Renai X Royale (恋爱Ｘロウイアル) Review

Asa Project’s title from last year was probably their best game in recent years, and the main reason is that they gave up on their usual “dumbass romance setup” and turned the content straight into close-quarters, hand-to-hand catfighting. You can actually see the rare scenario where the protagonist picks one heroine, and another heroine who’s clearly already lost keeps showing up to try and steal him away. In a normal visual novel, once the protagonist enters a route, all the other heroines instantly vanish…

That rare brand of infighting actually gave last year’s Asa Project a bit of a “pure love” feel. The love-hate drama between the girls and the protagonist, all that Mary Sue-flavored content, let a lot of otaku find that long-lost “romantic comedy” feel, so plenty of praise naturally followed.

So Asa Project probably figured out a new formula that suits them—at least it’s way more solid than the dumbass nonsense they used to pull, like “indirect romance,” “swapped romance,” “long-distance romance,” “love triangles,” and whatever else. And with that, the ugly nature of Japanese capitalists revealed itself: Asa Project announced this year’s new game, Renai X Royale (恋愛Ｘロウイアル). What’s it mean? It’s just Love X Royale. Personally I’m convinced the “Royale” here is totally short for “Battle Royale,” so I’d translate it straight as Love Battle Royale.

Battle royale—you know how it goes. Played PUBG? Everyone fights to the death, only one winner. This is blatantly a game where the heroines tear each other apart to the bitter end.

The setup is dead simple and brutal. Our protagonist starts out as a boy who claims to be totally ordinary; he’s got a yandere little sister at home who’s obsessed with her big bro, and at school he shoots the shit with his buddy, who ribs him with “you’ll never get a girlfriend”—which hits a nerve, hard. The protagonist thinks, hey, I’m not some fat loser, I don’t code, I don’t use Arch Linux, I don’t do Python—there’s no reason I should be single. So all fired up, he runs into the student council president at school, sees she’s a girl, and immediately hits on her. Except that flirting flips the president’s horny switch and she falls head over heels for him on the spot.

After flirting with the student council president, he goes to class, and a new pink-haired transfer student shows up. The moment she introduces herself, she launches an attack on the protagonist, declaring she’s his fiancée and that they’re getting married. Boom, chaos. Just that morning the protagonist was moping about nobody wanting him, and now suddenly he’s hot shit. The pink-haired girl says her name is Mari and that she and the protagonist pledged themselves to each other as kids, and now she’s come back to marry him.

Naturally, our protagonist says he doesn’t remember knowing this pink-haired girl from childhood. He does vaguely recall playing a lot with some girl as a kid, but whether it’s this pink-haired one—yeah, forgot. (Yes, we all damn well know it’s this pink-haired girl, and we all know the protagonist will forget.)

Even so, the pink-haired girl shamelessly follows the protagonist home and crashes at his place, achieving literal cohabitation. And the protagonist remains utterly unfazed, his heart still yearning to be a loser. Then his buddy drags him to see the hottest local idol duo, and when the protagonist sees the two girls—one brown-haired, one purple-haired—especially the purple-haired one, he grins.

Turns out one of them is the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend. The purple-haired one.

It was a cold winter day, and the protagonist, again dragged by his buddy to an idol show—he wasn’t even into idols, but seeing a live performance for the first time, he felt the beauty of it.

After the show let out, he met a girl, purple-haired, and looking closer, she was one of the idols who’d just performed. The idol approached him and invited him to grab a bite. She even busted out some humblebrag nonsense about never having eaten such peasant food and how delicious it was, and thanked him for keeping her company. They exchanged WeChat, one thing led to another, and they confessed. After that, the protagonist discovered this purple-haired idol was hella flirty, always getting up close and personal, and even introduced him to her partner—the other idol, the brown-haired girl.

Just as the purple-haired girl was about to take things further—they’d kissed, so sex was the obvious next step, right?—the protagonist looks at her face and suddenly the image of that pink-haired girl he played with as a kid pops into his head. He remembers he might’ve pledged himself to some pink-haired girl in childhood, and instantly goes limp. He refuses to sleep with the purple-haired girl.

The purple-haired girl notices something’s off and asks what’s wrong. The protagonist, being an idiot, tells her the truth—that seeing her reminds him of a girl from his childhood. The purple-haired girl assumes he hasn’t gotten over his first love and breaks up with him. They never contact each other again.

And that’s the origin of the protagonist’s “ex-girlfriend.”

Now the game gets to the point. Whether it’s the pink-haired childhood friend from his past, the yandere blonde little sister obsessed with her bro, the white-haired student council president he accidentally charmed at school, the purple-haired ex-girlfriend who reappears before him, or the brown-haired girl—the purple-haired one’s partner who’s always scheming to steal her boyfriend—five women surround this one man and launch a merciless war of attrition. There’s a school legend: if you confess under the tree on Christmas Eve, the two of you will be together forever. All five heroines roll up their sleeves and begin the final PK.

Though I honestly don’t know what’s so great about the protagonist… he’s clearly a scumbag, right?

Anyway, the game also has a simple, brutal branching system. Basically, on Christmas night all the heroines come confess to the protagonist one by one, and whoever you pick is who you get. Pass on one, and you can pick the next…

Pink Hair: Hanamaru Mari

The protagonist’s “default” childhood friend, the center position on the game’s promo art, and his earliest “first love.” If you reject the white-haired president’s tsundere pleas twice in a row on Christmas night, you’ll hit the pink-haired Hanamaru Mari route.

There’s honestly not much to say about this route, because after entering it the protagonist’s brain suddenly overclocks and he instantly remembers that he was indeed connected to Hanamaru Mari as a kid, and that they pledged themselves to each other. It’s just that Mari had to move away and dumped him, so he got sulky and refused to acknowledge her. That’s also why he kept pretending not to know her when they met again—he was still mad…

Believe that reason or not, I… barely believe it.

Then the story fast-forwards to Mari deciding to seal her girlfriend status by sleeping with the protagonist, but wouldn’t you know it—because Mari usually acts so dumb, looking at her face like she’s mentally deficient, the protagonist… goes limp.

And to solve the protagonist’s impotence problem, Mari actually goes to his ex-girlfriend, the purple-haired one, to complain: “Why didn’t you train him properly back then?!”

My face at that moment was the face of someone who’d just fucked a panda, and the Weibo masses agreed.

In the end, the story doesn’t progress much—just Mari fighting all the other heroines to secure her main heroine spot, and they barely manage to get married.

The end…

This is the dumbest heroine route I’ve ever seen. First time I’ve seen a mentally deficient girl put in the center position.

White Hair: Ryōzen Shione

The tsundere of the game, a boy-crazy girl who falls for the protagonist for no discernible reason—according to the game, the reason is just that the protagonist flirted with her that one morning out of spite. And yet such a seemingly dumbass move makes her love him to death, to a point I can’t comprehend.

She’s the familiar tsundere type—likes the protagonist but has to act tough—but she’s got a black-haired maid at home who constantly snarks at her with a straight face, and that’s actually the most fun part of the game.

Once you enter her route there’s not much to say either—still slice-of-life jealousy and fighting—but this route actually has branches, including a little interlude where Shione feels guilty about the maid after getting a boyfriend, plus a flashback about how the maid was taken in by Shione’s family as a kid and how they’re like sisters.

To resolve her guilt, Shione proposes a horrifying idea: why don’t the two sisters share a boyfriend?

So the protagonist goes and does it with Shione’s black-haired maid, and in the end he marries Shione. The end.

Story-wise this route is pretty stupid, but it’s also the most entertaining, mainly because the maid’s snark accounts for 90% of the fun. It’s what I recommend most.

Blonde: Komachi Nonoka

If the protagonist rejects the pink-haired and white-haired girls on Christmas night and also skips the two idols’ school performance, he’ll go home lonely and get an option: “Do you think your sister is fine too?” Accept, and you’re on the little sister route.

In most games the sister route is a mainstay, but here the sister is basically an NPC. It feels like the protagonist is with her purely because “I had no other choice.” Aside from occasionally threatening him in a yandere tone to express her bro-con, she has almost no presence.

The sister route’s plot is even simpler: the protagonist got dumped by the pink-haired girl as a kid, then dumped by the purple-haired girl later. The sister feels bad for him and wants to warm her brother’s heart, so she becomes even more bro-con—even installing a tracking bug on him, secretly watching what he does every night and masturbating while she’s at it. Truly a hero among female perverts.

There’s not much to this route. At most, everyone’s shocked the protagonist chose his sister, and they end up having a daughter who’s born with a talent for crazy facial expressions. Oh right, the sister also shares her brother with her best friend, letting him take the friend’s virginity. Unbelievable.

By the way, the CV for the sister route is Anzu Mitsu, and her voice is genuinely awful here. I’ve never heard her sound this twisted.

Brown Hair: Amagamine Renna

If the protagonist chooses to go see the idol performance on Christmas night—really to see his ex—he’ll find that the brown-haired Renna confesses to him before the purple-haired girl does. Accept, and you’re on her route.

How to put this route… it’s relatively “seriously written,” but the story is really hard to describe. Because in this route you see that Amagamine Renna is both a realistic and a very affected person.

As a kid, Renna saw idols on TV and said she wanted to be one, so her rich mom set up an agency and brought in an idol prospect (the purple-haired Kiyu Yuna) to mentor her daughter into stardom. Renna tagged along with Yuna every day, copied her, became an idol too, and they formed a duo. But the popular one was always Yuna, not Renna—probably everyone saw Renna as Yuna’s stepping stone. Renna was pissed and always wanted to surpass Yuna. Then one day Yuna suddenly announced she had a boyfriend, and when Renna saw him (our idiot protagonist), she was consumed with envy. Later, when she heard Yuna and her boyfriend broke up, Renna was secretly thrilled—even thinking she should steal him for herself.

My impression is that this Renna operates on a child’s logic: whatever someone else has, she wants too, and it only tastes good if she snatches it from them. Truly, the grass is always greener.

In the end, naturally, they get married. Yuna doesn’t agonize over her ex at all, and the game even stages a fake final showdown between Yuna and Renna for the protagonist. To me, Yuna wins hands down, and the protagonist’s choice remains stupid. But the most gracious one is Yuna—she quits being an idol and moves into acting instead.

Purple Hair: Kiyu Yuna

Yuna is the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend. On Christmas night, if you go to her, you can get back together.

Then the story gets very by-the-numbers: the protagonist no longer has any impotence issues—after all, he’ll never think of that idiot pink-haired girl again—so they can just bang. They even have an HCG of them going at it until dawn. Holy shit, I screamed holy shit!

Apart from the confession, the story is mostly the same as Renna’s route. Renna sees Yuna get back together with him, goes all fragile, and after a bunch of messy drama, Renna finally blesses their relationship.

Then Yuna says she’s quitting idols to go into acting and study abroad, which might mean a long-distance relationship…

The protagonist agrees, they spend their final days together, and later Yuna returns as a successful actress. The end.

Honestly, I don’t think Asa Project’s game this time can be described through its plot, because its appeal isn’t in the story—it’s in the gags and the infighting. The internal battles among all the heroines are the most worthwhile part, and the biggest highlights in all that infighting are two characters’ snark: the black-haired maid, and the protagonist’s cuck—oh, I mean green-haired buddy.

I’d say wherever the maid and the buddy are, that’s the MVP zone. Scenes with them are never boring. A lot of people call Asa Project the “facial expression studio,” but I think that’s inaccurate. In this game, Asa Project gives each heroine plenty of crazy expressions, and that exaggerated style leans more toward “gag manga.” Unlike other visual novels that simulate youthful romance with a realistic bent, if you look at Renai X Royale through the lens of a gag manga, you’ll get the jokes too. And like most gag manga, the protagonist often doesn’t definitively choose one heroine—but this is a visual novel, so routes are mandatory. Renai X Royale learned from the previous game: even after the protagonist picks a heroine, the other women don’t disappear—they fight even harder, actively joining the fray and cranking up the comedy.

Renai X Royale is a big step up comedy-wise, and correspondingly weak on romance. You’ll hardly see any depiction of “the protagonist gradually falling in love with the heroine”—it’s all verbal “I like you,” so it’s instantly “love.” Romance becomes a game of strategy. I really don’t recommend treating this as a “romance simulation”; focus on the comedy. Just like you don’t listen to stand-up comedy for pure romance, you won’t feel any romantic emotion in Renai X Royale. Anyone looking for true love in this game will only be disappointed—but then again, does anyone talk about love in an Asa Project game? They’ve tried before, but have they ever succeeded?

If you just want a laugh from a visual novel, Renai X Royale is a great fit. If you want Mary Sue romance, then you’re definitely as brain-damaged as the pink-haired main heroine.

By the way, as a comedy romance, Renai X Royale takes its parodies to the extreme—you can even pursue all the side heroines and male side characters, including the white-haired president and the two bros.

Oh right, one of the bros turns out to be a cute girl when you pursue him. But a true bro never disappoints—after you reject all the girls and choose to enter an ending with the green-haired bro, you’ll find your own Homo Happiness.

Yes, for comedy’s sake all the characters are heavily template-ized, but only the black-haired maid and the green-haired bro in the final True End are the only two normal people in the game.

Since the title itself says love is a brutal battle royale, the winner’s declaration of “Winner winner, chicken dinner” tells us whose route is the real True End.

There are nine pursuable characters including the bros, and only a bro has a “chicken.” Think about it?

Oh right, Asa Project’s most important inherited café background (and inherited shopping mall, inherited sky, inherited…) is back!

Excited? Surprised?