Ousama Renai (王様恋愛) Review

There was a time when Asa Project’s nickname in the Chinese community was “the face-meme studio,” thanks to those deranged expressions their characters pull. And the shameless gag romance plots, peaking with Renai 0 Kilometer.

But Asa Project themselves don’t seem happy with that reputation. After that came Kansetsu Renai and then everything afterward slowly dialed the “face memes” down — at first every heroine had them, then just one, and by now… you basically can’t find any. Personally I think Asa Project sees itself as a pure-love studio that expresses its stories through various definitions of “love.”

Every game they pick a new flavor of “love” and put it right there in the title — indirect love, two-timing love, triangle love, love rivalry, part-time-job love, side-character love… at this point I’m convinced they write “renai” in the title first and fill in the rest later.

After over a year, Asa Project is back with a new one: Ousama Renai (王様恋愛). The official blurb says the protagonist is a rich young heir who lives like a king every day, and the hook is “love initiated by the man.” At a glance it screams “domineering CEO sweeps me off my feet.” Then I finished the game and… no, that’s not what this is at all.

From King to Master

The game opens by telling us our hero is loaded — money, free time, a dedicated maid at home. Because he wants to know “what love is,” he goes out to meet women.

His first victim is the redhead. He names a price she can’t refuse, and she promptly becomes maid number two. He also pays his way into a girls’ school to “observe the common folk,” crossdresses for the bit, and mostly just hangs around his house, which is enormous, because the money is enormous…

Then the story enters territory I genuinely can’t follow. If the redhead was a chance encounter, what is going on with the ojou-sama, the half-blood sister, and the parade of self-proclaimed spies and masochist perverts who keep showing up? And the plot assumes the protagonist is already at max affection with every woman — nobody’s unhappy, everybody’s throwing themselves at him.

I know the guy is rich, but Asa Project, aren’t you the pure-love people? This version of “love” is a little too realistic.

And the protagonist starts out as an insufferable arrogant prick — he’s rich, so sure, fine. But early on the game gave me the impression it wanted to show an arrogant rich kid who doesn’t know what love is, meets more “ordinary people,” and gradually softens, becoming a better and different person…

Reader, I was dead wrong. The guy doesn’t change from start to finish. He stays the same cocky, posturing asshole the whole way, bullying every heroine with whatever bizarre kink he feels like. Every one of them, yes.

At times he’s pure flex: he refuses to jerk off himself, because a man of his station can’t be expected to do his own self-comfort, so even that has to be done by someone else — a maid at first, then other heroines. Reading that all I could think was, insane, bro. I assumed “king” in the title was a metaphor. It’s a noun.

The route structure is identical across the board: a blunt choice around the midpoint dumps you into a route. They advertise 8 romanceable characters, but they’re paired into groups, so you’re always romancing two at once — in plain terms, every ending is a threesome.

And the routes don’t differ story-wise. It’s just more kink variety: costumes, locations, the threesome “kinda-NTR” setup, and the final “two holes, one tool” bit…

It’s not that there’s zero story. Several characters get a quick flashback explaining why the protagonist and this person fell in “love” — the impoverished maid he took in as a child, the ojou-sama he fell for at first sight, the promise with the not-technically-blood-related sister, etc. But it’s over in a flash before the story dives straight into the fucking.

When the game was first announced it promised “a slightly H love story.” Now I get it: it means nukige. Asa Project used to at least try to write — even force — a “pure love” scenario. This time they gave up. Apart from that blink-and-you-miss-it flashback, it’s mostly training-style dialogue like “is Daddy’s dick big?”

Trying Very Hard to Save Money

Anyone who reads my blog knows my classic complaint about Asa Project: they constantly reuse background art from older games to cut costs. The legendary example is that cafe background they used for nearly 15 years. In later games they doubled down — more old backgrounds, more obvious, more lazy. At least there was always something new each time…

In this game the recycling reaches a new level. Backgrounds aren’t enough — the character sprites are reused too. From what I can remember, every heroine, or nearly every one, has a pose copied from an earlier game: same limbs and body, just a different outfit and hair. Every motion, every so-called “face meme,” is a limited-time re-run of old material. Backgrounds, obviously, are worse than ever — I honestly can’t recall a single new one.

Playtime is short too — around ten hours for everything. Every route is formulaic and half-assed: pick a route, cut instantly to a flashback establishing that the heroine “loved him long ago,” then routine sex. There isn’t even a proper confession, it seems.

The only route that actually tells a story is the maid’s — a bit about how they met and some snark about the protagonist. The rest… the writer clearly had no idea what to put there.

In the staff credits I saw a familiar sight: one scenario writer credited for writing, staging, UI design, and system design. They’re clearly short-staffed — that happened in earlier Asa Project games too — but here it feels lazier than ever. The writer handles staging… and this game has almost no staging. The UI is copy-pasted. The OP and ED are massively scaled down from the usual Asa Project style: no tacky 3D transitions, not even the classic “heroine’s running silhouette leads into the OP song and singer” bit…

What can I say. I can accept that Asa Project did their best to ship this and cut a lot of costs along the way — “done is better than perfect.” But did this one actually need to be done?

What Are We Even Expecting?

I’ve been playing Asa Project games for a long time. Scroll back far enough on this blog and you’ll find a ten-year-old post reviewing Renai 0 Kilometer in embarrassingly overwrought prose. The thing that defines Asa Project and draws people in is the comfy gag atmosphere and those viral “face memes” — honestly I think the face memes are the real core competency, the “Only Asa Can Do” thing. It’s why people nicknamed them the face-meme studio and why so many kept watching their releases.

No way Asa Project doesn’t know this. In Kansetsu Renai, right after Renai 0 Kilometer, the art of the face meme peaked and nobody’s topped it since… even though the game never got a translation and most people couldn’t read the raw, it still became prime reaction-image material.

Then something happened. Whether it was the studio’s own repositioning or the face memes just not selling copies, Asa Project’s games gradually downplayed them and started pushing “pure love,” trying to hook players with richer romance writing instead of memes. The funny part is they didn’t rip the face memes off all at once — they phased it out slowly, bit by bit. Then the artist change accelerated it. The themes kept reaching for new definitions of “love,” but the games got more and more boring and showed up in discussion threads less and less. Not bad, exactly — just no longer able to break out or get people to play. Back in the day Renai 0 Kilometer even pulled in Takenii, a guy whose entire diet is shooters and sports games.

So what do we, as visual novel players, actually want from Asa Project?

For me at least: more bits, more memes, more R18 gag-manga staging, and more absurd face memes. I never asked Asa Project for a soul-searing eternal-vow love story — if I want “immortal pure love” I have better options. Why would I pick Asa Project for that?

Even setting that aside — fine, chase “pure love.” But most visual novels are pure love, plenty of people do it better than you, and you’re not even good at it. That earlier angel game read like they were trying hard, and it landed at a solid-above-passing grade while sacrificing every other heroine’s route. A total net loss. If that’s your ceiling… go back to the gag-manga comfort zone.

And the sad part is, with their current production capacity they probably can’t go back. Resources are that tight — they cut corners even on a nukige. They don’t have the capital to return to the face-meme era.

A Nukige Short That Doesn’t Match Its Title

Honestly I feel a little sorry for Asa Project’s situation — watching them slide from gag comedy to pure love to this little disposable nukige, and based on what I know of other studios, the next step is a merger or bankruptcy.

You can tell in a lot of places that this game badly needed sales. Several school-uniform designs are absurdly horny, and the heroines’ breasts keep getting bigger, up to Renai 0 Kilometer levels. The funny thing is that this slapdash game actually got decent reviews — lots of people found it perfectly usable. Maybe the old fans have all quit, or maybe they’ve made peace with it like I have. As pure fap material, this one has maybe 70% of the Imouto Tengoku series’ power — at least those have animated CGs and the internal-countdown ejaculation thing, which this can’t touch.

If I have to nitpick it as a nukige, it’s the title. “Ousama Renai” — there isn’t really any renai in it. It’s more like a king’s game between a master and his sextoys. “King-Flavored Romance Play” would fit better.