It begins as every Japan-set dating sim worth its salt does — with a transfer student.
It’s Aya’s first day at the ominously-named ‘Love-Love All-Girls High School’, and they’re (understandably) a little nervous. Shy and socially anxious, they hope they’ll manage to make a friend or two. Turns out their classmates are eager – perhaps a little too eager – to get acquainted. Aya is set upon by a stampede of besotted young women, but Aya doesn’t have romance on the brain themselves. “I Just Want To Be Single!” they yell. Cue chirpy acapella theme music.
I Just Want To Be Single!!: Season One, recently released on Steam in Early Access, is a game you’d be forgiven for overlooking on a Steam Store that today is packed with visual novels from Western indie devs. A handful carry a reverence and understanding of the medium (the excellent VA-11 HALL-A, for example), but many take a mocking, ironic approach, or exist primarily to titillate, such that fans have grown wary. Tsundere Studio’s debut, I Just Want To Be Single!! stands out from this crowd.
Billed as ‘aromantic, asexual, and nonbinary’, I Just Want To Be Single!!’s player protagonist, Aya, is a reflection of its mononymous lead developer ‘m.’. “I’m still figuring things out about myself and this game is an extension of that,” m. tells me over Discord. “The story in this game is largely about finding yourself and who you want to become.”
Aya’s potentially aromantic identity is reflected in the mechanics and presentation of the player’s conversations with their classmates. At the top left of the game’s snazzy but unobtrusive UI, two meters can be found. The first of these, the ‘Favorability’ meter, fills up to a total of five hearts. There’s a separate meter for each heroine, color-coded to their monochrome paper-cutout designs. Pick the ‘correct’ (i.e. emotionally intelligent) response from your dialogue options and a heart will be added to the Favorability meter, your conversation partner’s face lighting up with warmth and recognition.
Dating sims are often maligned for their core mechanics — saying the ‘right thing’ to receive romance is a philosophy that sits uncomfortably with many. I Just Want To Be Single’s conversations feel more realistic in their push and pull, and sharp writing renders everyone’s wants and desires recognisably three-dimensional. “I really like the idea that in this story, you are playing as an unnoticeable side-character, and everyone around you is a protagonist or main character in their own story,” says m. “Each of them are going through developments and having adventures. You’re simply along for the ride.”
That’s not to say that the genre’s beloved character archetypes aren’t well represented. Your tutorial verbal spar is with ‘Random Girl’ (pink), the sexually-aggressive stalker type who really wants to get to know you. Next, you’re introduced to Kaede, the class rep (orange), who adjusts her glasses and shows you around school. Pulling classroom doors open, we encounter: Katsumi, the idol; Akane, the athlete; Mika, the gyaru girl; Shizuka, the artist; Chloe, the robot; and, sneaking up behind you, Nozomin, the delusional ‘chuunibyou’ character.
“I wanted to make them look as different as possible, but still appealing,” explains character designer Tsungelique. “I gave Akane a more muscular body. She’s a sporty girl, so her body type should reflect that. With Kaede, I wanted a softer figure. It’s rare in anime for a chubby, or not-so-slender girl to be seen as attractive. We knew we wanted a darker skinned character, and having Mika, who is a gyaru, but also half-Japanese was important to us.”
Aya can only handle so much. The other meter is their ‘Stress Level’, which fills up to a total of ten skulls. A skull is added whenever your conversation partner gets a little too aggressively flirtatious, combative, or offended. It’s a smart way of translating social anxiety into a game mechanic, crafting empathy by threatening the player with a situation that they’ll equally want to avoid.
For a debut game made by a tiny team, I Just Want To Be Single!! is remarkably polished. Menus are responsive, and packed with amusing wordplay and sight gags. Conversations are broken up by manga panel interludes that serve as the game’s cutscenes. The game’s humour is self-reflexive and winking, reminiscent of outsider indie hits such as Undertale. Its structure and aesthetic approach take clear cues from Danganronpa. Nothing here feels overly derivative, but the game’s parts fit together neatly and confidently, considering genre forebears rather than merely copying them.
Visual novel dating sims are usually clearly delineated and divided by their characters’ genders and sexuality. The conventional categories include bishojo (in which a male protagonist courts women), otome (in which a female protagonist courts men), and yuri (in which a female protagonist courts women). Here, the vibes are enjoyably ambiguous, I Just Want To Be Single!!’s flirtations and conversations span the tropes of both bishojo and yuri, and transcend them. “Most dating sims are heavily targeted towards either specifically female or male gazes and I wanted something that could work for both,” says m. “Making the protagonist nonbinary allows a lot more people to imagine themselves inside the shoes of the character, including those who don’t feel comfortable with their identity.”
It’s a remarkably wholesome and considered outcome for a project that started as a joke that they had made in a Discord server during the pandemic — “what if there was a dating sim but the goal was to not date anyone” — complete with a tongue-in-cheek logo bearing the title that would eventually grace the Steam store. The game’s marketing as an ‘anti-dating sim’ is a savvy elevator pitch to get players’ attention, but it undersells the nuances of Tsundere Studio’s genre intervention. “It’s simple to make a game that is ‘anti-romance’, but this isn’t that kind of game,” they say. “There are still some mechanics that aren’t fully revealed yet. I’m interested in the relationship aspect of our game. What does it mean to be in a relationship? What does love mean without friendship? I want the player to find out the answer to those questions and test themselves.”
The game was successfully funded via Kickstarter in March of 2022 and the community has been engaged and excited in Tsundere Studio’s Discord server since. “I was moved by the amount of people who said that the game helped them feel represented in some way,” reflects m. “This game has been the culmination of my self discovery over the past few years, both in terms of the story and the characters and in how much I’ve changed over the course of development. We’ve had to face many challenges. I’m glad we’ve come so far.”
In the game’s current release, only the prologue and first chapter are available, their total playtime spanning a couple of hours. Two major content updates are currently in development, each adding a new chapter. Tsundere Studio hopes to complete Season One within the year, but they’re keen not to put a solid date on it. The Early Access approach feels fitting. I Just Want To Be Single!! is still figuring out what it wants to be and how it fits into the world. For those of us going through similar journeys, Tsundere Studio’s game is a welcome mirror of empathy and possibility.