Minazuki for the creation of the story.

The two originally considered creating the story and characters entirely by themselves, but after Minazuki expressed his concern that having only six heroines is not enough to exemplify a romance theme, the two asked writer Saki Aomura and illustrator Hisashi Kawata to assist in the project's development. Out of the ten heroines created, Takahashi wrote the scenarios for Akari, Multi, Tomoko, Serika, Aoi, and Ayaka; Aomura authored the scenarios for Lemmy, Kotone, and Shiho; and the scenario for Rio was written by a third writer named Udaru Harada. Minazuki designed and illustrated Takahashi's characters, while Kawata illustrated the remaining characters.

On release, the video game magazine Famitsu scored the PlayStation version of the game a 30 out of 40. In the October 2007 issue of Dengeki G's Magazine, poll results for the 50 best bishōjo games were released. Out of 249 titles, To Heart ranked 19th with 14 votes.