I Can’t Beat the Pretty Girls Review

The three stories (redemption, revenge, retirement) are based on choices in the opening destiny chapter. In redemption, Shi Lei trains a female kickboxer while a psychologist helps him overcome demons. In revenge, you step back into the ring while two gym managers fight over becoming your representation. And the retirement story is more of a basic dating sim setup.

Each story involves two primary love interests. This is grounded and offers great contrast as they can really push and pull off each other. In redemption, Zhu Yueran is a fighter while Wang Xinyuan is a healer, but both are caring. Revenge’s two managers include the ice-cold Su Xi and the down-to-earth Lu Youyou, but both have secrets. And in retirement, Zhao Xiaoqiao is immature while Wan Baoer is a man-eater, yet both have their eyes set on you.

The first two stories involve match-fixing and Shi Lei dealing with a past tragedy. The pace is slick and there are solid branching paths, although going down certain routes exposes continuity issues as it feels like important scenes are missing. Good endings require players to be aggressively one-sided, but most are worth it. The retirement story is weak compared to the other two. It seems patched together and one love interest, Xiaoqiao, is infuriatingly immature (22 going on 12). Fortunately, it is still worth playing because her counterpart is fantastic and there is crossover, as you see more of Su Xi, for example.

Surprisingly, for a game about Kickboxing, there is not much actual fighting done by the player. It skips most matches to focus on character interactions. There are some minor QTEs, scene investigations, and a few conversations you have to ‘win’ but it is not much different from the genre standard in terms of mechanics.

One atypical and cool part is that all stories track two metrics. The first is favorability for each love interests, which is normal. The other is tailored per story e.g. gym alignment in revenge, or cure in redemption. The value mix of these opens or closes routes nicely. Also, good news, while there are some early endings, it generally rolls forward without interruption.

All three stories will take under 7 hours to clear and over 12 to 100%. Video quality is fine and audio is nearly all live recorded, which is awesome. English translation is good, but there are some broken subs (fix here). Despite a few missteps, particularly in story #3, the game lands most of its punches.