Hataraku Otaku no Renai Jijou (働くオタクの恋愛事情) Review

Last week in Zhengzhou I met up with a friend from Beijing who works at a well-known internet company with business all over the country. He’s fairly famous on G+ as a road-bike inner-thigh chafing specialist and senior programmer critic, “Neo Slixurd.” Since his name is Neo and he’s gay, I usually call him “Genio,” or just “Genniao” for short.

Chatting with Genniao is always a good time. We started by discussing whether “Princess Xiaozhu is actually an idiot,” and quickly reached a consensus. The conversation later drifted to the fact that I play galgames.

What Genniao was most curious about was how I learned Japanese so fast. It wasn’t fast at all, honestly — play porn games every day and you’ll learn fast too. My experience with that is documented here.

His second question was how many games I actually play. By my own count, I got through about 80 last year. That number isn’t exactly accurate, since I personally treat galgames as novels — meaning I only read “the main ending the game anoints as canon.” Every other ending is just a “possibility” to me. If you’re in love with a heroine you can fantasize about it, but it’s not the real story. So for most games, unless it’s something like Hatsuyuki Sakura that splits the whole story apart, I just take the main route and skim the rest. A single game isn’t that long either — if you clear every route, according to ErogameScape most Japanese players need about 19 hours. That’s not so bad, but who plays this stuff every single day?

Finally we got onto where galgame stories are headed. Genniao said the games he’s played are all older ones or the more famous ones, and he has no idea what the newest stuff is like. I explained that most of the newest games are still clichéd as hell — a notch above the current mainstream seasonal anime in overall quality, sure, but that’s just a product of the audience. ErogameScape stats show most eroge players are in the 25–30 age bracket, not the under-20 elementary-schooler tier you get watching anime on Bilibili in this country.

“Honestly most eroge plots are pretty stupid. Like the one I’ve been playing recently.”

And that’s how I brought up Hataraku Otaku no Renai Jijou.

Remember that game I played last year called Hataraku Otona no Renai Jijou? The title means “the love life of working adults,” and the game lives up to it — it’s about a male office worker who hits the gym to improve his looks and becomes a seasoned pickup artist. Reception to the previous game was pretty polarized. Grown-ups like me who can’t find a partner and have seen through the world found it realistic — a masterpiece. A lot of students who haven’t entered society yet found it unacceptable.

The part they can’t accept is mostly that they haven’t figured out how society actually works. What is reality? Adult romance is just that boring. People who go to bars are already in hunting mode, and when two people get together it’s not some absolute, earth-shattering love — odds are they’re just keeping each other company, or just in it for their own pleasure. I’ve seen plenty of students complain that the protagonist of Hataraku Otona no Renai Jijou is unfaithful. Unfaithful my ass. Go read some cuckold stories on ACFUN or check out the hookup threads on 1024… That’s just how society is. Pure-love galgame stories are like Aunt Qiong Yao’s novels — they happen, but you can’t count on them.

So Hataraku Otona no Renai Jijou seems to have stirred up some discussion. I don’t know how well it sold, but it apparently even got an anime adaptation. I never thought of it as a nukige at all — Japan just defines it as one. If that counts as a nukige, then all those steamy urban romance novels in this country should count as erotica too…

Anyway, the game caught the developer’s attention, they decided to milk it again, and they figured they’d keep licking the boots of shut-in otaku. So this time they picked “the love life of working otaku” as the subject — Hataraku Otaku no Renai Jijou. Call it a spiritual sequel, I guess.

In Hataraku Otaku no Renai Jijou, the protagonist is an otaku with a job. He watches anime, knows some really old anime references, knows some obscure but well-received shows, can banter a bit about various directors’ styles and even criticize them, and his overall ACG level is almost scraping the passing line for Reddit. All I can say is, now that’s a proper otaku…

But hold on, that’s way too early…

As an otaku, the protagonist’s day job is driving a taxi in Japan. He also gets introduced to a bar that caters exclusively to otaku, where he meets all kinds of otaku girls. Every otaku girl has enormous breasts, every otaku girl is a virgin, every otaku girl is extremely interested in the protagonist, and every otaku girl has her own otaku inclination — one loves playing eroge, one loves watching anime, one loves reading manga, one loves otome games, one’s into creating stuff… etc., etc.

Does the setup already feel a bit fantastical? Don’t worry, there’s more…

One night after leaving the otaku bar, the protagonist picks up a cosplayer in his taxi. When they arrive at her place, she doesn’t get out — she invites him up to her apartment. And so, the cosplayer girl pins the protagonist down and they go straight to fucking…

And that’s when the game’s prologue ends — with the OP.

This pattern should feel very familiar, because Hataraku Otona no Renai Jijou did the same thing: the protagonist starts as an innocent virgin, gets dragged to a bar by his boss, gets targeted by an older woman, gets his virginity taken, and thus begins his hunting career.

But what is the protagonist in this game? He’s an Reddit mud-pit otaku who loves obscure shows and is twisted beyond repair. And you’re telling me that just because he drives a taxi home and picks up a cosplay girl, he gets free sex? Bullshit.

The game only gets more idiotic from there. Every otaku girl the protagonist meets can chat with him in perfect mutual understanding — a mutual understanding so fake it’s beyond fake. The style is roughly…

“Do you watch XXX anime?” “Yeah, yeah, you watch it too?” “Yeah, yeah, I love XXX character in it. Too bad the show’s so obscure, it only got a 6-episode OVA, hardly anyone watches it.” “Yeah, such a shame.”

Tell me — in real life, what are the odds you’d meet an otaku like that, who’s female, with big tits, willing to talk to you, and actually interested in you? Lower than winning the lottery? Yeah, probably.

The otaku girls in the game are all phantoms. Take Yanai Akira, the character who loves otome games. She starts by recommending the protagonist play something like Touken Ranbu, then excitedly gushes to him about various male voice actors’ anecdotes. Up to that point it’s still kind of realistic. But then the protagonist asks if she likes the male voice actors because they’re good-looking and handsome.

“I like them not because they’re handsome, but because they’re good people. Looks don’t matter, looks are completely useless.”

Good god. That lie was delivered with such sincerity it made me laugh until I cried. Every woman who loves watching Korean dramas says she likes her ajoeshi not because they’re handsome but because they’re good people — but Wang Baoqiang is a good person too, why don’t you go watch him? Or, going further back, Huang Bo is a good person with solid acting chops, why don’t you go watch him?

This is a society that judges by looks. Nobody doesn’t judge by looks. Even male seiyuu fans judge by looks, for fuck’s sake — look at the big names, which one of them is as ugly as a Sendai auntie?

I know, I know. This game is meant to flatter otaku. Most otaku are fat, cola-drinking, black-stocking-fetishizing, reeking shut-ins that no girl would ever like, and they’re always fantasizing about some girl throwing herself at them. So the writer doesn’t want to tell you the truth — he built you a fake game world, where there are girls who’ll discuss obscure shows with you, gorgeous girls who’ll argue White Album 2 with you, and pure cosplay girls who’ll offer up their pussy for you to fuck… It’s all there to satisfy otaku fantasies…

But man… the lie is so fake. Faker than what a JK said to me today: “Mister, you look so young!”

After that, the game unfolds exactly like any ordinary romance game. Or rather, it’s even more boring than an ordinary romance game. The protagonist confesses to a heroine, they date, they fuck, and they live happily ever after.

Worth noting: once the protagonist and heroine start dating, the game barely has any otaku content left — it’s just ordinary lovey-dovey stuff. In other words, strip away that fake, reality-detached “otaku social life” skin, and what’s left is a very boring, very formulaic “otaku gets a great girlfriend” story.

That said, the game does put effort into “getting close to the otaku crowd.” It comes with a dictionary that collects all the neta in the protagonist and heroines’ dialogue, and some of them are pretty fun to read.

But that’s about it. The game does take a little jab at “fake otaku” — some handsome guy tries to hit on a heroine by claiming he watches anime too, gets caught having never seen it, and the protagonist laughs at him…

But how would that play out in reality? A guy like the protagonist who watches obscure shows and clumsily spews nonsense would never get a girl’s attention.

And I don’t know if they learned their lesson from last time, but the protagonist again has plenty of random women he can sleep with for free. But you can’t be greedy — pick too many and you get the Normal End, where you’re told you’ve left otaku-dom and can’t date otaku girls anymore. So you can’t take everything like in the previous game.

Compared to its spiritual predecessor, Hataraku Otaku no Renai Jijou loses the previous game’s biggest strength: realism. It swings to the other extreme and becomes a fantasy. Would an otaku go to a bar? Would an otaku land a cosplay girl? Would an otaku find a girl who watches obscure shows? Would an otaku meet a girl who doesn’t care about looks at all and will sleep with him just because he likes anime?

Maybe such people exist. But if you could pull that off, what couldn’t you do? You’d attract girls doing anything else too, surely? There’s also one other type who could pull it off — the “fake otaku” the game looks down on. Like Boss Wang, a guy I know whose slogan is “2D fake otaku, 3D flame warrior.” He watches shows without really getting them, yet he hooks up like a champ, and he doesn’t even know what Reddit is.

“This game is about ’the love life of otaku,’ about how otaku go pick up girls and even hook up, and it paints the protagonist as a high-level otaku. But isn’t that self-contradictory? Otaku by nature don’t want to interact with people much. And in the real world there are no otaku girls waiting for you. An otaku girl is a girl first, and an otaku second. Otaku are unpopular for all sorts of reasons — it’s not like having an otaku hobby makes girls throw themselves at you…”

That’s how I finally explained the game to Genniao.

“I see… so this game really is garbage,” Genniao said, stroking the bottle of cola in his hand.

I wasn’t surprised by that answer. The game itself doesn’t seem to know why it exists.