Hataraku Otona no Ren'ai Jijou (働くオトナの恋愛事情) Review

A long time ago—though looking back now, it wasn’t that long—I was out to dinner with some friends. They asked why I wasn’t looking for a partner. I’d already lost weight, so was I still hung up on that fujoshi who’d toyed with me, or was my orientation just broken?

At first I refused to answer. But refusing to answer only makes things worse. Being mistaken for a simp drooling over some crazy bitch, or for a pathetic freak who turned gay because he got dumped—either way, it’s bad news.

So I thought about it and gave a careful reply.

“Because, uh, I don’t really know how to deal with women. They’re hard to figure out. It’s stressful. And kind of a hassle.”

My friend blinked, then burst out laughing.

Then came the lecture. Same old “I’ve seen this a million times” bullshit. He, a “veteran who’s banged every kind of woman” and a “senior in the battlefield of love,” was going to “give me some life experience.”

He yammered on with a bunch of advice. I just kept shaking my head.

“You can just ask a girl from a matchmaking service out to dinner right away!” “Most of the time I look at their photo and want to puke, let alone ask them out.”

“You can invite a girl from work to a movie at night. Doesn’t have to be romantic.” “There are no girls at my work. Only Transformers disguised as girls.”

“You can hit on girls near the sports field!” “Near the sports field there are only skinny guys and old men in tank tops. No girls.”

“You like ACG stuff, right? Go to a convention and pick up girls there.” “At conventions it’s all winners banging cosplay thots. I’m just air when I go.”

“Next time I organize a party, I’ll bring a few girls and create opportunities for you.” “I fucking hate karaoke. It’s too loud.”

“You’re good with the internet. Use WeChat’s drift bottle and Momo or whatever.” “I am not going to use hookup apps, goddammit.”

“You can walk around on the weekend and strike up conversations with girls on the street.” “If I have free time on the weekend, I play Galgame.” “Then when the hell are you going to meet girls if you don’t go out?” “If I go out and start hitting on girls all over the street, am I some kind of pervert?” “…”

My repeated answers made him a bit impatient. He scratched his head, clapped his hands together, and delivered his final move.

“Well, if that’s how it is, you’ll just have to go to a prostitute.” “Fuck off!” “I’m serious.” “Fuck off!” “No lie, a guy like you who freezes up around women should just find an experienced woman to give you a good fuck and you’ll be cured.” “Fuck off!” “Damn… you’ll understand eventually. Everything leads to the same place. It’s called accumulating experience. Like fighting monsters—you know EXP? Without experience, how do you level up?” “Shit… why don’t you go to a prostitute?” “I want to, but my wife won’t let me!” “Then keep fucking off!”

After the argument, things calmed down again.

“I think…” my friend started again, “you’ve probably played too many Galgames. You’re stuck in the illusion of school romance. Real adult love isn’t like that anymore. If I showed you a love story for adults, you’d probably understand reality better, huh?”

“Adult love? Don’t give me that. I know how it works. Every day after work you go out to hook up. You see a girl and immediately grovel. You use crude language to get her back to your place and fuck her. Sex first, commitment later? And sometimes no commitment at all?”

My friend nodded.

“Setting aside whether I could even pull that off, I think it’s boring as hell.”

“Unfortunately,” my friend took a sip of water, “that’s exactly how boring it is. You’re not some girl addicted to Qiong Yao novels. Love itself is just the artistic expression of mating.”

“If there were a Galgame that specifically did an adult love story, I feel it wouldn’t be any more refined than those borderline urban erotica on Qidian. In your words, it’d be just as boring.” He added that as a final note.

Of course, I never thought that hypothetical would become reality. A company actually did release a Galgame focused on “love stories for working adults.” That’s Akabee Soft 3’s Hataraku Otona no Ren’ai Jijou.

The title says it all: the current state of love stories for working adults. If I remember right, the Japanese word “jijou” emphasizes “the state of things now” rather than just “things” themselves. So the title probably has a bit of that “fifty years of crosstalk: the current state” vibe.

The game’s setup is easy to guess. The protagonist is a young man fresh into the workforce—an office worker, a member of society, a corporate slave. He has no romantic experience and lives an ordinary life. One day after work, a senior colleague asks if he has plans tonight and invites him to a bar. He agrees, taking his first step into nightlife.

His first time at the bar, he’s nervous and clueless. Luckily the older guy and the people at the bar are friendly enough, and he quickly gets the hang of things. Then one night, the senior can’t make it, so the protagonist goes alone. At the bar he meets an older woman drowning her sorrows over life’s disappointments. According to her, the protagonist is “young and pretty”—she’s very interested in a virgin like him. She seduces him and drags him to a public restroom by the road, where she fucks him on the spot… (not quite rape; he’s half-willing, since he’s inexperienced). After that, he loses his virginity and enters a new world.

Having had sex, the protagonist feels less awkward around women. He starts openly telling dirty jokes with a female senior at work. He begins noticing the women around him: a female student on the street, Asuka, Sayoko, a part-time worker at the bar, Yurika, a former classmate, Tomoe, and his office senior, Miyu, among others… And through his daily work, he starts interacting with them.

After that, the story enters a steady phase. Actually, it stays steady right to the end. The protagonist first changes his hairstyle on the advice of a woman at the bar, then starts working out on the advice of a former classmate. With his lifestyle changed, he gets better and better at navigating the world of romance, and encounters keep coming. He meets a girl while jogging at night who throws herself at him; at a convenience store, a runaway schoolgirl offers herself; even at a class reunion, an old classmate confesses her feelings. Walking through society, he meets all kinds of women. With his looks, physique, and not-too-shy conversation, he gains many women’s favor and becomes a full-fledged “madame killer.”

This reminds me of one of the game’s taglines: “All heroines are virgins.” By this point in the main story, the protagonist has already slept with at least four women, but none of them are “virgins,” and he’s no virgin either. The encounters are pure one-night stands. The individual routes haven’t started yet—ah, right, those women are just extras, not true heroines.

So where are the heroine routes? The individual routes are where you pick one of the romanceable characters and reach an ending. It’s a Galgame, so those heroine routes do live up to the “all virgins” tagline. But even so, the way you reach the ending is very different from typical school romance. These are working adults, after all. The developments are things like getting drunk and sleeping together, or asking someone out to dinner and directly confessing. There’s no romantic flutter, no sweeping atmosphere, and certainly no “after many hardships, the two finally come together” drama.

There’s just dialogue like “Let’s go out.” “Sure.”

By the second half of the individual routes, I was profoundly bored. Why? Because the environment in the game is too similar to my current life.

The protagonist jokes around with colleagues at work every day, then after work either meets someone at a bar or goes home early to sleep. When he meets various women, he either asks them to dinner or teases them and moves on. If there’s a chance for sex, he takes it; if not, he leaves.

Guys like that exist in Japan and in China. They follow desire, understand needs, exchange with each other, and leave no trace. They might be right next to you. If you frequent the nightlife sections of adult websites, you’ll see many such “hunters” exchanging tips. Honestly, I have plenty of colleagues and classmates who move through that nightlife with agility, often calling themselves “urban hunters.”

The protagonist in this game is more like a journey from ordinary office worker to “urban hunter.” Of course, this story feels real to me, yet distant. Real because such guys are around me; distant because I’m not one of them. I can understand their behavior, but the story feels alien.

That’s when I realized: a game story this close to reality doesn’t just give a “been working for years” otaku like me a sense of distance—it also makes me feel it’s boring.

Early Blizzard ads for World of Warcraft had a tagline: “I am a paladin.” The ad was short, but it conveyed that a person busy with work could, in their free time, change identity, enter another world, and seek another self. For Galgames, the same applies. They’re entertainment. A person bent over by societal pressure opens a game seeking maximum relaxation. Whether used as adult content or immersed in as an isekai novel, the feeling is about forgetting the real self and entering another world.

But Hataraku Otona no Ren’ai Jijou doesn’t make you forget yourself. Instead, you find characters who seem like people around you. That might bring a sense of familiarity, but when you see those people become urban hunters in the game while you can only watch them have fun from outside the screen, a sense of loss might grow stronger.

If this were a TV drama, those “hunters” would find themselves in it. If it were a novel, they’d find their place, and might even boast, “Hey, the protagonist banged his classmate—I’ve done that too,” feeling a strong resonance.

But this is a Galgame—an 18+ Galgame. Most people willing to follow the story are losers in real life, I think. Apart from twisted fantasies about banging girls, who would get off on this?

And the second half’s casual treatment of work and love makes it hard to indulge in fantasy. It feels more like scrolling through the hookup section of SexinSex—lonely and distant.

The game has a “Trivia” explanation list that explains many social terms that appear in dialogue, including “paid leave,” “job transfer,” “overtime,” “gay bar,” and more, often with funny snark at the end. If a player who hasn’t entered society yet tries this game, they might discover a whole new world.

The art is fine—actually, more than fine. The atmosphere uses winter and mostly nighttime to create that “lazy, decadent urban nightlife” vibe. The music does the same, handled by Kyohei Nishizaka, with most tracks named after cocktails. Many of those cocktails appear in the game, and there’s a dedicated cocktail list you can browse to learn about each drink.

Oh, and about that explanation system—the “Trivia” and “Cocktails” sections explain all those seemingly useless bits of knowledge needed for socializing and picking up women. I couldn’t help but wonder if the developers wanted to give the losers playing this game something useful. Many choices in the game involve carefully selecting social phrases—like when a female senior says she’s dieting, what’s the right thing to say. In reality, being eloquent with women is a necessary skill for picking them up. Women’s minds are delicate and sensitive, after all.

Hataraku Otona no Ren’ai Jijou is a good game. It puts effort into many places: art, music, dialogue, and research into realistic adult society. It provides an extremely friendly guide for non-adults, with content explanations and various social etiquette suggestions, and it presents an excellent “how to become a winner” route for otaku who don’t want to enter society.

But as a Galgame, at least for me, it’s a bit boring. Because I’m already a working adult. I understand all this. Hearing it again is just tedious.

I guess this is what they call “brainwave mismatch.”

Finally, thinking about the protagonist’s emotional journey in Hataraku Otona no Ren’ai Jijou, I find it quite interesting. From an office worker to his first step into bar nightlife, then changing clothes and getting a haircut to look presentable, then working out to stay in shape, then losing his virginity to an older woman, and after that becoming more skilled and experienced in hunting. Even when he has sex with a schoolgirl a second time and she teases him for being a bad kisser, that problem disappears later. And the protagonist is hardly loyal—if a girl offers herself, he takes it, and even after sleeping with a heroine, he still thinks he doesn’t need to take responsibility. But strangely, no one in the game condemns this much. Everyone seems to take it for granted.

That’s when I realized: this really is taken for granted in real society.

I couldn’t help but remember what my friend said at the beginning:

“Picking up girls and hooking up is like fighting monsters. You know EXP? Without experience, how do you level up?”

Maybe my friend was right. You always need to accumulate experience and take the first step. How could there be a grand love story in society? Even on campus, it’s only a tiny probability. I can’t say eroge are all lies—I can only say those are low-probability events. Storytellers only tell you how exciting the climax and twists are, never how boring the daily life is.

Once you enter society, romance is gone. Just like the protagonist in Hataraku Otona no Ren’ai Jijou, who does nothing but fuck and go to work and bars. Because adult love stories really are this boring.