Hitotsu Tobashi Renai (ひとつ飛ばし恋愛) Review

Back in elementary school, my family bought a VCD player.

I can’t remember the name of that player anymore. What I do remember is that it came bundled with a stack of pirated VCDs.

My dad bought it thinking “once we have this thing we can watch blockbusters at home,” and the discs they threw in were all big prestige movies, stuff like Mission Impossible. So we immediately fired up this fancy machine and watched Mission Impossible for a good long while.

Halfway through, neither my dad nor I could stand the movie. It wasn’t that the content was bad, it was just… boring to watch.

So for a long stretch after that, the VCD player just sat there gathering dust, because there was nothing worth watching.

Then one day, my dad brought home a Hao Shaowen movie, probably one that wasn’t allowed to be shown in mainland China. It was called Dog-Egged Soldiers (狗蛋大兵), a Taiwanese film, and it had a few things in it that didn’t quite line up with mainland orthodox thinking. Even so, it was a comedy, and the comedy-forward content had the whole family doubled over. That’s when I realized the VCD player still had a use.

After that, my dad started making regular trips to the local pirated-VCD shop hunting for comedies. So we ended up watching a ton of Hao Shaowen and Stephen Chow movies, and a lot of classics too. On a side note, thanks to this thing I also watched Stephen Chow’s A Chinese Odyssey series very early on. I thought it was pretty meh at the time, and honestly it only became a masterpiece much later anyway.

From then on, our VCD player was basically playing comedy nonstop. Comedies of every style and type. My dad and I were probably born to be crude people who can’t handle blockbusters and deep, meaningful films. We got our kicks from all those absurd little stories.

But soon we’d nearly run through all the comedies, and the VCD player was already sliding into obsolescence. We never bought a DVD player. I went off to high school, my dad rarely hunted for discs anymore, and he rarely dragged me along to watch comedies either.

Still, some impressions stuck with me. About Stephen Chow, about Ng Man-tat, about Hao Shaowen.

Years later, I don’t remember exactly when I next saw Hao Shaowen. I just remember that at some point, I saw Stephen Chow again.

He was still making movies, still doing that mo lei tau style, and still prolific. Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu. But I watched for a while and found nothing to laugh at.

Same familiar voice, same familiar comedy style, but those two movies felt like they were missing something. Can’t say if it was the plot or something else. For a while I thought it was Ng Man-tat’s absence, but then I realized Shaolin Soccer does have Ng Man-tat in it…

The answer finally came to me much later, after I saw Crazy Stone and the Lost in Thailand series.

The reason was simple: I’d gotten sick of it.

And soon enough, even the Lost in Thailand and Crazy Stone style got old fast, though plenty of people still can’t get enough. Later I watched Gintama and discovered a whole new world, but after several episodes back to back, I started feeling like I couldn’t take it anymore either.

Sometimes I think comedies are genuinely hard to make, because everyone builds up a kind of immunity to jokes. It’s like tickling. Tickling someone once might make them laugh. Keep tickling the same spot and they stop laughing. Keep going and… their skin starts to bleed.

Which brings me to that Jian Bing Man thing from a while back. I literally gagged.

It reminds me of that scene in Hail the Judge: half a pancake is a lifeline to a starving man, a decent meal to a man who isn’t that hungry, and even to a man who’s already full it can be a little snack to chew on.

But if you force a whole mouthful of pancake down someone’s throat, hungry or not, it’s torture.

Everything has its limit. I think that goes for visual novels too.

Hitotsu Tobashi Renai (ひとつ飛ばし恋愛) is an older Asa Project title, sitting between 恋愛0キロメートル and プラマイウォーズ. I’ve already mentioned this studio’s traits twice: a heavy parody style, and sprites absolutely loaded with gag faces. It looks like a con, but I enjoy it.

I wasn’t especially satisfied with the studio’s 2015 release, プラマイウォーズ. Compared to the earlier 恋愛0キロメートル, it felt much more restrained, like it was holding itself back. I didn’t really get it at the time, but after finishing Hitotsu Tobashi Renai, I finally understood why things turned out that way.

Hitotsu Tobashi Renai screwed me over right from the title. The first time I saw the name, I read it as “A Love That Flies.” Why? Well, ひとつ means “once,” and 飛ばし means to let fly, so together it’s “a love that flies free.” But as a translation it ought to be more literary, so “A Love Like Flying” it is. Combined with the airplane-shaped form in the game’s OP, I even felt proud of how faithful and elegant I’d been…

But soon I realized the title was off, and I had a feeling things wouldn’t be that simple. Much like how プラマイウォーズ carries the meaning of “Plus Minus,” I started digging through dictionaries. 飛ばしの辞書形は飛ばすだ、そして、飛ばすの意味は何ですかな。。。

See “skip”? That’s the real meaning. “ひとつ飛ばし恋愛” is “a love that skips one,” or to put it more literarily, “a love one person removed.”

And the game’s official site makes it obvious with its big tagline, “fall in love with a friend of a friend.” The meaning of the title clicks right away.

So as “a love one person removed” suggests, the romanceable characters in Hitotsu Tobashi Renai are all friends of the protagonist’s friends: his sister’s friend, his little sister’s friend, his childhood friend’s friend, and a relative’s friend.

Honestly it doesn’t matter who you’re going after. Each heroine comes from far and wide, all brought together by the shared ideal of getting banged by the protagonist. So no matter how you tweak the attributes, it all leads to the same place. The only thing is that the “friend of a friend” gimmick inevitably runs into a problem: how the protagonist relates to that friend in the middle.

As you’d expect, these friends of the protagonist’s friends, the people in the middle, are all female…

“Will there be a love triangle?” “Will there be NTR?” “Will there be a White Album MKII?”

You’re overthinking it!

If you really want to call it a love triangle, only one route has one, and the others barely register. Overall, the “friend of a friend” romance setup is more of a framework than anything. It doesn’t do the game any favors; it actually makes it worse. And the scenario’s overconfident flexing on all the non-main plot just grinds the game into a pile of cookie crumbs cobbled together from disconnected gags.

As a visual novel, the common route should introduce the heroines, build the protagonist’s character, and kick off the main story. Hitotsu Tobashi Renai has no main story, so naturally it should introduce the heroines—but since most of the plot is “friend of a friend,” it has to introduce the friends first… Then after introducing the friends and bringing out the friends of friends, the protagonist’s friends are close to him while the friends of friends aren’t, so the protagonist…

Starts shooting the breeze with his friends instead of the friends of friends!

First up, the protagonist’s older and younger sisters.

The older sister I can only describe as a bitch, a total demon, scheming and messing with the protagonist for her own amusement from start to finish, like he’s her personal toy. Usually a character like that would have another side, but the game never shows it. She’s terrifyingly calm, terrifyingly sneaky, terrifyingly well-informed—like Soma Hiromi from Working!!, knowing everything and everyone, but constantly cornering the protagonist. And every time the protagonist tries to get closer to a heroine, this pervert swoops in right on cue and makes things worse. It made me want to reach through the screen and punch her.

The younger sister should be a moe point as the imouto character, but her accent is exactly like Kinoshita Hideyoshi from Baka and Test, going “aniki” this and “aneue” that, straight-up old-man speech. Imagine a little sister at home who doesn’t call you “onii-chan” but “Elder Brother, it is time for your meal.” See if you can still find that moe. She’s also a foul-mouthed tsundere who often joins that bitchy sister in making fun of her brother. The protagonist’s life couldn’t be more miserable—two tigresses in the house. I genuinely feel for the guy…

The only useful thing in the common route is Kotobuki Risa, the one heroine who grabs enough screen time, though it’s not good screen time. Maybe Asa Project figured Nokia’s gag faces in 恋愛0キロメートル were well received, so they copied the formula and crammed even more shamelessly over-the-top gag faces onto Risa. The result is her face is never straight 100% of the time. Every appearance, dirty jokes and gag faces fly everywhere, flying for half an hour, flying until you forget where the plot was…

So the whole common route is 30% the older sister’s scheming, 30% the younger sister’s snark, 30% Risa’s gag faces, and the remaining 10% belongs to the other heroines.

So what kind of common route is this??? Huh???

Since you’re going after friends of friends, apart from Risa—whether it’s the sister’s friend and swim club senior Aoki Natsume, the childhood friend’s good friend Tamamori Sakura, or the little sister’s good friend Sonohara Aori—their! presence! is! pitifully! low! They only pop up now and then in daily scenes before vanishing again. What fills the screen is always that bitchy sister, the snarky little sister, and the girl whose face is never straight, Risa. The content has nothing to do with romance—it’s all dirty jokes and teasing. Also the little sister’s CV performance is pretty bad; listening to it gives me goosebumps. Risa is voiced by the famous Ono Ryoko, but because the character is so over-the-top, you can’t feel any of her charm…

The endless common route finally ends, so I get my chance at the individual routes. And what do I get… aside from Sonohara Aori’s route having a bit of actual “romance” flavor, the rest are way too half-assed…

Aori’s route does have foreshadowing from the prologue: the two meet on the train, later discover she’s the protagonist’s little sister’s good friend, and get to know each other. Then one day the protagonist gets the idea to go to school early, bumps into her on the train again, mutual feelings develop, and the two start making excuses to meet on the train as often as possible. The protagonist deliberately gets up early, Aori deliberately waits for him. Over time feelings deepen and he confesses. After the confession they start dating, but then it turns out the protagonist’s little sister has a brocon thing and won’t accept her brother being stolen by her good friend. The protagonist decides to keep the relationship with Aori secret, but it leaks anyway. In the end the little sister comes around, accepts it, and grows up a bit. Happy End.

Sounds decent, right? Yeah, because this is the only route in the whole game that’s worth a damn. If Aori’s CV weren’t Mizuhashi herself, with more than enough skill to carry it, this route wouldn’t land either. The little sister’s anger is pure comedy-level—the old-man-accent girl’s sulking amounts to hiding out working at a café. By comparison, Aori and the protagonist’s daily station dates are genuinely romantic, and the final confession at the station is a lot of fun.

Of course, apart from that route, everything else is pretty sloppy…

This game has a route for Risa, the gag-face queen, and it is extremely… bullshit. Risa is a friend of the protagonist’s relatives, so one day she comes over for dinner, drinks too much, passes out at his house, and the next morning wakes up to find herself and the protagonist lying there naked together. Risa screeches that he has to take responsibility, and the protagonist has no choice but to agree to be her boyfriend. The same day she agrees, Risa drags him around to every friend, announcing “This is my boyfriend!” Then one day the protagonist discovers Risa has a habit of stripping naked in her sleep, realizes nothing actually happened that night, and that he’d been played. Risa plays dumb. Pissed off, he bangs her right there in the classroom. After that he gets addicted, three rounds a day, the protagonist feels great, Risa feels great. Then one day Risa learns the protagonist has a marriage promise with her own sister—the protagonist’s cousin (or second cousin, I forget)—Achika, made when Achika’s mother was gravely ill and the two made a vow in front of her. Risa realizes she’s NTR’d her beloved sister, is devastated, then goes to ask her sister’s forgiveness. Achika is totally calm: “Whatever, I forgot all about that.” In the end it turns out the one hung up on it is Achika’s father. After some back-and-forth, Achika’s father accepts the protagonist dating Risa, and it’s over.

The dumbest part of this route is that from start to finish, the protagonist never has any romantic feelings for Risa. He just says she feels great to bang. When he learns about the marriage promise with Achika, he says he doesn’t care, he’d be fine dumping Risa and marrying Achika, Risa is just good in bed. And in the route’s finale, one time he uses lube while banging Risa, finds it way better, so in the end he says the one he really loves is the lube, not Risa…

Bullshit, right? Total bullshit! This route is just making stuff up as it goes…

As for the other two routes, Tamamori Sakura and Aoki Natsume: in the former, the protagonist wants to surprise his childhood friend together with Sakura, but the two end up spending more and more time together, the childhood friend starts playing wingman, and they get together in the end. In the latter, the protagonist goes to Natsume-senpai for advice to help his buddy’s love life, and the two fall for each other. Natsume’s route also has that demon of an older sister stirring things up—she does help a bit, but mostly she’s just watching the show…

Going after a friend of a friend should bring love triangles, but sadly this game barely shows any. There should be a triangle between Tamamori Sakura and the protagonist’s childhood friend, but the route never really addresses it. She just keeps playing wingman the whole time, and only at the very end says she’s lonely—too late by then.

And the older sister in Natsume’s route is even funnier. She keeps stirring things up and enjoying the show, then gets angry when she finds out the protagonist and Natsume are dating. Not out of jealousy—just because she has nothing to amuse herself with anymore. Natsume naively goes to apologize, and the perverted sister realizes there’s new entertainment to be found after all, and everything goes back to normal.

So this older sister really is a total creep. She’s literally a demon. And the protagonist in the game calls her 鬼だ！ more than once.

So Hitotsu Tobashi Renai, a game built on the premise of “dating a friend of a friend,” doesn’t hold up at its foundation. The only route you can call romance is Sonohara Aori’s, and only part of it. Everything else is pure messing around and parody. Even if Natsume’s and Tamamori Sakura’s routes have romantic elements, the scenario writer gives more screen time to the “protagonist’s friend jokes” woven throughout. You’d say the jokes take up “80%,” romance only “10%,” and the remaining “10%” is HCGs. Even so, the game doesn’t have many CGs. In the common route I swear I barely saw a handful of images, and individual routes have few outside the H-scenes. Pitiful compared to other games.

I do find the jokes and gag faces in the game funny, but the title has “恋愛” in it, damn it. That’s off-topic, buddy.

Looking back, maybe 恋愛0キロメートル’s success gave Asa Project a taste for it, and they concluded one-sidedly that its success came from gag faces and parody, so they went all-out on Hitotsu Tobashi Renai, trying to press their advantage and build the brand.

Little did they know 恋愛0キロメートル had more than just gag faces. Whether it was the triangle over the sisters buying a ring or the Nokia family-film scene, those were the essential parts that gave you warmth and a girlish feel beyond the gag faces. With those, 恋愛0キロメートル succeeded and left you with a bit of Girls Song after all the girl-chaos.

So Hitotsu Tobashi Renai is a game that played itself out on “cram in jokes” and “crank up gag faces.” The staff must have realized this too, because the next game reined it in a lot—but then reined it in too much. The new gag-face heroine loses her gag faces as soon as she enters her route. Too cautious, and it still didn’t produce many highlights. At least プラマイウォーズ’s older-sister route is decent. Yeah. I just hope next time Asa Project changes out that inherited café background.

So how do I put it—after finishing this game, I feel like a starving man who wanted to find a bit of joy and warmth to satisfy his appetite. After all, I’d been eating a lot of shit recently.

So someone hands me a pancake, a pancake called Hitotsu Tobashi Renai.

I take a bite and it tastes pretty good. I’m not hungry anymore. But the pancake is too big and I can’t finish it. I like gag faces, I like jokes, but a game like Hitotsu Tobashi Renai that piles on jokes and crams in gag faces—I still can’t stomach it…

“Can’t finish it? Nonsense! Someone come feed Mr. Li his pancake!”

…………………………

Fin.