My Life with a Lonely Beauty Review

My Life with This Boring Game

My Life with a Lonely Beauty is a dating simulation game by Genius Studio Japan, a studio whose entire portfolio consists of dating sims. The protagonist, whom we’ll call Mr. Dude, escapes his suffocating home and finds shelter with Haruka, the sexy-mommy stereotype. You also have Akira, the rebellious punk whose home life sucks, and Komi, the goody-two-shoes who’s pushy because she loves you.

Listen, I’m the type of person who finishes books out of spite. If I hate something, I want to arm myself with solid arguments to shred it to pieces. Attempting to drag myself through My Life with a Lonely Beauty was its own brand of torture. From the bottom of my heart, nothing about this game was appealing. Not the characters and their flat cutouts of a stereotype. Not the uninteresting story. And certainly not the plain interface with one illustration you can’t even appreciate because of the hideous black square covering it.

Spare Yourself

We can all agree that the wait is usually the worst part of an Otome game. The slow-consuming desperation of ending a chapter on a cliffhanger and not having enough keys, diamonds or whatever to plunge headfirst into the next. Or the love-hate relationship with the ad system so we can get crumbs of currency. Patience is a virtue that Otome games exploit. My Life with a Lonely Beauty did not get the memo. A ticket must be spent every time you want to play a new chapter or replay the one you just finished. You get one every two hours but can only have two at any given time. After spending my second ticket, I was glad I could finally stop playing.

First, we’ll talk about the ad system. There are two ways to get rubies. The first one is a simulation of a slot machine that’ll give you 13 points you can purchase rubies with. If you watch an ad, you can triple it. And the plain old watching ads for 30 points. In both instances, I was swindled thrice. I watched the minute-long ads for them to give me nothing. Zero. Nada. This made me boycott watching ads altogether, which means not getting enough points for rubies and not finishing the game. And before you say, “Oh, but you didn’t get the whole experience,” I don’t care. My Life with a Lonely Beauty is not worth any grind, any ad watching, any… anything.

Just No

The story is uninspired at best. Mr. Dude and Akira were mean to Komi, the only character I didn’t hate, for the sin of worrying too much. Haruka’s sexy-mommy trope was creepy and predatory. The interface is boring and out of character. The only thing you can do is play. Even the money grabbing aspect was money grabbing mediocrely. I had to go find where I could watch ads to get the currency. And I’m not saying I like it when games shove the store in my face, but you need to at least know how the currency works.

My Life with a Lonely Beauty is a skeleton of a game, an Otome stripped to its barest essentials. I see no effort anywhere. Only the art is okay and still, it lacks character. The main interface is the most boring lackluster unappealing interface I’ve ever seen in a game. You’d think this was a school project made by a bunch of kids who were barely learning to code and not a company that’s been doing exclusively Otome games for years.