A few years back, Asa Project’s games seemed to have lost their way. Their stuff used to be all about the laughs, and nearly every release had that one character with the insane facial expressions. Then something changed—no idea what they were smoking—and the games started getting more restrained, pivoting to all these “searching for pure love” themes, like the earlier 三角恋爱 and 寄宿恋爱. But no matter how they went about it, those games just felt off to me. It’s like some guy who’s normally a total goofball, never serious for a second, suddenly sits you down and gets all earnest—what even is that? Some kind of advanced dark comedy? And the two Asa Project games before this weren’t all that great either. They just threw out a premise — either a love triangle or a cohabitation setup — with nothing really noteworthy underneath. Take away that half-baked premise and I don’t think it’d change much. On top of that, the “face-meme king” that used to be the main selling point has had its presence steadily erased, and it hurts to watch a label that once had real character turn more and more into “just another face in the crowd.” And it doesn’t stop there. Asa Project’s game titles have gotten lazier and lazier too — they just slap an adjective in front of “koi” and call it a day. What kind of idiot work puts “this one’s a love triangle” and “this one’s a boarding-school romance” right in the title? Even White Album didn’t pull that. Did you guys just give up on naming things? And then 2019 rolls around and the title gets even more blatant: “恋愛、借りちゃいました.” Just look at it. Does that read like a proper “title” to you? It’s a whole sentence, and it’s got this painfully awkward punctuation mark stuffed in the middle. What the hell! Have you ever seen a work named something like I, Ate My Fill, You, Farted, or She, Crossdressed? This is one of the few games where the title alone was enough to make me not want to play it. But because I was bored out of my mind, I figured I’d give it a look anyway — and it turned out… this game is actually surprisingly good?! You could say that. Title aside from being dumb as hell, this game at least has clawed back a good chunk of the level of Renai 0 Kilometer. We’re happy Asa Project finally figured out what kind of “reinvention” it actually wanted.