Cue to Fall in Love with You Review

As college student Ren Jie, you are run over by a scooter and this somehow awakens an AI love assistant named YOYO. This AI occasionally provides unimpressive dating advice and conjures gifts from another dimension, but how it all works is never adequately explained. Although curious about love, the assistant does not raise any interesting topics and her role is inferior to Zero from the Unemployed game. YOYO is a fully AI generated character (possibly the first in the genre) designed to look like a person, so there is uncanny valley whenever she appears.

The six primary love interests are played by real human actors and the cast is strong. Genre veterans, Lei Xiaomi and Wang Nannan, play Lin Wenxi and Xia Wanxing respectively. Wenxi is a kind doctor that channels the teacher from Hello Love: 18 Again. Wanxing is a starlet and childhood friend with some nice flashback scenes. Both know how to work the screen and are consistent.

Lesser known actresses play the other roles but they do a good job. Shen Yufei is a sultry reporter with high sex appeal. Gu Panpan is a tomboy who likes to beat you up. Lu Xiaoyu is a younger friend who has a big crush, but thankfully she is not excessively immature. And Suzuki Rei is the softly spoken exchange student who becomes your roommate.

It’s the personalities and adequate back stories that ensure these six are not one-dimensional. Romance is fairly low-key and tempered, for a slow burn, even though Yufei can be aggressively affectionate. Each character has 3+ endings, based mostly on conversations from chapter 5 and 6, although putting this dialogue together may have worked better. There are early endings too, ala I’ve Fallen For You, but the finales are too short generally. While having 6+ love interests is often problematic, the 5.1 hour runtime and minimal story gives them all enough screen time.

The game is rough around the edges. Scene cuts are quite jarring and frequent. The story flow and pacing could be better. Audio is live recorded (great) but the volume levels needed adjustment. Video quality is inadequate during high motion. Translation seems to be LLM without edits, so there are many pronoun issues and name changes. One nice thing is that skipping through scenes is instantaneous, which helps when re-exploring the nicely branching timeline—it will take 10.5 hours to see everything. Cue to Fall in Love with You is nothing exceptional, but it is a pretty good effort that most genre fans should enjoy.