Okay, yes, this game is cringey. No one is questioning that, lmao. It’s a gamer themed dating game based around real living people. You really don’t need to go much further than that to understand why everyone makes fun of it. But don’t worry, I’ll keep talking about it and make it all your problem too 🖤🖤🖤


First of all, I just want to say I realize that they clearly went into this game thinking this would be a funny joke of “hey, let’s make a game about ourselves.” “Yeah, hahaha you know what would be funny? If it were a dating game, you know how cheesy those can get.” “Oh, that’s perfect! We can totally poke fun at each other and the game genre at the same time!” And yes, there’s nothing wrong with that in theory. But then you actually sit down and play the game and realize you’re playing a high school dating simulator where you play as a high school girl who is interested in the other high school boys. Except they’re based on 30-year old men, still acting and looking like the 30-year old men they’re based off of, and the cherry on top is one eventually getting into a scandal about whether or not he was sexting with high school aged girls. So yeah, I’m going to find this game incredibly creepy. It’s like watching Grease, where all the high schoolers are so clearly adult men and women, but you have to sit and pretend they’re all 17. Except in addition to that, they’re all epic gamers, a few of which you can argue have some pretty questionable morals. (Though I won’t act like any of the actors in Grease didn’t either lol)

The game still has the qualities that dating visual novels have, and there’s a clear talent put into the UI and art. I don’t want the idea of the game being “cringe” to be anything involving the art or music department or anything like that, it's just when you decide to make a dating game about real people, even if it’s supposed to be a joke, it’s going to be freaking weird. It’s especially going to be weird when the game ends up focusing on specifically Normal Boots people. So bluntly put, that’s what I think about the game. It’s a weird and uncomfortable premise for a game, so as a result I think that the game is weird and uncomfortable.

The game ended amazingly for me though, with it crashing hours in: perfectly encapsulating the spirit of the whole experience.

"I like what I like."

Ever since around the advent of its massive popularity surge about a decade ago, I've been an avid fan of content produced on Youtube. At the time of the production of this visual novel, I was largely invested in the whole of both Normal Boots and Hidden Block. The personalities of the content creators behind them were many of my favorites on the entire platform. As the years have passed on with trepidation over the countless accounts of problematic celebrities, I had to accept some people within this game fell into the same categorization. That has caused a significant sting to the ability to both enjoy, or ever go back to Asagao. That being said, some of my favorites are still present to this day in my watching habits. So, while many of these people no longer produce the same content they once did, or have tarnished their reputation through incredulous behavior, I have something to hold onto. At the end of the day, this was charming, full of fanservice, lots of heart, plenty of humor, and I could be eternal rivals with Brutalmoose. Not everything ages well, but hey, I can recall the days when this was bliss.

No seal awarded

This game is so wholly unique and bizarre, so clearly a time capsule of an internet era, so niche in it's appeal, so insane of a concept, that I can't help but appreciate it. There is no other game like Asagao and I doubt there ever will be anything like it ever again. For that alone, I think it's something to admire. Or at the very least. something to be fascinated by.

That's not to forget the well written, detailed and engaging script, the really pretty artwork and the killer soundtrack. It's clear from the effort the devs put in and the themes the game explores that there's a lot of heart here. It all collides together to make what would be a very well assembled but straight forward shojo visual novel, if it wasn't for the inclusion and branding of Normal Boots in the game.

It's something that's pretty much inseparable from Asagao. Which makes for a confusing emotional experience, for when I played this back in 2016 but even more so now. I don't know if I would ever go back and play this for that reason. But that all the more, just makes it stick out in my mind as the weird oddity of a game it is.

This was the first dating sim I had ever played, obviously got into it because I was a fan of Normal Boots back in the day. I thought it was really sweet and enjoyed it a lot, though my assumption is that avid fans of the genre might find it rather generic. Since its release JonTron and ProJared have both gone and done some fucked up shit, which would kind of make this a hard one to go back to. It's a hard one to rate, as those two characters would make me want to give it something more like a 2 star rating; while my memories of my initial experience playing it would make me want to give it something more like a 4 star rating, so I'm compromising at a 3 star rating. I went the PBG route, that boy better not mess up!