Hitotsu Tobashi Renai is an old game, one of Asa Project’s earlier works. Actually, calling it “early” is a stretch—more like early-ish. Hitotsu Tobashi Renai is built around “love one person removed,” and the Chinese patch apparently translated the title as “indirect love,” which honestly fits pretty well. That’s exactly what the game is about. My opinion of Hitotsu Tobashi Renai wasn’t exactly high at first, because I overplayed it. It’s chaotic the whole way through—the “skipped-over characters” are either insufferably nasty or unbearably saintly, and the art style itself doesn’t look remotely serious. Compared to Renai 0 Kilometer, it feels like it goes too far. If you say it’s going the comedy route, then it insists on throwing in some “romance” on the individual routes. If you say it’s going the pure-love route, those enormous exaggerated facial expressions alone make it look like anything but pure love… Awkward, isn’t it…

Asa Project, a company that used to be pretty damn good. They’re under Hook, I think. They made a name for themselves with Renai 0 Kilometer, then kept the style going with ひとつ飛ばし恋愛 and later Purumai Wars… and then this year they put out Suki to Suki de Sankaku Renai. Before I get into the new one, let’s walk through how Asa Project’s games have evolved…

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.