Cultural Exchange with a Game Centre Girl – Episode 1

Content Warning: age gap romance

What’s it about? Thanks to a cross-cultural miscommunication over valentines, game center employee Kusakabe Renji has accidentally confessed to a total stranger—British middle-schooler Lily Baker. But when there turns out to be a real spark between the pair, they decide to get to know one another properly through an exchange diary.

Woe to the viewer who does a bit of light googling after they finish watching Cultural Exchange with a Game Centre Girl. The episode has a pleasant energy to it, and the contrivances of the initial premise (Valentine’s Day does have SOME romantic connotations in Japan, after all, even if there’s the gender division between it and White Day) get smoothed over by the welcoming atmosphere the show exudes from the actual centre on up.

The hobby anime-adjacent bits about gaming a crane machine have a nice kinetic detail to them, even if I suspect they might be utter nonsense if you were to try them in practice. And the scene where Renji and Lily both realize, halfway through a chase scene, how absurd what they’re doing is, actually sells why these two like hanging out together beyond “plot says so.” Working around a language barrier is also a perfectly decent and even popular concept to hang a rom-com on, looking at titles like OKITSURA, The Expression Amrilato, and arguably A Sign of Affection. American Sally Amaki is also doing solid work as Lily, whose dialogue is so far entirely in English and sounds pretty natural (though for an English-speaking listener it really underlines how exaggerated and breathy the archetypal “anime girl love interest” voice can be).

Then you toddle over to Wikipedia and learn that Renji is meant to be an 18-year-old university student, and Lily is 13, and my skeleton begins trying to unzip its meatsuit. I really don’t want to wade too deeply into the murk of age gap discourse, so let’s keep it short: writing romances with teenagers is tough, because a person goes through huge changes in short amounts of time. Compared to, say, a 25-year-old and a 30-year-old, an 18-year-old and a 13-year-old are at wildly different places in regards to physical development, material conditions, and even legal rights. And it’s even more uncomfortable when they haven’t even put in a magical or historical angle—those at least can create a different contexts for what ages and social roles mean.

Game Centre Girl is squarely a contemporary shounen rom-com, existing in the logic of contemporary society. And this isn’t exactly a case of “the characters are nominally very different ages but act equivalently, so you’d only know about the gap from looking into the lore,” either. There aren’t any explicit numbers dropped, but Lily is already wearing what looks very much like a middle-school uniform, while Renji is a working adult. It feels like there could’ve been an easy way around this if he’d gone right into working out of middle school himself rather than attending high school, but that’s not the show we got.

It’s a shame, because while I have some Opinions about the way shounen high school rom-coms are more readily embraced by the larger anime-viewing populace versus shoujo ones, I really wouldn’t have minded giving this a few episodes just to hang out with the characters. As it is, the ick factor really casts a pall over the whole affair. I suppose we still have Hi Score Girl and the upcoming Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games for that arcade gamer romance itch.