rrakku's archive

first published 2026/06/30 on Anilist

The rules of the Aishiteru Game are simple: your heart flutters, you lose. Generations of romcom authors (competent and incompetent) recognise the limits of the concept as a plot device, but not the author of I Want to End This Love Game. The game relies on one’s inability to put on a poker face or the honourability of the loser, that’s why it’s a game played by children at school or adults at bad parties. Extending the span of a game designed to be won in minutes if not seconds to YEARS is a disaster in waiting. Every of this show basically goes like this: Yukiya/Miku tease the other –> Yukiya/Miku get the butterflies –> Yukiya/Miku refuses to admit their very obvious reactions –> repeat. Often, two three times an episode. From eating lunch together at school to playing video games together to “fake dates” to staying over, everything gets filtered through this narrative loop, killing any and all momentum from any genuine chemistry the two leads have dead in its tracks.

The show does redeem itself later on with another one of Japan’s quaint party games, the Pocky game. After 10 episodes of blue-balling its audience, the author finally decides that some drama is due and gets Miku jealous enough to kiss Yukiya under the thinly veiled guise. And ironically, an unintended consequence of its matrix of horrible writing decisions—depicting so much of their flounderings and pointless detours—is this intense juxtaposition of progress that cuts through both diegetically between our main duo and also the meta layer by the audience. I Want to End This Love Game manages to carry this momentum to the very end. As the two start their final Aishiteru Game of the season, the same “I love you”s are said, the same denial is given, yet something feels different. Gone is the awkward wheel of doom that they pedalled on week after week, instead, Yukiya and Miku grew closer, finding a new balance of the relationship upon where a new but the same old game is played.

“I have seen people online describe I Want to End This Love Game as ‘Walmart Kaguya-sama: Love is War‘, but that’s a disgrace to both the supermarket giant and Akasaka’s magnum opus.” That was my planned, harsh and original opener when the show first aired. But once it grows out of the Aishiteru Games, it becomes increasingly clear that there is something more it has to say. Your teenage years are a constant negotiation between mind and senses, spent running around in circles mindlessly chasing things that are already right in front of you. And while I Want to End This Love Game had failed to make it entertaining, if its purpose is to present the frustrating, the embarrassing, and the endearing of adolescence, making you dwell in thoughts of the past, it has passed with colours. Perhaps not flying, but grounded colours.

52/100